Coen contemplates Elmo

 This is my grandson, Coen Sylvia. He's about 18 months old in this photo. He's watching his favorite TV show, Elmo the muppet, and is deeply engrossed, as you can see. Taken Sept. 28, 2005.
 

Compassion and understanding

Al Pacino tells the following story: "During one of my performances I made a connection with a pair of eyes in the audience, and I thought, 'This is incredible; these eyes are penetrating me.' I went through the whole performance just relating to those eyes, giving the whole thing to those eyes. When curtain call came, I looked in the direction of those eyes, and it was a seeing eye dog ... I couldn't get over it -- the compassion and intensity and understanding in those eyes, and it was a dog."

From time to time I've seen the same quality in my own dog Bogie's eyes, but I had always assumed they were faux qualities. I thought, "It's amazing how they mimic our own emotions." Because, hey, they're animals. They don't really have compassion. They can't really "understand," the same way we understand.

The Pacino story woke me up. Hey, maybe they aren't "mimicking" our emotions. Maybe they really have those same emotions, in even greater quantity or intensity than we do.

Now when Bogie looks at me that way I'm going to be thinking that he really is "intense, compassionate and understanding."

The above is from a sermon by the late Tom Ahlburn. Pretty remarkable.

A day in Apple Valley

Our gradndson, Aidan, was only two when this little gem was taken. His mother, Hillary, snapped it on a day when the two of them -- along with Jonathan (his dad) -- were out picking apples and pumpkins. I love the sweater, but the smile says it all.

Our new home in the Tamaron section of Sarasota.

The world can be a cruel place

An apparition? A mirage? Both? Neither?

She was wearing a gossamer-thin blouse and jeans and came floating across the parking lot like an apparition. I was sitting at an outdoor table, drinking coffee from a paper cup. As she headed straight toward me I figured I was in for an adventure, and quietly wondered what kind.

“Do you have a cell phone?” she asked, her blue eyes barely visible behind her sunglasses. The strong Florida breeze was whipping around her blond hair.

Yes, I told her, and she asked if she could make a phone call on it. “What kind of phone call?” was all I could think to ask. And that started her going.

Her husband had driven off with all their possessions, she said. They had been doing their laundry in a Laundromat when he stormed off. They had been married a year and nothing like this had ever happened to them, she said.

She started crying. “Nothing is working out right now,” she said, through her tears. “We just lost our new house. My catering business is really hurting and Josh can’t find a publisher for his books.”

Her first husband had been killed in a roadside accident two years ago, she said. “I watched the whole thing. He stopped to help someone change a tire and another car came along and killed him. Josh and I were writing a book about the incident when he asked me to marry him. I didn’t know what to think.”

Now they had no home, no money, and no prospects. “What’s wrong with people today?” she cried. “Everyone is so cruel, so uncaring. We haven’t had a place to stay for three days and the motels are all full. Those that aren’t want $100 a night and we can’t afford that.”

She got on my cell phone and called Josh, but was quickly transferred into voice mail. “Josh, honey, where are you? What’s wrong, sweetheart? Whatever it is, we can work it out. We’ve worked out bigger problems before. I love you, honey. Please come back to me. I’m sitting here at Panera’s with a nice man who’s lending me his cell phone. Please come back to me.”

The tears were rolling down her face. She handed me the cell phone back and left with a “Thank you.” The last I saw of her she was walking across the mall parking lot, the tails on her blouse blowing in the breeze, the sun reflecting off her yellow hair. I never learned her name. When you’re broke the world can be a cruel place.

A troubadour comes to town with his guitar on his back

In a way, Chris the troubadour is still trying to fulfill his father’s dream. Chris was playing his guitar at the Old Salty Dog last night and, outside the noise and hubbub of the bar, talked about his family. There were a fair amount of people in the place-nothing extraordinary, but the crowd seemed into it. He played old Neil Young songs, making me recall Young’s originality and freshness. He also played tunes by such performers as Simon and Garfunkle and other “classic” musicians of the pop genre.

