I was in email conversation with my friend Angelique recently about a visit she made to Florida, and found myself quite unexpectedly overcome by memories of the Tampa that was, strong sense-memories that came so fast I could scarcely keep up with typing them.
I asked Angelique if she would mind my sharing them on the blog, since they started as a private email. And she said no, she did not mind. She said, Everyone’s landscape is an adventure.
Here are some of my adventures:
I remember wandering barefoot in summers (the soles of my feet were like elephant hide back then!) and always getting sandspurs. I remember relentless white heat and the rattling of palm fronds in hurricanes. I remember the two weeks in December when the temperature went below 50 F and all the rich women dragged out their fur coats.
I had a friend who lived out in the wilds beyond Tampa, in a house right on the Alafia River (pronounced AL-a-phi). I spent many nights and weekends with her. She had a withered arm due to polio, but she was stronger and tougher than me and did everything that I was too scared to do. She taught me how to jump on a trampoline and how to climb a tree, and we often took her canoe out onto the river by ourselves for hours (those were the days when parents didn’t think to put GPS or leashes on kids). One day on the river, we were chased for probably a half mile by an enormous alligator. Scary. We paddled very very fast (three-handed)… but I’m not sure if we even told her parents about it.
The ants! We called the little red ones fire ants, and the black ones were sugar ants, and the big ones were carpenter ants (I don’t know if they really were or not, but that’s what we called them). And the ginormous grasshoppers, oh lord, they terrified me because they jumped. I would cross the street to avoid them.
Tampa was lovely in parts when I was growing up, and rowdy and unruly in others. Sleepy but quietly vibrant, if that makes sense. I lived at a nexus in terms of class/culture — I was educated beyond my station and hung out with a lot of wealthy kids as well as kids like my friend Diane (on the Alafia) or my friend Holly who was the Baddest Girl in 4th grade and the first of our school to have divorced parents. Her father was No Good, as everyone knew, but he was always really nice to me.
One of my favorite places as a kid was Ayres Diner, where you could get Southern breakfast 24/7. It was a favorite haunt of truckers and prostitutes and night-shift workers from the hospital.
I wrote my first poem at the age of about 7 (? maybe a bit later) in the back seat of the car driving across the Gandy Bridge at night — the long causeway and bridge that runs between Tampa and St. Petersburg. My idea of the ocean was warm and salty and full of jellyfish. I have danced like a lunatic on those white sand beaches at night while heat lightning poured across the sky like drip icing.
I have seen more roadkill than you can shake a stick at.
There used to be buzzards nesting on top of the Barnett Bank building when I was a kid. It was the tallest building downtown (9 stories? 12, maybe?). The buzzards would fly around in the noon heat while office workers sat in the shade with their lunches.
I have been to old-South juke joints and biker bars and tiny Mexican restaurants in cinderblock buildings. I’ve been to stately Southern homes. I still adore Spanish moss — to me, Spanish moss, warm dark nights, and palm trees are Florida, in a particular way. And that great big sky.
—–
Tampa is not like this anymore. None of our childhood places are, except in the space between imagination and memory and whatever strong feelings we have taken away from our beginnings. Love. Rage. Fear. Curiosity. Determination. Hope. If we could go back and make things different in our lives, these lost places are where most of us would begin, I suspect.
When I told these memories to Angelique, she responded with this:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(from “Little Gidding” by T.S. Eliot)
To which I say, yes. I hope I will not cease from exploration for a great long while yet, because the lost places aren’t really so lost, are they? They are within us, and we are finding them all the time.
Memories are maps. There’s a whole comment section here just waiting to be filled: so please, won’t you tell me your landscapes?
Enjoy your day.
Ah, memories. I have been walking through mine lately, of growing up in Costa Rica drinking raw milk; fishing in the surf; waking up to warring parakeet tribes’ cries at 5 a.m.; and endless days of walking barefoot on the beach, reading hundreds of books each summer (I kept a book diary back then), surfing, biking, snorkeling, eating stuff we collected ourselves; of not having television or radio signals come in because of the high electric interference that exists in that area… so much it almost seems like a different reality altogether. But then, I ask my sister, and she confirms I did not dream any of it. She was fortunate enough to live there a few more years after I left for college.
It does not exist anymore, with all the cable/satellite hookups, new hotels, paved roads, new inhabitants, the older ones I used to know either dead or on their way. I dream of this place, where I was happy for a little while.
Thanks for reminding me that I have been and am very fortunate.
Karina, thank you, these are lovely memories. You make me see and hear and taste it.
So many different realities in our lives, like beads on a necklace.