Funny how you grow up in the same house with people for seventeen or so years, then you don’t see them any more. When we were kids, the family chugged along in slow cars on small roads for hours to visit relatives, then they repaid the visit. People were always home, because where the hell else would they be? You had to work for a living in the textile mills, shovel the snow, put the kids through school and collect your S&H Green Stamps. You didn’t have to drive anywhere to visit grandma because she was right upstairs in the same house, where she belonged. If older relatives became ill, foul-tempered or slightly deranged, you took care of it best you could for as long as you could. When they started setting the curtains on fire, you reluctantly sent them to the crazy house in Danvers.
If anybody roamed very far away, don’t worry, they’d always be back for Thanksgiving. Nobody had Turkey Day dinner alone, it was always a massive production of at least a dozen souls. Alert grandmas would scour their neighborhoods for loners and drag them over for cranberry sauce by their ears. It wasn’t the Christian thing to do, it was the Nana thing to do, and nobody argued with Nana. When people graduated from high school, they didn’t go looking for a job in some foreign city. Why would you want to go anywhere else but Lawrence, Mass. when you had band concerts in the Common on Sunday afternoons, the Red Sox on the radio and Salisbury Beach as soon as summer arrived?
Still, we now and then might cast a lustful eye at faraway Florida. The Sox had Spring Training in Sarasota in those days and the radio announcers would warm our February afternoons with tales of brilliantly sunny days, grassy green fields and the glories of little gem ballparks in exotic places like Bradenton and Lakeland and Vero Beach. It was everybody’s dream to some day go to Spring Training where you could see Ted Williams up close and maybe get an autograph. Nobody was moving there, of course, it was against the solemn laws of New England to bail on your town and leave a weeping mother at the door. Or as my own grandmother might say, “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Nonetheless, the Sunshine State always giggled in our prefrontal cortexes.
Breaking with tradition, in 1958 I was guilty of slip-sliding away to Stillwater, Oklahoma to go to college. A couple of years later, my sister Alice found out we all wanted to be California girls and blasted off for the West Coast, leaving our little sibling Kathy (8 years younger than Alice and 10 younger than me) sisterless and brotherless. Somehow, despite all this, Kathy made it through life optimistic and psychologically undamaged. We were like three points on a scalene triangle and have remained that way, Alice in Camarillo, Kathy in Salem, N.H. and Bill eventually in Florida for all these years. Sure, there have been the occasional visits, but not enough, and now, suddenly, we find ourselves all very old. Especially me. Kathy and Alice, musing on all this, decided a trip to the home of the old gaffer was essential before unidentified gloved minions began inserting him into a furnace somewhere or interplanetary friends of Gary Borse started lifting him off to Proxima Centauri on a benevolent starship. They got on a plane, Jane, and set themselves free.
Welcome To The Big Swamp
The Two Sisters posse landed in Charlestown, wrecked the place in three days and moved further south. The night before they left, of course, there was a giant SWAT raid on their hotel, which they claim had nothing to do with them… but come on, how many times have the cops ever raided your hotel? Next stop was Savannah, where they drove through cemeteries and complained about the downtown parking and lack of action. “It’s a snore,” griped Kathy. “Where’s the beefcake? Where’s the Chippendales? Where’s the miniature golf course with the big dinosaurs?”
Eventually, the Deadly Duo arrived in lovely Fairfield, encamped in the Ellison estate’s famous Little House, drank champagne to celebrate and passed out. Alice had trouble sleeping so she went out on the porch and was attacked by a terrifying armadillo. “It was BIG,” she swore, “about five feet tall with red eyes and bad breath.” We think it was really just Frank from down the street but we left her to her to her own imaginings. Sometimes people from California have withdrawal symptoms when leaving the state and hear alligators under the bed.
Next day, it was off to jolly old St. Augustine, where the deer and the John Birch society play. We parked in one of those places where you have to take a photo of the QR Code, send it in a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Vatican and sit in a dive bar until the Pope’s imprimatur comes back. Then we marched on to St. George Street, as everyone does. Fortunately, the crazed woman who daily runs up and down the street with the giant Trump flag was busy scaling speckled trout that day, so we enjoyed a modicum of peace on our little jaunt. Matter of fact, foot traffic was very sparse that afternoon, a phenomenon we attributed to the arrival of Alice.
We took photos of the splendid lighthouse and drove to the beach on Anastasia Island, where it rained a torrent. We got out when it died down and crossed a bridge to an ocean overlook, where two ladies from Titusville were enjoying their day. “We need a casino here,” one of them grumped. “Where are all the men?” Kathy and Alice told them not to complain, it was worse in Savannah and in Charlestown your hotel got raided. “Oh, my!” gasped one of the ladies. “Think we’d have any luck on the whale-watching tour?” Maybe with the whales but not the old men, Alice told them. “You might want to try computer dating. Be careful, though, the ones with the cutest pictures are all liars.”