As a testament to the vagaries of his career, he had a box in front of him that said “Chris’s Tips.” It was empty.

Chris came to Florida this winter from his home in Warrensville, Ohio, and said he was glad he did. “We live in the snow belt,” he said, in between sets. “We got 90 inches this winter - a new record.”

The snow mass was enough to cause him financial damage, as part of the roof on a greenhouse he owns collapsed and was awaiting him back in Warrensville. He was anticipating the neighbors’ complaints about the mess.

Chris’s father owned the greenhouse and he was trying to make a go of it, but “it’s tough to make a buck in the nursery business,” he said, so he’s not about to give up his singing/playing career. Besides, he seemed to enjoy it too much and was looking forward to next year, when he already had several gigs lined up.

Back in Warrensville he also has a girlfriend waiting for him: his wife divorced him years ago and he doesn’t get enough time to visit with his son. "I lost my son,” he said, then quickly rephrases it. “I mean, I gave up living with him when the divorce came through.”

Chris has a friendly face and is eager to talk to customers. He asks everyone for requests. Barbara requested “Hotel California.”

“Wow, that one stretches my vocal cords,” he says. “I can’t figure out what key they’re playing in, or how they have their strings tuned.” After a moment he says, “I’ll play it anyway, sometime in the first 10 minutes of the second set.”

Instead, though, he starts the set with it. His voice strains to hit the higher notes. As I listen I’m reminded how the words are something of a metaphor for the troubadour life he has set for himself:

“You can check out any time you want,”
“But you can never leave…”

Want a scan? Meet me in the Flamingo Room

Let's say you needed a scan - a CT scan or one of the others. Where would you expect to go to get this scan? A hospital, right? Or a walk-in clinic.

Would you expect to go to a motel? Yesterday, I was reading the Herald-Tribune when a yellow flyer fell out of it onto my lap. It was advertising various scans "at below-market prices." For example, you could get a "deep leg vein scan" for only $60 and a "pancreas scan" for another $60

This is how Florida is different from Rhode Island, where we lived the past 25 years. You would never see this kind of thing advertised up there, let alone in a Sunday newspaper flyer. Even though getting an "aorta artery scan" is only $45 I doubt that any of the people I know would rush to this company, UltraLife, for a scan. New Englanders prefer to be conservative; stick with their own physicians.

These scans, by the way, were being administered for one day only at a nearby Comfort Inn, not exactly a confidence builder there. And if you didn't like that, they were being offered in nearby Bradenton at a Quality Inn (the Flamingo Room, to be exact).

I think I'll pass.

After looking around for a month - and vacillating between buying or renting a house - we settled on renting and ended up with what’s called a Spanish/Mediterranean style house, owned by an engineer from upstate New York. We'’ll move in June 1 and live here for about a year, which should give us enough time to figure out where we want to live and what our priorities are.

Who knows? We may end up renters for the rest of our lives.

A young man's thoughts turn to ....

By using her inate tool of curiousity Barbara discovers a unique event: the Cincinnati Reds, who play their spring training games here in Sarasota, are due to play the Boston Red Sox for the only time this year on Saturday, a mere 24 hours away. Both Jordan and Lesley (two of our children) are extremely excited about this coincidental juxtaposition of timing and baseball, so we call the box office to ask for tickets.

“All sold out,” says the saleslady. “Have been since January 21, when the tickets first went on sale.”

Rats. But wait! Now she comes out with a suggestion. “Come to the field around 3 o’clock tomorrow,” she says. “There’s always people around selling extra tickets.”

So we show up at 3 pm and drop Jordan off to score some tickets, if he can, while the rest of us drive off to look at some real estate. Five minutes later the cell phone rings. Jordan has scored four box seats at $14 each.

Man, I love spring in Florida.

That night we show up and watch the golden boys of the Red Sox take the field just a few feet away from us. Everyone around us is excited. This is living. Both Jordan and Lesley hit the cell phones to call friends. Their conversations inevitably start out with “Guess where I’m sitting right now…”

How could anyone guess? Back home in Rhode Island there is 7 inches of snow on the ground. Chicago, where Lesley lives, isn’t quite as bad, but it’s far from baseball weather.

