Alongside a Gibbous Orange Moon

Thursday, April 15, 2004

Breakfast with Don, Dinner with the Grants

North Easter Island Circle, Englewood, Florida

We did three things today: 1. Watched breakfast on TV; 2. Went to the beach; and 3. Had dinner at that the Myakka River Oyster Bar.

We were supposed to wake up in time to attend a coffee this morning at the recreation center, and I did indeed wake up in time to see it on closed-circuit TV (channel 15 here in Polynesian Village). Nancy woke up a little later than I did and missed some of the good stuff. When the image came on the screen, I saw Mr Mike’s back walking away from the camera. Suddenly, women started moving around just off camera—occasionally coming into view—and one ran to the end of the room and picked up an armful of paper towels and ran back to the scene of the coffee spilled—which I could imagine but couldn’t quite see. Right after this, Mrs Mike came on screen and said the first words I could pick out of the ambient sounds the microphone picked up—but those words are the quote of the day, so see below. The rest of the breakfast consisted of announcements (including many requests for charity work: blood donation, collecting material to help others) and jokes, one of particularly questionable cultural sensitivity.

After the Mikes returned (minutes after the end of that narrowcast), Nancy and Mr Mike left for a walk on Manasota Beach. When they returned, Nancy presented me with a handful of the most wonderful pieces of the world, which she called shellglyphs. Each was a single lid of a bivalve into which had been cut (by what, we do not know—a burrowing seaworm?) channels that often represented or nearly represented a recognizable symbol: a C, a Y, an arrow. Sometime, I’ll put these to good use.

Later in the day, after I finished some reading and reporting for work, we left for Venice’s Nikomis Beach. The day was too windy and the sea was a cold and muddy churning, so only Tim did any swimming. The beach had two weird features, which are somehow one. The end of the beach by the Venice jetty had almost no real sand near the water; the “sand” consisted of shells of various sizes, but none so small as to make them grains. And the beach was covered about four inches deep with a thick, prickly seaweed covered with little brown berries. I had never seen anything like it. Nancy and I searched for shellglyphs, but had little luck. Tim and I designed sandglyphs farther up the beach where there was some real sand.

In the evening, we went out to dinner, meeting up with the Grants (that’s Aunt Joan, her son Peter, his wife Beth, and the three girls: Suzanne, Caroline, and Sophie). We had a good time, especially since the girls (12 down to 4 years in age) are so cute. Sophie, once again, expressed her love for Tim by sitting by him all the time, giving him hugs, and yelling out who he was going to marry. Unfortunately, she could only imagine people at the table as future spouses for Tim, so that usually meant his second cousin Suzanne, but sometimes it was his mother, his father—and once, at the very end, and quietly, it was Sophie herself.

Quote of the Day (Mrs Mike on “Breakfast with Don”): You’ve gotta focus on Polly, Don. She just spilled her coffee.

Sign of the Day (on Polynesian Village Channel 15): Fruit Tree Owners / You must pick up your fruit or we will have to charge you
||+ permalink Comments Geofhuth 11:56 PM