Day 34: Sarasota, Florida

Sand cranes have right-of-way

Saturday 27 October –  A.K. and J. have had a winter place in Sarasota for a decade or so, and there’s a lot she wanted to show me in the town, as well as errands she needed to do.  So after power smoothies for breakfast, we watched the sand cranes stalk past on the sidewalk and then drove away toward the ocean.  Our first stop was the Circus Park playground.  A.K. has grandchildren and used to work for a toy company, which was a perfect fit for her very playful spirit.  Of course she loves the Circus Park!

The Ringling family has long and deep ties to Sarasota, first making it their home, and then their circus’s winter home, and then funding at least one art museum, a college and college programs and playgrounds.  Circus Park looks like a great place to play.  Well into my twenties, I used to find time most weekends to play on some local swings, and then slide down an escalator banister (the escalator served an office building, and so was stilled on weekends).  I am not nostalgic for my twenties; I know I was still testing my life, stepping gingerly into places that were wrong for me.  But I wonder whether I ought to seek out playgrounds more often as I saunter into my fifties.

This playground is part of the city's Payne Park.

On this day we didn’t have time to stop, as the green-tea woman sometimes runs out, and A.K. needs her macha powder.  I’m not sure I would have wanted to, anyway.  Circus Park is really brightly colored with the kinds of deep primary colors of children’s crayons – and in the last few weeks, I’ve been much more focused desert, field and cave colors, which tend toward the muted.

The Sarasota Farmers’ Market is unmuted.  On this Saturday morning, months before the start of tourist/snowbird season, the sidewalks started to get crowded about a block before we reached the downtown area cordoned off for a wide variety of stalls.  There were charities, hand-crafted miscellania, baked goods, produce and coconuts, drilled to order and furnished with a straw.  There was also Izumi Haraki, who sells green tea produced by her family back in Japan.  I wish I could have taken her photo without seeming rude.  She was wearing a headband with cat ears pointing up, a frilly, lacy, shiny mini-dress with a crinoline holding the skirt out stiffly, and shiny, high-heeled, platform Mary Janes.  She was also offering a bulk discount on macha powder, so A.K., whose generosity is close to boundless, bought enough for herself, a daughter or two, a friend or three, and me.  If it does everything it claims it can do, I shall be Superwoman by June.

After exploring a couple of boutiques on the outskirts of the market area, we met J. for lunch at a bakery and bistro called C’Est La Vie.  The name was not memorable, but the meal was very good and the brand-new waitress friendly and competent.  The small dining area was crowded, but not as badly as it will be in tourist season!  We didn’t linger – people were waiting for seats, and we intended visiting the beach, and had pedicure appointments for 5:00 or thereabouts, and a dinner reservation at Veg.  Before all that, A.K. providentially remembered that she wanted to pick up a couple of things at a clothing shop she especially likes, so we got back in the car and drove there, passing the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens on the way.  Aha!  It had been a while since A.K. had been them, and she didn’t feel she’d explored them fully (some fundraiser the last time, I think).  So there we go.

Banyans and me.  I don't believe I wore any pink
while in Fairbanks.

Lizards, plus best plant name of all time.

The gardens are renowned for both orchids and epiphytes.  I loved exploring them, and was struck by how unsettling the idea of life in a tropical zone felt to me.  I do not want to live surrounded by banyans and floating parasite plants.  Interesting.  The gardens are beautiful, the Spanish-moss draped oaks are beautiful, the magenta and amethyst and popping pink flowers are beautiful, and I want to see them and marvel at them and then I want to go home.  I've made a portfolio, though, of the gorgeous orchids (mostly), which you can view here if you'd like.

I have lived in Boston, suburban Boston, the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Dublin and suburban Washington, DC.  I loved Boston and quite liked all the others, with various reservations.  On this trip, I’ve felt a strongest pull to Detroit, the South Dakota plains, Sedona, suburban Albuquerque and maybe Kansas City.  I do not see any great commonality amongst those places.  To clarify, I have loved visiting every place I’ve been, even Las Vegas.  Feeling excited, welcome, happy to be here, though, is very different from feeling home.

Green means "Low Hazard."  Red with
stripe means "Water Closed to Public."
Purple is in-between, I guess.

