Florida

I have this love/hate relationship with the southern part of Florida, where we're now spending a couple of weeks. Our agenda for this trip is to enjoy some spring training baseball games, visit a few gardens and art museums, soak up the warmer rays, visit my brother and wife, and generally enjoy a change of pace in our lives, all pretty good ideas. But there's something about this place that gives me the willies.

The best news about Florida, it seems to me, is the climate. If you can manage to be somewhere else during July, August, and September when the heat and humidity are absolutely paralyzing, it's a great place to live. Those who live here year round, generally recognized by their leathery skin, are quick to point out this feature, but when asked what else they like about Florida there's more discussion of the weather. Of course there's always spring training for four or five weeks, and some will point out the absence of a state income tax, but that's a charade; states will get what they need one way or another, no matter how it's disguised. No, it's the climate that's the big draw down here.

My parents, for reasons none of us have ever really understood, pulled up some well-planted stakes and left Chapel Hill (a.k.a. the southern part of Heaven) for the unknowns of St. Petersburg. We're talking here about intelligent, well traveled, healthy adults, who enjoyed the Florida climate for nine months of the year and then either became air conditioned hermits or visited family "up north" during the heat waves. But I'm showing my bias.

What we all love about Florida is the climate. Every day it's warm and pleasant and, well, boring. Which brings me to the things I hate about Florida, and I guess you can understand that at the top of the list is that relentlessly boring climate. Tediously boring, except for hurricane season, which is another negative to be explored some other time. But I have some other "issues" with Florida.

It's not only the climate that's boring; check out the geography. It's flat. Endlessly flat. Don't be misled by places named Bay Hill or Mt. Dora or Glenvar Heights. Florida is flat.

Then there's the architecture, which seems to objectify boredom. Everywhere you look it's always the same one storey, stuccoed cottages with tile (or faux tile) roofs and screened porches or endless rows of single and double wides in "Ranch Estates" or somesuch, with the view broken only occasionally by a garish pink palace complete with minarets and palm trees.

Of course it's crowded and the traffic is a mess, but that's pretty much true everywhere along the coast, so we won't hold that against them. Except that here it's aggravated by the driver in the '93 Chevy Caprice going about half the speed limit with the left turn blinker saying, "Pass me if you dare!"

But boring, crowded, rootless southern Florida has the weather! That's why we keep going back.