dateline delray beach

After being denied access to the Kingspoint clubhouse Ryan decides to leave his own special cannonball in the adult pool.

We’re stretched thin between holidays, which generally bring with them a seasonal greeting card from my sister, so I thought I’d recycle an old one. This is from the inside flap of a thank you card from a Christmas a long time ago. Her son Ryan has since cleared 5 (I think. Maybe only 4? I’m such a bad aunt.), so he’s quite a big bigger than he is pictured here. It’s been hanging from a pushpin over my desk all that time.

This was snapped in Florida, at D’s in-laws, near Kingspoint, the retirement community in which my grandparents lived (technically, my step-grandparents -- if you’re trying to keep all of this straight -- but we never called them that or thought of them that way) in Delray Beach.

There are four of us kids in our family, two older girls and two younger boys, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to get chunked according to gender and shipped off to relatives in the summertime for a couple weeks at a stretch.

One summer Grandma and Grandpa S made the long drive up to Denver from Florida in their full-size American made sedan and took me and my sister back with them. That road trip, in the summer of my fourth grade year, is a thing of romance in my memory (although I’m pretty sure we drove my grandparents crazy) -- I had my first jumbo sized prawn, learned the Swedish word smorgasbord, and my grandfather’s glasses steamed up suddenly like magic when we stepped out of the air conditioned interior of the car into a muggy Louisiana summer day.

D has a movie musical running in her veins and was forever orchestrating all four of us in a full on symphony routine. The ride to Florida required some re-scoring, of course, because she had fewer resources to work with. Our repertoire included endless repetitions of Dream by I don’t know who (which was her favorite love ballad until Samantha Sang usurped that position with Emotion, backed by the Bee Gees, some years later), along with Yankee Doodle Dandy and You’re a Grand Old Flag, probably only because we had saved the paper American flags that were stuck in our sandwiches on toothpicks at Sambo’s somewhere in the South, and then animated them like Barbies across the terrain of the back seat.

Our cast also included two molded plastic pirates that we picked up at a rest stop who inspired a unique composition from D, the refrain of which included: “Yo ho ho and a bottle of orange juice / Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.”

Truthfully: The piece was all refrain.

There was also the tune that we called “Monomanop”, which I’m sure has a real and very different name, which we lifted from a Sesame Street skit and in which I got the boy’s part, which meant I got to sing skat. (For a refresher, see Flickrite Sidereal’s take on the theme »)

But to my point. Our destination was Kingspoint, which was populated then as now (I’m sure) by New York Jewish expats, who treated children like incoming insurgents.

I exaggerate. There were some kind ones in the bunch. But there were so many rules.

The pool and the shuffleboard court were off limits during what seemed like most of the afternoon, so while we waited D put us to work publishing our first newspaper, which we typeset using rubber stamps and populated with interviews extracted from the bathing beauties around the pool (where bathing caps studded with oversize flowers were in fashion -- I wore one myself -- and most of the women’s bathing suits had skirts). The issue that I remember best featured the return of Howdy Doody to daytime TV (we got some GREAT “I remember when” interviews).

That was the summer of my first remarkably warm Atlantic ocean swim, of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and my first exposure to the Lawrence Welk show. It was the summer of my embarrassment when, in my excitement, at the home of my grandparents’ friends, I shattered the glass-topped coffee table when our contestant won the Miss America Pageant, and the grownups who were playing mahjong in the next room came rushing in. (So yeah: It's an old habit.)

They laughed it off and I remember thinking I got off easy.

That summer is the reason I know the Fox Trot and the Box Step and the Tango, because our grandfather taught us in the living room darkened by heavy drapes against the fierce Florida sun, illuminated by the little lights that lit up each of the oil paintings that he brought home from Europe on his travels in the garment trade. Taught us to trace the patterns and measure out the steps as he lifted the needle and found the track on the vinyl again, looping Fernando’s Hideaway until we got the cadence right, got the the harmony of moving across the floor as one.

I danced the boy’s part, my sister danced the girl’s. And it’s the reason to this day that, when the occasion calls for ballroom dancing, I find it nearly impossible not to lead.

just about everything in heaven is covered with glitter

A seasonal greeting card from my sister

(It's a little bit easier to read large)

An Easter card from my sister, which alludes to the premature demise of our childhood pet parakeets, Bobo & Polly, received as Easter presents, who then suffered sorely from our elementary school age neglect. (We kept them alive for a little while, but they definitely failed to reach their full potential.)

Deb's real good about reminding me of my failings, in that tongue-in-cheek barbed kind of sisterly way.

Which means I'll be feeling all guilt-ridden and remorseful this holiday weekend.

Hope yours is happier than mine.

;)

Happy Easter, All! Happy Spring.

of american politics and the defenestration of panties

A greeting card from my sister, aka she who aspired to be a mermaid. Annotated.






The Text:

(canned hallmark copy) When I'm President, I'm gonna settle all disputes with a dance-off. // You're gonna be Vice President, so work on your moves.

(deb copy) But you know, I'll probably be impeached after only a month in office for throwing your underpants off the White House balcony [1] into the Rose Garden 500 times [2]. You'll tap Johnny Whitaker [3] for your Veep & usher in a new era where everyone is nice to everyone, they all have enough money, and cars run on grape juice [4] -- which is very, very cheap. And pollution free. [5] Plus they'll put your face on all the stamps even while you're still in office. So let's just forget the whole thing & hope Barack wins. [6]

The Annotations:
[1] The author alludes to the defenestration of panties of our childhood, in which she, the older sister, tormented me, the younger sister, by dropping my underwear through our open second-story bedroom window into the flower bed below. Repeatedly.

She did this publicly and in broad daylight, and frequently when her friends were over, to demonstrate her mastery over me. I, in my horror, would run down the stairs and out to the flowerbed to retrieve the panties, mortified that the cute boys playing hockey in the street would have witnessed the incident and known they were mine. They only knew they were mine, of course, because I was the only one rushing down to the flowerbed in horror. Had I stayed inside no one would have noticed the brief whisper of white that floated down and settled into the soil.

Almost without fail Deb would be waiting for me, on my return, with another pair of panties poised and ready to drop through the open window. She would release them as soon as she saw that I saw what was about to occur.

And so it would begin again.

[2] And again. And again. And again.

[3] Johnny Whitaker, you may remember, stared alongside Sigmund in the Saturday morning live action show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Deb had a thing for Johnny, and daydreamed about writing love letters to the budding young star, which she would sign "Love, Debby" with a generously flourished cursive "L".

[4] We were sometimes broke growing up, sometimes not, depending upon my parents' immediate fortunes. Broke times were powered by much grape juice because yes: it is very very cheap.

[5] Nothing if not environmentally virtuous, my sister.

[6] This would be the political part.


(The only thing more surreal than coming off two weeks on the road covering both coasts late late late on a Friday night, is coming home to something like this.

Which, of course, made my day.)