Florida Days

Piggy

Things are quiet in Florida this AM; lazy sun coming over the horizon, mist shuffling off the lawn, gators sleeping on the golf course.

Back home I see it is 13 degrees, and for 6:48 in the morning, that represents a warming trend. It should be above freezing by the time I return to the airport to shovel my car out of the long term parking lot... in my blue blazer and dock siders.

 

Lizard Breath and Gecko Eyes are growing up. We stumbled across them again at the 19th Hole at John's Island Club House, and just as if they were still supernumeraries in the black-and-white version of The Lord Of The Flies, they yelled "Piggy!" - for Pygopodia, a genus of geckoids and, unfortunately, my nickname in this triune club - and were howling down the hills to steal my specs.

We made plans to do some stuff, my wife and I and the boy Lizard and the girl Gecko.
Their parents were fine with a little free child care, and they trusted us almost as much as they found me insufferable, thinking that if children were to be seen and not heard down at the Club and Beach, I really should be neither. But there it was.

We perused the film listings for the inevitable chance of a rainy day - every other activity was a combination of  "picnic", "pool", "beach", and "frankfurters" (that's what they call 'em at John's Island and they go for $10, and as a friend pointed out, since kids rarely take more than 2, 3 bites from a hot dog, that nets out at about $25 per standard hot dog fully consumed).

I, Frankenstein was the favorite early on. However, on checking the Rotten Tomatoes reviews, barely 51% of the audience liked it... and this was the audience made up mostly of guys and gals that were at Screwie Louie's Porpoise Pub Big Fourth Anniversary Party which was a white ponytail affair, roughly meaning bikers my age and their old ladies.
That was not a good sign.
Lizard B. and G. Eyes had already seen ("been dragged to" as they nicely put it) Monument Men, and they said it was monumentally boring, the fact that it outscored I, Frankenstein notwithstanding.

Last night we "sat" for them, even though they are too old to allow any notion of "babysitting" to attach to this type of primate behavior. Popcorn and The Walking Dead on AMC. Their parents had given faint endorsement of such TV: "Walking Dead or whatever..."
Some straight guys and dolls - what does one call non-zombies? I chose "straight"; I suppose Straight Rights organizations will be offended - were hacking the arms off a zombie, smashing his teeth and mandible on a rock, taking him home to meet the gang... who lived at a old prison, and there was a joyous reunion of the straights, which included being lovingly hit by the butt of a rifle and being placed in a cell by old and smiling friends.

During this waking nightmare, LB and GE told me of a friend of their parents, who lived in New Brunswick and was visiting earlier in the month, and constantly referred to strangers, foreigners, tourists, immigrants, and generally new faces as Come-From-Away-ers.
It sounded very north-of-the-border to me and the wife, both having gone to University in the Great White North.

It also resembled 1984's NewSpeak.

"Ever Orwell!" I said, hoping for a laugh.
Nobody laughed.
I explained the Canadian use of the intensifier "ever", but by then what had been Wit had wilted into Pun, which in turn decayed to Mawkish Jape.

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