Escape From Sarasota

Just got back from a week in Sarasota, Florida, where I was visiting my grandmother on my dad's side. He was flying down there to help her take care of her taxes -- she's got a trust that my grandfather set up for her that keeps her in an assisted living facility for ladies who used to lunch. And it also happened to be her 90th birthday. ...And, embarrassingly, it'd been around five years since I'd visited her. (Mer and I'd gone to see her right after she'd gotten one of her legs amputated; she was pretty out of it the whole time, so that may not even count.) Babies, I struggle with filial piety at times.

The flight down was a snap: I'd never been to the new Terminal 5 at JFK or flown JetBlue before -- the special TV hookup they give you was totally fascinating. I finally got to see an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show -- he went to Uzbekistan and attended a wedding. The footage they got of the country and the people was great, but although Bourdain talks a big game ("Oh no, more vodka? You do not want me to drink more vodka"), he actually seemed to have, in fact, many reservations. After that the Travel Channel had a show where a fat, bald dude ate some puffins.

My grandma lives in an assisted living facility right on the bay -- it's actually a lot like a fancy hotel, except that, because of her leg et al., she lives in the hospital wing, which is a little more... medically equipped. My dad and I were staying at a Comfort Inn a few miles up the road. Every evening after my grandmother was put to bed, we'd head back to the room to watch the free HBO (we watched the pilot for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which I actually kind of liked a lot). There was no way to control the strength of the air conditioner -- it was either sweltering or freezing, so we went in the freezing direction. After hearing my dad describe the situation, including some complaints about the wretched coffee included in the complimentary "continental breakfast," my grandmother dubbed it the "Cold Comfort Inn."

During the day we'd follow her around the palacial grounds of the facility -- she's got a motorized chair with which she's quite agile and speedy -- from the lizard-crossed gazebo looking out over Sarasota Bay to the residents' herb gardens to the fancy-dress dining room (I'd been told to pack a suit for to wear at dinner; as per my usual M.O. I managed to bring two left dress shoes). As we puttered around, she explained to anyone who'd listen, "my whole family's here!" The clucking and attention felt good, I have to admit. We celebrated her birthday, which, to my grandma's consternation, almost all the other residents'd gotten wind of via the chapel bulletin board. Nina'd helped me repurpose a very apropos silk scarf as a gift; my mom sent along a 500-piece Barack Obama jigsaw with my dad. I got to eat a lot of fish and seafood at fancy Sarasota restaurants; I even found a mussel pearl in my food at The Crab & Fin, promptly almost losing the tiny thing in an inner pocket of my jeans.

Somewhat more claustrophobic were the rigors of her schedule: She'd be up early, ready to meet me and my dad for a few circuits of the gardens; then lunch'd be ready; then more walking around around or watching movies from the library; then obligatory whiskey (holy god do old people drink) while she listened to the copious voicemails her friends had left her while she'd been out; changing into dinner clothes; dinner in the posh dining room with motorized curtains that slid closed as the sun set over the water; then it'd time for her to be "processed" and put to bed, leaving my dad and I with naught to do but drive back to the hotel and watch a couple of hours of TV before the whole thing started again.

Nonetheless, the week passed pleasantly enough, and pretty soon we were back at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport to catch a JetBlue flight home to JFK. I picked up some odd-tasting "key lime"-flavored treats for my co-workers (bark, taffy) at the CNBC store and we hunkered down to wait. And we waited. And the scheduled time of our flight came and went. And eventually it was dark and the terminal was almost empty. Apparently JetBlue has a single plane devoted to the New York-to-Florida route, and because of inclement weather earlier in the day at JFK and the cascade delay that had led to, well, blah blah blah, we were running late. At about 10 o'clock, the flight crew made the announcement that they were going to attempt to board us, but because they had a very narrow window for taking off (the pilots were at this point toeing the line of maximum awake hours), we had to be fully boarded in 10 minutes. My heart sank, but we lined up and got on the plane -- and they did do a pretty efficient job getting us on board. We began taxiing, the little DirectTV screens turned on and started playing a New York Times interview with Mickey Rourke. The flight crew did a high-speed version of the emergency procedures, and for a minute it actually looked as if we were going to get airborne. But then we stopped taxiing and the lights flickered out, Mickey Rourke frozen tauntingly on the TV screens in mid-smirk. We'd missed our window, they told us, and, furthermore, they couldn't get us on another flight that night or even the next day. And we might not even be able to fly back to New York until Monday.

My dad and I sort of panicked -- I opened my laptop and we made an emergency visit to Travelocity.com. Last-minute plane tickets are expensive! The earliest, most convenient flights were going for, like, a thousand bucks a pop. So we booked a middlingly-expensive and sort of roundabout itinerary, flying out of Tampa the next morning (at 7:00am!) and into Boston, and then from there into good old JFK on a Czech Air puddle hopper. We were harried and pissed off, but we weren't the most fucked by any means -- a woman ahead of us on line kept repeating into her cell phone: "What am I going to do? I have no one here. I have nothing." My dad re-rented a car and we drove back to the Cold Comfort Inn to try to sleep for three hours (couldn't) before waking in the dark and making the hallucinatorily early hour-and-a-half drive to Tampa. Once we'd done that, though, things were easy -- all our flights were punctual, I slept en route, and even found an issue of The Guardian from January in the seat pocket on the Boston flight that had a scary article about serial killers.

I pretty much agree with this: http://fuckyeahcilantro.tumblr.com/