A roach the size of Cincinnati

Last week I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed, when I thought I saw something running across the floor. Sure enough, there was a huge bug, about 2.5 inches long, scurrying under the sink. My rapid response system went into action. I grabbed a tube of toothpaste and hurled it at him. He was huge, I swear the toothpaste bounced off him.

 

I finally nailed him with a copy of James Rogers' "Hot Commodities" (hardcover edition). Barbara was asleep so I didn't bother her with the details.

 

A few nights later, I was in bed, reading a magazine, when another one of the buggers ran across the page I was reading. By the time I picked myself off the floor he had disappeared into the covers. I ripped the bed apart until I found him, then had James Rogers deal with him.

 

I showed the specimen to some friends and they were saying that it was only a "water bug." Someone else told me it a "Palmetto bug." But once the exterminator took a look at the little guy the next day he said, "Cockroach, for sure." I told him some of my friends thought it was only a Palmetto bug. "Yeah, that's the Florida expression for a cockroach," he said, swinging into action with his toxic air cannister.

 

I guess you get used to those things down here.

The CRAZY real estate market

 

Yesterday, our real estate agent Gail sent us a listing of homes for sale here in the Sarasota area. We chose 10 of those to visit today and sent our list along to her. A few hours later we got a note back from her saying that 5 of the 10 houses we chose had already been sold. "A CRAZY market," is the way she put it. Hmmm. I'm wondering whether it is safe to invest a huge amount of money is something called "a CRAZY market." Probably not.

Why do gulls all face the same direction?

There are many mysteries about bird life; this is just one. Take a hundred thousand gulls, put them on the beach, and step back. What happens? They all turn and face the same direction, usually that of the sun. But why? (A) They're cold (B) They all follow the leader (C) They expect a fish truck to come by at any minute? I'll leave it to the ornithologists to figure that one out.

Where are all the people??

So many people on the west coast of Florida (we're in Sarasota) are hyperventilating because of the real estate craze and it leads to some curious happenstances. Many individuals have been persuaded to buy a condo purely for the purpose of making a profit. The thinking goes like this: The price of condos went up 37% in 2004 and 23% in 2003, so if I buy a condo now and just sit on it -- don't actually move in or rent it to anyone else -- I can make tens of thousands of dollars by this time next year.

 

That leads to many, many empty condos in the middle of the peak season down here -- January, February and March. You can see it mostly at night, when the buildings are curiously dark.

 

We looked at the building next to us last night.  There must be 60 condos in the building and yet there was only one light on -- on one of the units on the top floor. Where are all the people? Sitting in their primary residence, waiting for the dollars to roll in, baby.

 

Where will these people be when Fanny Mae, which owns 90% of the mortgages in the country and which mistated its revenues by $9 billion last year, collapses?

Mennonites on the beach

Every time we go to the beach at Siesta Key we see a number of Mennonites. The men have long beards and nearly always are fully clothed -- long-sleeve shirts, long pants and suspenders -- while the rest of us walk around in bathing suits. Most times the men take off their shoes and socks and roll up their pants to walk in the surf. The women wear long dresses and white headwear.

 

You wonder how they can suffer the heat in those outfits. At first, I felt sorry for them. But then I was ashamed for feeling that way. It is obvious that they are different, and also obvious that they don't care what other people wear, for they have their culture, their religion, and they seem content with their unique lifestyle.

 

My feeling of sadness turned to one of admiration. While the rest of the world seems to overdose on plasma TVs, convertibles, high rent and high living, they have stuck with a lifestyle that is hundreds of years old.

 

Wait. I just saw two young Mennonite men wearing shorts. One of the them was on a cell phone. Oh, well.

The real estate bubble

We arrived in Sarasota at exactly the wrong time. We want to buy a home here, but house/condo prices are out of control. This looks to me like a frenzy of buying, with everyone trying to make money and no one trying to buy a home. It doesn’t look like the kind of market we would want to buy a home in.