Take Me For A Ride In Your Boat Boat
There are exactly four things your average tourist can do in Ocala; visit a top-flight thoroughbred horse farm, take a glass boat ride at lovely Silver Springs, ogle the awesome World Equestrian Center or swing and sway over the abyss at The Canyons Zip Line and Adventure Park. We didn’t tell Alice about the zip-line because the last time she went on one (in Belize) she forgot to use the brake and had to be landed by a scrawny little 125-pound Belizean fellow. Which is a little like standing on the railroad tracks and sticking your arms out to slow down the Orient Express. They gave the poor guy a big tip but how much does it cost to replace your external obliques?
We went to Silver Springs instead. They used to have an abundance of wild monkeys there, rhesus macaques to be precise, but they multiplied to untenable numbers and some of them carried the herpes B virus, which could be spread to humans, thus the state took measures to curb their monkeys. Nonetheless, aggressive monkeys have forced the park’s closure on two occasions. In one instance, a woman visiting Silver Springs with her family said the monkeys had charged at them. Bad monkeys! None of them bothered us, of course, because they were afraid to incur the wrath of The Two Sisters, who carry tasers and keep cooking pots in the car.
Silver Springs’ main claim to fame is their glass-bottom boats, which float over springs producing over 500 million gallons of water per day, making SS one of the largest first-magnitude springs in the world and a significant contributor to the Florida Aquifer. One fine day in the late 1870s, a couple of Marion county lads named Hullam Jones and Phillip Morrell decided it would be a good idea to fix a piece of glass to the bottom of their dugout canoe to better explore the local springs. When Colonel W.M. Davidson and Carl Ray bought the Silver Springs area in 1924, they developed the larger gasoline-powered boats needed to take groups of tourists over the springs. Even though Silver Springs is not the booming tourist mecca it once was, virtually all the boats going out the day we were there were filled. Even The Two Sisters liked them. And Bill got a Junior Captain’s badge for volunteering to steer the boat if the Captain got bushwacked by monkeys or anacondas.
Further Travels
On the way home from Silver Springs, we swung by the burgeoning equine playground of the World Equestrian Center, which doubles in size every four hours, about the same as amoebas. Named one of Time magazine’s 2024 World’s Greatest Places, WEC is easily the largest equestrian complex in the United States with endless horse barns, state-of-the-art arenas and luxury accommodations on more than 2,000 acres at last count. They even have enormous Jumbotrons around the arenas so blind people can keep track of the action. Their laundry building is bigger than the Astrodome and their posh restaurant Stirrups in the Equestrian Hotel only takes reservations if you’re in the Fortune 500.
The original plan of the Roberts family which built the place was probably to make a few bucks somewhere down the line, but every time they make a million they spend two million more. At last count, they had over 3000 stalls, which is double what they have at most thoroughbred racetracks, and the WEC stalls are much nicer. Each one has non-slip mats in the bath and even those little bottles of shampoo, conditioner and shower gel hanging on the wall. There’s also a Call Button if you need someone to come in and brush your back. Young horses in Illinois just beg their parents to take them there, it’s better than Disney World.
No June adventure to the Gainesville area is complete without a visit to the Hippodrome’s dependable summer musical comedy. This year it’s an oldie---1982’s Pump Boys and Dinettes. At the Princess Theater on Broadway, it played to capacity audiences in olden times and even won a Tony award for Best Musical. As with many musicals, the story line is thin (very thin in this case) and mainly used to tie the country pop tunes together. The musicians, on the other hand, were better than terrific and deserved a larger crowd. They’ll probably get one if the Hipp ever gets their tiny elevator fixed. Many oldsters---like Alice, for instance---aren’t crazy about scaling the 30 steps to the staging area, and people over sixty are a large percentage of the Hippodrome’s business. “We’ve got the UP part fixed, now we’re working on the DOWN,” says the manager. Let’s hustle it up before Aunt Bea breaks a clavicle or someone falters on the descent, creating a snowball effect on the steepish stairway.
Back at the Little House, Alice and Kathy packed their suitcases with iron bars (don’t argue, I carried them) and loaded up for the trip back to Charlestown and flights home. We discussed the Good Old Days, of course, as only siblings can and commiserated over the demise of several old neighborhood pals. We spoke vaguely of a future meeting before the Cosmic Archer starts aiming his arrows our way, hopeful the sturdy Killeen genes allow for an encore down the road. We’re optimistic because we’re Garfield Street Kids and we don’t allow Reaper parking on our street. We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but we’ll meet again some sunny day.
That’s not all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
