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Florida is Different
Mar. 12th, 2016 09:29 amI'm currently in Punta Gorda, Florida, here with Michael & Kent for a memorial service for Kent's mother, Zoe Forrester, who passed away last August. Kent's parents and paternal grandparents have wintered here since 1980 and consider it their primary residence (at least for tax and insurance purposes) so it is very fitting that we distribute the last of Zoe's ashes here on what would have been her 80th birthday.
This is my second visit to Florida, the first being the GALA Choruses festival in 1996 in Tampa, just north of here. I didn't see much of Tampa except for the downtown core where the festival was being held, not to mention nothing outside the city. This trip is a bit different.
We always joke about how Florida is God's Waiting Room, a place packed to the rafters with the retired, near-dead and dead. Yup, it's much truer than I knew: In our drives about town, there is a medical clinic or a funeral home on every other block. And the clinics are all hyper-specialized: not just ophthamologists but specialists on cataracts, not just surgeons but specialists in coronary bypass and knee replacements, not just dermatologists but skin cancer treatments, and so on. And huge billboards for no-frills cremations, starting at $650! And I haven't seen a single elementary or secondary school yet.
The senior demographic skews local business in a way I hadn't anticipated: if your customer base doesn't keep/care about office hours, then the routine of the day takes on a new tilt. Meals skew to earlier times: peak dinner hour here seems to be 5-6pm, but DC's is more 7-8pm. We went out for Thai food last night naively thinking we were going to beat the heaviest of the dinner crowd at 6pm but found we were in the trailing edge of a mass of people. Our lunch with family yesterday was 1pm, barely beating a hoard of people arriving after 1:30pm. It's going to take some time to map out other peculiarities of local timing.
One thing very unexpected: cows. As we drove through the rural space between Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, among other places, we passed several open fields of cows. While Florida paid a lot of money to be successfully known as a producer of orange juice, I had no idea it was also a significant player in beef production. Huh.
The past 48 hours have been a bit of a blur, largely because I was fighting off a nasty cold and have been severely medicated to mediate the symptoms enough to let me (barely) function. Today, we're having brunch, picking up some supplies for the memorial service (the cake, some ice cream, flowers, etc.), then heading to the RV park where the family has gathered. I'm hoping for a bit of spare time to lift some weights at their gym and perhaps soak in the pool before the service starts at 4pm.
No one is sure exactly how long the service will run as, well, how to put this delicately... Forresters make god-awful project managers. Seriously. Not a one of them can focus on an agenda item for more than three seconds before willing drifting off onto some unrelated tangent. It's a constant chorus of "Oh, say, that reminds me..." Great for group therapy, lousy for getting things done. Bless their hearts.
This is my second visit to Florida, the first being the GALA Choruses festival in 1996 in Tampa, just north of here. I didn't see much of Tampa except for the downtown core where the festival was being held, not to mention nothing outside the city. This trip is a bit different.
We always joke about how Florida is God's Waiting Room, a place packed to the rafters with the retired, near-dead and dead. Yup, it's much truer than I knew: In our drives about town, there is a medical clinic or a funeral home on every other block. And the clinics are all hyper-specialized: not just ophthamologists but specialists on cataracts, not just surgeons but specialists in coronary bypass and knee replacements, not just dermatologists but skin cancer treatments, and so on. And huge billboards for no-frills cremations, starting at $650! And I haven't seen a single elementary or secondary school yet.
The senior demographic skews local business in a way I hadn't anticipated: if your customer base doesn't keep/care about office hours, then the routine of the day takes on a new tilt. Meals skew to earlier times: peak dinner hour here seems to be 5-6pm, but DC's is more 7-8pm. We went out for Thai food last night naively thinking we were going to beat the heaviest of the dinner crowd at 6pm but found we were in the trailing edge of a mass of people. Our lunch with family yesterday was 1pm, barely beating a hoard of people arriving after 1:30pm. It's going to take some time to map out other peculiarities of local timing.
One thing very unexpected: cows. As we drove through the rural space between Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, among other places, we passed several open fields of cows. While Florida paid a lot of money to be successfully known as a producer of orange juice, I had no idea it was also a significant player in beef production. Huh.
The past 48 hours have been a bit of a blur, largely because I was fighting off a nasty cold and have been severely medicated to mediate the symptoms enough to let me (barely) function. Today, we're having brunch, picking up some supplies for the memorial service (the cake, some ice cream, flowers, etc.), then heading to the RV park where the family has gathered. I'm hoping for a bit of spare time to lift some weights at their gym and perhaps soak in the pool before the service starts at 4pm.
No one is sure exactly how long the service will run as, well, how to put this delicately... Forresters make god-awful project managers. Seriously. Not a one of them can focus on an agenda item for more than three seconds before willing drifting off onto some unrelated tangent. It's a constant chorus of "Oh, say, that reminds me..." Great for group therapy, lousy for getting things done. Bless their hearts.
