After A Good Night's Sleep

Finally, I am back where I belong, sitting in the early morning darkness on our lumpy beige Ikea couch with Olga next to me. I have my favorite brand of Tesco coffee in my Starbucks Tampa mug, and I'm hearing the sounds of water in the bathroom as Dave showers. Home sweet home!

I worked through the day yesterday without too much trouble. I was surprisingly alert and awake, or so I thought, until I got home and unpacked and then suddenly couldn't keep my eyes open. Dave and I had planned to watch "Homeland" because I still haven't seen the last episode of the most recent season, but that just wasn't going to happen.

We had our own belated Christmas celebration, in which he gave me a portable hard drive to store all my photos. So now I don't have to keep burning CDs and stashing them in my huge, heavy CD storage book. How great is that?! I, on the other hand, have been so discombobulated that I haven't had a chance to get him anything yet, which is pretty pathetic considering it's January 7.

My grandmother's Roseville art pottery vases made it to England with no problem. Did I mention I was bringing those back from Tampa? You may remember them from my New York apartment, but they were among several items (like the coffee table) that I left behind in the states when we moved to London. So on this trip I wrapped them in newspaper and carried them gingerly in a tote bag and stashed them under the seat in front of me on the plane, and now here they are.

In an effort to relieve my mother of my few possessions remaining in her house, I also brought back my third-place trophy from the 1979 Pasco County Spelling Bee. It's ridiculous that I'm even saving this thing, with its peeling gilded winged victory figure and its yellowed plastic faux marble base. In Florida I put it in the trash can twice, and then pulled it out again.

Sometimes I think my entire life is spent ferrying objects from one place to another. I suppose that's what life is, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum way.

(Photo: The Westway, arcing over the towpath along the Grand Union Canal, with Trellick Tower in the distance, taken last month.)

Home, Bleary-Eyed

I am back in London, but thought I'd leave you with one more Florida photo. I drove past this restaurant in Tampa three times before I was able to finally get a shot without hordes of cars out front. Apparently Martha's is a rockin' place!

My flight home went well -- it seemed relatively fast, consumed as it was by my current book, which I have neglected for the past week and a half, and two movies, "Enough Said" and "The Fifth Estate." The former was good, the latter only OK -- it's about WikiLeaks, and since all the action mainly involves typing, the director had to go to great lengths with fast edits and whatnot to try to lend it some excitement.

Now I'm sitting at my desk and I really need to get to work. More tomorrow!

The Friendly Skies

Today my Florida sojourn comes to an end. I leave Tampa this evening, arrive in London tomorrow morning, and go straight to work. I should be a ray of sunshine there!

Yesterday I drove my dad's truck down to Anna Maria Island to see my friends John and Sue. Within moments I was sucked into the rhythm of beach life -- John made me the biggest mimosa I've ever seen, and we all walked to a nearby restaurant for French toast. Sue and I then took another quick walk along the city pier before I hopped in the truck and drove to see Dave's parents in nearby Bradenton.

There I ate again -- grouper sandwich this time, at a restaurant on the beach -- and picked up my coffee table, which I had stored at their house in Michigan when Dave and I moved to England a few years ago. They brought it down to their winter home so I could retrieve it. This coffee table is turning into a ridiculous curse. Why I didn't just ship it with the rest of our belongings I'll never know. I bought it for $5 at a Salvation Army when I was in college, and I refinished it, hence developing an emotional attachment that I am loath to break. I wanted to ship the tabletop -- basically a couple of pieces of wood -- back to England, but just guess how much The UPS Store told me yesterday that it would cost. Are you guessing?

EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS.

I am not kidding.

So, needless to say, that won't be happening. I'm going to put it in my dad's garage and take care of it, somehow, on my next trip. I think I can ultimately just check it on the plane, but I need time to package it correctly and I don't have that time now.

Anyway, Dave's parents were doing great and I enjoyed spending a couple of hours with them. Then I hit the road and drove back to Tampa, where I had sushi with my stepsister and her new husband, with drinks at a local dive bar afterward -- a sort of rednecky, bikery "Cheers."

In between, during my driving around, I got to stop here and there to take some photos, which kept me sane. The quiet driving time, the alone time, was a pleasure.

(Photo: Just north of Bradenton, Fla., yesterday.)

Bluebirds

After a rainstorm a couple of days ago, I wandered back down to the old citrus grove near my dad's house. There were several bluebirds flitting about. Bluebirds always seem to be a cheery symbol, especially in old songs like "Over the Rainbow" and "Bluebird of Happiness." I'm not sure my state of mind here can be described as exactly happy, but still, it was nice to see them.

Yesterday I went with my stepmother and nephew to see "Saving Mr. Banks," about Walt Disney's efforts to acquire the rights to "Mary Poppins" from her creator, P.L. Travers. I really enjoyed it. I've read criticism of Tom Hanks for his portrayal of Disney, but I thought he did a pretty good job, and I enjoyed the photos and clips at the very end, where the real Travers is seen and heard conversing with the "Mary Poppins" movie writers. Overall I'd recommend it.