Although our next stop was the beach.  Stop me if I’ve mentioned this before, but I love the water.  Even when it comes with a purple flag that means “Dangerous Marine Life.”  I mean, it’s good of them to mention it, right?  Nearer the shoreline, there were signs reading, “CAUTION.  Watch For Sting Rays.  Shuffle your feet.”

One thing about northern places:  they tend to go easy on the venomous critters.  Yes, we had jellyfish growing up outside Boston, but they weren’t frequent.  Yes, Jaws was set on Martha’s Vineyard (or a fictionalized Martha’s Vineyard?), but it was fiction.  I never heard of anyone sighting a shark at Humarock or Rexham or Green Harbor beaches, bar the occasional sand shark, who are more scared of you etc. which would mean I’d render them pretty much catatonic, since I would have been at least hysterical if I’d ever seen one myself.  Anyway, I had deep concerns about these Gulf sting rays, and inquired of A.K. what she knew about them.  Not much, she told me, and recommended asking the life guard.

The life guard was pretty sanguine about the stingray situation.  It was late in the year for them, and the sea was choppier than they like, so they shouldn’t be any around, but there’d been three stings yesterday, so they had the signs up today.  He seemed to think the foot shuffling really would protect me; he did it, he reported.  And he wasn’t afraid to go in the water.  So I gave him a mostly-sincere thank you and headed on my skeptical way.

The water was glorious.  Saturated teal-blue color, with happy white foam topping gentle waves, warm – if you didn’t grow up swimming in a northern ocean, you have no idea what warm sea water means – and gently salty.  I swam for real, mostly parallel to the beach, for twenty or thirty minutes, and was blissfully happy with just an edge of terror that a sting ray would jump up from the bottom and chew my leg off.  I believe this is what Edmund Burke meant when he distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime.

White sand, blue water, bluer sky.  Sarasota in October.

Rinsed off under the public shower, toweled a bit, and decidedly untidy as to hair, I allowed A.K. to steer me to her favorite day spa for a long-overdue toenail sheering.  Still feeling the rapture of the deep, I chose blue polish that came close to the color of the gulf waters under a cloudless sky.  A.K. encouraged me to share the story of Mr. John the Pickle Man with the pedicurists, and a client across the room asked that I speak up a bit.  My nail tech, surprisingly, was a native Floridian.  I should have made notes on the day; writing this five months (five months?!  Yikes!  My appalling lack of discipline alarms me.) later, I can remember that she was going to school part-time, or maybe full-time, and I think to learn other spa-type skills, but I do not remember.  She was very nice and did a fine job with my feet.

By the time she finished, I was mostly dry and able to dress, and even smack my hair around with the brush a bit, so as not to alarm the other diners at Veg.  We met J. there, and I thanked him for my pedicure.  “Oh, did I give that to you?” he asked, with a comical glance at A.K.  “Yes, you did,” she said.  “You were happy to.”  I really like seeing how well these two get on with each other.  They’ve been through a lot together – kids (from previous marriages) growing up; high-powered, stressful careers; at least one scary health emergency; retirements; one tiny granddaughter in the painful process of overcoming leukemia – and they’ve taken good care of each other and their relationship.  They seem to be very much in synch on their goals for retirement, including the part where you do some things just because that’s what the other person really wants.

Beautiful orchids show up in
surprising places, too.

One thing they do is refrain from bossing each other around about diet and exercise.  However, they have both been open to exploring ways to nourish themselves better – hence A.K.’s power-kale smoothies – and part of that was discovering Veg.  This is a vegan, vegetarian and pescatarian restaurant run by a South African chef.  Large parts of South Africa do not naturally lend themselves to vegetarianism, but he’s obviously open to new things, too.  And the spice blends that come out of that region are excellent.  Which spice blends aren’t?  But the South African ones are new to me, and excite my attention in ways that I don’t always allow, say, oregano and rosemary to do.  Also, South Africa produces some excellent wines.  So I had pinotage, and shared the opening latkes, and took a chance on South African-style seitan, and everything was excellent.

There’s some kind of lesson in this place, which is really unprepossessing from the outside.  It’s tiny; it’s in a strip mall; its website is ugly.  But very good things come from it.

For such a busy day, it was really relaxing, and fun.  Part of that was not driving, part not having a goal 300 miles away, but the most important part was A.K. and J.’s company.  There are a lot of ways in which we are not alike, but that never seems to matter at all.  I just like them – their characters, or something – and they either like me or are unusually willing to fake it.