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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Florida

We are going to Florida again this year, having booked the bookables that one needs to book.
I wonder if we shall see Lizard Breath again and his sister, Gecko Eyes, again.
So I reprinted this for anyone who is not familiar with them.

There are a lot on geckos in Florida. The place is infested by them. They should be the state animal, if they are not already so designated. It was in a discussion of geckos that I first met Lizard Breath, a young man possessing that uncanny ability so well and truly depicted in Jurassic Park of being able to imprint and bond with the first person of advanced years who cannot stand kids.
I mean, it was Spring Break and I had just come down in a flying sardine can filled with the germ-laden X-Box generation, had I not? And who said the economy was in the tank, for had not all of them had some sort of iDevice upon which they were playing Angry Birds or a form of Quidditch; the less athletically inclined formed large flash texting mobs in corner of the aircraft, and threatened to unbalanced the wretched thing, forcing the flight attendants to chase them back to their seats, and wake up their blissfully sleeping parents.

We were staying with friends at Johns Island. It was one of those places where, as our friends drove us around, everyone smiled and waved. Even in the morning the scads of people going early morning walk-about smiled and waved.
When I went walking in the morning, no one smiled and waved to me. I guessed they knew that I was just passing through. Perhaps it was my demeanor. One day as I waited for my friends outside the Publix supermarket, some people asked me if I were on my way back to the marina, indicating I resembled a yacht owner... or a swabby; I did not ask, so I remain in the dark. All I do know is that I had a Tommy Bahama on over a Del Boca Vista T-shirt, and I thought I looked more like Jack Klompus, and an inquiry about the astronaut ball point pen might have been in order, rather than the maritime connection.

I was sitting behind the 19th Hole, the small cafe off the 18th green of the Johns Island Golf Club, sipping a cup of tea, and watching the egrets standing about like statues. So was a woman in dark glasses accompanied by three children. She belonged; I knew it at once. Even without make-up early in the morning, I could see she belonged. She had that air of being able to summon the spirits and faeries of make-up and fashion at a moment's notice, if need be; but there was no need, for she had already sized me up and tossed me into that trash receptacle reserved for tiresome pedants. I think it was my sneakers that gave me away.
The children were of various ages: the oldest girl sipped her orange juice and intermittently did her daily dozen of lip-push-ups, consisting of a series of sucking in the cheeks and compressing the lips outward in emphatic moues, followed by a shrug that seemed to signal it was not really worth the effort.
The younger two, a boy and girl, were a brace of pestilences in training.

There followed a lengthy interlude of muted giggles and Indian burns and almost spilled OJs, interspersed by half serious remonstrations by the mother. It was a lot like sitting in the midst of an elementary school production of Waiting for Godot, only not as thrilling as the original.

Then the egret moved! He was not ten feet from us, and he thrust his beak into the bush, spearing a gecko, and then throwing it down his gullet! It was electric... rather like being a thorough tool and sitting through Warhol's Empire and spilling one's fourth bag of popcorn when startled by the sudden appearance of a sea gull flying by the lofty pile of bricks.
The mother did not move, and the eldest daughter moued at it all, but I positively goggled, and the other two were breathless.
"Wow!" said the boy.
"Shit!" said the young girl.
"Madison...," admonished the mother, leaving unspoken the coda that one should not use the S-word in front of people who had not been properly introduced.
I considered, then spoke, "That egret just ate that gecko!"
Gecko of the infraorder Gekkota I immediately learned from the Science Whiz Kids sitting next to me.
"That was just like school!", I said.
The younger ones of the crowd sort of turned half way to look at me.
"I used to have a nun like that who taught me in fifth grade..." I thought this might be about their age. "... and she would come down the aisles, tall and silent, then suddenly whack people with a ruler!"
They giggled.
The egret struck again. He apparently loved to be the center of attention.
"Thwack! Don't play video games in class!" the boy said. All three of us laughed.

This game of personifying our freedom and play as reptiles and our oppressors as thin, unemotional, goggle-eyed birds went on for a while, and then for a couple mornings thereafter.
And the boy became Lizard Breath, the girl was Gecko Eyes, and I was Pygopod. If you must know, it comes from Pygopodidae, a family of Gekkota, and it is pronounced "PIG-opod", with all the possible emphasis on the  "pig..."   part with a barely muttered  "...opod"  at the end. It often degenerated - in our subversive creole - into something like "piggy-pod".
However, I counted this a real feather in my cap, because just as the nicknames were being dealt out (in the manner of "he who dealt it, smelt it!"), there had been a vigorous show-and-tell about gecko defences and about how some throw feces at aggressors. That was not a good discussion to be in when names were being discovered and assigned.

And that is how I met Lizard Breath.
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