 

Consider this passage from a recent New York Times story:

“NGELINA UMANSKY, a 39-year-old spa owner from San Francisco, was visiting a  friend in Miami two weeks ago when she heard about a new condo development downtown. Hoping to find a vacation home, but worried that others were interested, too, Ms. Umansky arrived at the sales office at 8 a.m. the day after seeing some model units.”About 50 other buyers were already in line. Two hours later, a sales agent summoned her and said she had four minutes to decide which unit to buy. She acted fast, offering $350,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit.”Ms. Umansky thinks she got a bargain; when she called on behalf of a friend less than eight hours later, she was told the asking price on a unit like hers had climbed to $380,000, a nearly 9 percent price increase.”

 

The story mentions that some condos on the market are experiencing as many as 16 price increases in a single day. Definitely a seller’s market.

 

The Times piece continues:

“The gold rush mentality has some economists concerned. Some buyers of new condos and houses are behaving like day-traders before the dot-com crash, said John Vogel Jr., a real estate professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In some cases, developers are actually creating the frenzy. In central Florida, Transeastern Homes, which builds subdivisions, asks prospective buyers to put down a refundable deposit of $500 to $5,000 to reserve a time slot to buy a house that has yet to be built, sometimes without knowing more than the general location of the subdivision and a price range.”Buyers review floor plans and maps first at a Web site or in a brochure. When they arrive at the sales ‘event,’ typically at a hotel or a convention center, they spend five minutes looking at a map and choosing a home before the next buyer moves to the front of the line. Price increases - up to 16 a day- are announced over loudspeakers."People get excited and get caught up in it," said Joel Lazar, a Transeastern vice president. "Even if they weren't planning on buying a home, they convince themselves to buy a home."

 

Meanwhile, rental fees are lagging behind and seem to us to be downright cheap. So right now we’re thinking that we’d be stupid to buy into this frenzy. We’re thinking that we might rent, waiting to see if the bubble is popped, at which point prices should be a lot cheaper.

Parrots overhead

We’re getting some nice weather (70+ degrees) and warm sun and are planning to watch the Super Bowl at Turtles restaurant, using a gift certificate that some of the folks at my former place of employment (Lifespan in Rhode Island) got for us. One interesting sidelight: We read in the paper where a man named Jim Rainey, who apparently is general manager of the restaurant, was quoted as saying that “the parrots are back in town.” According to Rainey, throngs of parrots stop by every year to roost in abandoned nests in the cocoanut trees lining both sides of Turtles’ parking lot.



So, Barbara and I couldn’t resist walking up there one morning to check out the scene. The first thing we encountered was squawking sounds coming from every direction. “Those are the parrots,” said one man, who was standing by with binoculars in hand. We learned that parrots can make quite a bit of noise, almost enough to drown out the sound of traffic rolling by on Midnight Pass Road.



Meanwhile, the parrots were flying over our heads like a squad of kamikaze. I couldn’t resist taking a few photos. There was one female in particular who stood her ground outside the mouth of her nest and let me know what she thought of my photographic efforts. I retaliated by standing my own ground and shooting away. She did more squawking than me, though.

A snake on the prowl

Today we met Yvonne, a neighbor who likes to garden. It is because of Yvonne that the area around our condo is festooned with flowers of every hue and color. It makes our close area look more tropical than some of the other places on Siesta Key.



Yvonne is about 70 and speaks with a heavy French accent. She gives us little clues about things like how to get the mail, where to find various keys that we will need, and who calls the shots in the condo association.



We speak to her for about an hour before we bid her good day. But as we’re leaving she calls us back and tells us in her broken English that, if we come across black snakes while we’re walking about the place “They are good. They eat insects and don’t bother us while we’re gardening.”



I had suspected as such and filed this information away in the “Duh” category. But then Yvonne continued, “But if you come across brown snakes they are not so good. See, like that one resting on my steps now.”