We went through more of Dad's belongings yesterday. He's a retired math professor, and he has a box of old notes and draft journal articles that he and my stepmother seem intent on recycling. I asked him whether it has any scholarly value -- should we give it to the university where he worked, for example? But he says no. The articles themselves have been published, so I suppose they're publicly available -- but still, I hate to just toss all that stuff, even though it's incomprehensible to me. I'm leaving it up to them.

Like his boxes of ancient greeting cards and paper route receipts, the math notes are interesting in that Dad chose to save them all these years. You learn a lot about a person's attachments, what they love, when you see what they pack up and store away.

Memory Lane

Dad and I spent yesterday looking through boxes of old photos and memorabilia that he's saved through the years. He kept what seems like every greeting card we ever gave him, along with his old Boy Scout uniforms and his baseball mitt. He has a heavy brass plaque from a sundial that once stood at Camp Emerson in Idyllwild, Ca., dedicated to the memory of his father, a local scoutmaster. The sundial was done in by vandals long ago, but someone sent him the plaque.

He also has several carousels of slides from a trip he took to Europe with three high school friends in the late 1950s -- they steamed across the ocean on a freighter, and wandered through England, France, Italy, Switzerland and beyond. We hauled out the slide projector and the viewing screen and went through some of the slides last night. It's so strange to see my father, who loathes travel and who can barely bring himself to cross the bay to St. Petersburg to visit the dermatologist, standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in super-cool black sunglasses and a beatnik beard.

He has a hilarious cigar box filled with paperwork of dubious value, like receipts from his childhood paper route, listing all his customers and how much they prepaid for their subscriptions.

I hope it's comforting for him to look through all this stuff. He says he wants me to know what's there. It's a bit unsettling for me given the circumstances, but not unpleasant, and it is great to hear the stories. I only hope I can remember them.

(Photo: A roadside cafe in Lutz, Fla.)

Turkeypalooza

Here's that crazy flock of wild turkeys I saw Tuesday near my mom's house. There were sixteen of them in all, so many that Mom and I wondered if we were getting excited about someone's domesticated birds. We went home and looked them up in the bird book just to be sure we weren't being complete idiots -- and surely domesticated birds wouldn't be wandering in a field on an unused section of cattle ranch.

I am back at my dad's house. I haven't mentioned his health much here, mainly to respect his privacy. Suffice to say it isn't good -- the dreaded c-word, in the lungs -- and though the crisis that brought me here turned out not to be a crisis, he has other continuing problems that still bear investigation and treatment. (This is not a new situation. He's a nearly 77-year-old lifelong smoker, and got his first diagnosis of illness almost seven years ago. Doctors have been removing or irradiating various pieces of him ever since.)

We're mostly just sitting around the house spending time together, surrounded by an ever-changing constellation of relatives. My step-grandmother came over for dinner last night, and my stepbrother and his wife leave today to drive back to Louisiana. After today I'll have a few days with Dad and my stepmother by myself. I think it's most rewarding for all of us when we're doing nothing special together -- just watching TV or chatting in the kitchen. Living our lives, you know?

Happy New Year!

Here we are, in 2014. Did you ever think it would be 2014? When we passed the millennium mark  in 2000 it seemed positively sci-fi, and now we're already 14 years past that. Scary!

After much thought, Mom decided that one of the things she wanted to do yesterday was visit Ikea. She'd never been, and kept hearing about it, and wanted to see what it all looked like. So we went to the palace of inexpensive Scandinavian furniture and prowled the aisle past all those goods with unpronounceable names, and then had lunch in the cafe -- Swedish meatballs with potatoes and lingonberry sauce. I must say they were terrific. When Ikea first opened here it was considered stylish for downtown workers to journey there for Swedish meatballs at lunch, or so I was told at the time by one of my downtown-working friends. I'm not sure that's still the case, but we felt bizarrely swish nonetheless.

Yesterday was full of interesting wildlife encounters. Mom and I saw fox squirrels on our neighbor's property, where the house is being torn down -- we wondered if they were traumatized by the demolition, but they seemed unaffected. (It's a large spread and the new homeowners are saving nearly all of the trees, so I think the squirrels should be fine.) Then I set out on an afternoon walk -- to work off the meatballs, which were sitting in my stomach like those piles of metal cannonballs at St. Augustine -- and I saw sixteen wild turkeys in a field! I have never seen so many turkeys in one place. I ran home for the camera and got some shots, which I promise to post tomorrow. We also saw a distant pair of bald eagles sitting in a pine snag, but they were too far away to get much of a photo.

We toasted the New Year yesterday evening, sitting on the dock with a bottle of Freixenet from Publix, laughing about neighbors past and present and, apropos of nothing, the South Carolina woman who stabbed her husband with a ceramic squirrel. (I suppose it's not really funny, especially for the husband. Or the squirrel. But you try not to laugh.)

I'm heading back to my dad's today.

(Photo: An osprey flying over the lake.)