We looked at her steps, some 10 feet from us, and saw a brown snake about 4 feet long and the diameter of a 25-cent piece sunning on her steps. “They can make trouble,” she said, as she picked up a stick and poked at it. I noticed that Yvonne was wearing sandals and suddenly the word “brave” came into my mind.



As her stick poked the snake, it crawled slowly and with deliberation off the steps and into the nearby bushes.



“Anything with designs on its skin is no good,” she said. I felt like our experience in the condo had been inexorably changed and wondered if I could ever again walk about the place without checking first for 40-foot long brown snakes with designs on their backs.

Traveling to the tropics

Barbara and I decided we wanted to retire and move to a warmer climate. So we spent a full month getting our house ready to sell, packing for our trip, and making last minute arrangement to ship our car to Florida. By the time of our flight on Jan. 31, we were drained.



We arrived in Tampa and boarded a shuttle (an 11-passenger van) to Sarasota. There was one other passenger, a man named Bob who looked to be about 70 years old. The driver of the van was a congenial guy named Nick who was dressed in shorts and a tee shirt.



Nick didn’t say much, which was good because I had a hard time hearing him from our seat toward the back of the van. Bob was spread out across the seat in front of us, looking for all the world as if he owned the van. Bob didn’t say much until Barbara mentioned how much she admired the Tampa Bay Bridge. At the mention, Bob launched into a long lecture on how bridges were built, mentioning along the way that his uncle had been a famous bridge-builder in the Midwest. I closed my eyes while he lectured Barbara and used the occasion to catch some sleep.



Later, after I awoke I overheard Bob say he was retired and so I asked him if his wife was retired. “Hardly,” he said with a laugh. “She’s only 37 years old.”



Bob went on to say that, while they lived in Connecticut, his wife commuted to her job in Los Angeles. “She flies out every Sunday night and flies back on Friday,” he said, with no small amount of bragging, as if to say that this young, vibrant woman just couldn’t keep her hands of his aging body.



Bob lived in a section of Florida called Parrish, a planned development that included many homes worth close to a million dollars. His own home was on a lagoon, he said, and I asked him about the alligators.



“They don’t bother you much,” he said, “if you leave them alone.” Then, after a moment of thought, he added, “Of course, there was that incident with Frank down the street a few months back. ‘Gator crashed right through the screen on his lanai and grabbed his dog. They don’t usually do that unless they’re quite hungry.”h



The only sound in the van was that of the tires rolling along Interstate 75. Outside, the weather was quite a contrast with that of New England. We had just left a pile of snow 4 feet high on our driveway. Now we were watching the palm trees zoom by.



“A few weeks back,” said Bob, “we had an incident with an alligator. They usually don’t bother you if you don’t bother them, but every once in a while one of them gets a little wild and becomes a menace. Florida State law protects alligators but not if they become a public menace. So I called the state environmental agency and reported an alligator out of control.



“One of their officers came to the house and he and I worked on capturing this belligerent male. This gator was huge, I think about 9 feet long, and very aggressive. The method they use to capture alligators is through a lure, just like fishing. This state guy had a chicken, or something that looked like a dead chicken (hey, maybe it was road kill, for all I know) and he put a giant hook through it and had a long rope attached to the hook. Then he threw it out into the lagoon and we sat and waited.



“A few hours later we heard some splashing and the state guy said we had hooked the alligator. It took the two of us to pull him in. You have to be careful that you don’t pull the rope too hard, ‘cause the hook will rip the stomach open. Once we got him up close to the bank, the officer pulled out a grappling hook and hooked him in back of the head. That’s the way we pulled him in.



“As soon as he had him on the shore, we wrapped tape around his snoot. You know, alligator jaws are pretty powerful, but only when they are chomping down. Theyi don’t have as many muscles controlling how they open their jaws.



“Once we got him into the truck he was taken away and my problem was solved.”Bob stared straight ahead while Barbara and I saw in the seats behind him and tried to digest it all. We hoped we didn’t run into any alligators in Florida.