Floridian Adventures

In August, I was at the family health center in my neighborhood for some routine blood tests.  As the doctor scanned the small result sheet, his eyes darting back and forth between the ideal chemical levels and mine, he asked what I was doing in Turkey.

I’ve been asked this innumerable times and can give my response (in very broken Turkish) without thinking.  And then the inevitable follow-up question comes, “Where are your parents?”

“They’re in America.”

“America?!  What about your brothers or sisters?”

“I have one older brother.  He lives in California.”

Generally speaking, Turks tend to live in closer proximity to their families than Americans do. Living on different continents seems inconceivable to some people.

“Your whole family is in America?!”

“Yes.”

“You’re alone here?  You have no family?”

“Well...I have friends here.  Great friends.”

He gave me a disapproving, tsk, tsk, tsk.

“Don’t you miss your family?”

“Of course, but there’s email and Skype.”

“Email?  Skype? That’s not the same thing. Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!”

“Yes, yes. I know. I know.”

I left, pleased with my potassium levels and charmed by the doctor’s concern over my absent family.

That night, my dad called to tell me that my mom had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

I suddenly understood what the doctor was talking about.

I decided to work from America for a couple of months*, because I wanted to have a front row seat to watch my mom kick cancer’s ass.  I’ll spare everyone the suspense and tell you now that she didn’t disappoint.  Rather than simply kick its ass, she disemboweled it, had it quartered, and maimed its cold dead remains.

What I'm trying to say is that my amazing mother is now 100% cancer free!

* With the support of my infinitely kind bosses.

While I was overjoyed to spend time with my parents, eat S'mores Poptarts everyday, and watch Netflix with my dog, I was pretty unenthusiastic about returning to America. When I made the decision to move abroad five years ago, I naively proclaimed, “Twenty-two years is long enough to spend in one country.”  It's worth mentioning that while I had a decent amount of adventures in my first couple of decades, about 90% of those years were spent in Michigan.

Since then, I’ve spent the majority of my life overseas (with the exception of two prolonged unemployed stints that I’m going to go ahead and gloss over) judging my homeland from afar.  Living in Florida for two months made me see that I may have been selling my country a little short.

Just creeping on my dad from a parking structure. This is in December!

My parents relocated from Pennsylvania to Delray Beach, Florida in July, when my dad was hired as the president and CEO of Old School Square, the local cultural arts center. This coastal city of 65,000 residents is situated in Palm Beach County about 90 minutes north of Miami. During my time there, I constantly compared everything to the Midwest.

Happy sharks!

Some of the most obvious differences were the subtropic plants and animals.  Michigan is home to a remarkable spectrum of wildlife, but it's all largely varying shades of brown which ends up as roadkill.  Seeing a scarlet cardinal or bluejay in winter is cause to summon the entire household to the window.  

In Florida, the technicolor flora and fauna were truly amazing. We have petting zoos with goats and rabbits in the Midwest. In Florida, they have shark feedings. Apparently sharks like to sleep in late on Sunday and have their brunch around 1PM like the rest of us.

I captured this little guy in the bathroom before relocating him to the front yard.   Lizards, big and small, were everywhere.  Whenever I walked our dog Scout around the neighborhood, scores of six-inch reptiles would scurry across our path.  I occasionally saw lizards as long as three-feet, practically dinosaurs! 

Eat your heart out, National Geographic.

One unforeseen benefit to living in America was that I immediately went down an entire size.  In Turkey, all of the clothes I buy are a snug size large. But when I arrived in Florida, I became a husky medium.  There was no change to my weight, but U.S. sizes are labeled to make all of us corn syrup guzzling Americans feel better about our waistline. I love it. How do you like my broad shoulders now, LC Waikiki?  Kiss my moderately sized American butt, DeFacto!

Radioactive avocados!

I was surprised by the myriad of different food available in south Florida.  The local avocados were nearly quadruple the size of the ones in Michigan.  Mangoes, starfruit, and plantains, which are overpriced oddities in the Midwest, were mixed in with the affordable produce in Delray.  

After arriving, I noticed a few conch shell restaurants downtown.  The only time I’d ever heard of a conch shell was when my 10th grade English class read “Lord of the Flies” and we debated whether or not it was pronounced “Konch” or “Konk”. (It's the latter by the way.)

During Kayla’s visit from Colorado, she was happy to try some with me.

As we were leaving the house, I said, “Okay, Mom.  We’re going to eat some conch!”

“YOU’RE EATING WHAT?”, she asked horrified.

I’m not a seafood enthusiast, but I didn’t want to turn my nose up at this cultural experience.  We ordered the fried conch, which seemed like the most palatable option.  It tasted pretty chewy, but was surprisingly good, despite my face in the above photo.

My favorite person!

Kayla and I spent two perfect days at the beach. As we were basking in the sun on the second day, we heard the wails of a ten-year-old boy screaming for his mother, who was standing about 15 feet away chatting with her friends.

“MOOOOOOM!!”

After squinting, we saw that the child, who was crouched in four-inches of water, had been separated from his swim trunks, which were floating a few yards from his completely naked body.

“PLEASE, MOM!”, he begged.

I’m typing this in all caps, because this kid sent sonic waves in a one mile radius.  Beach goers pretended not to notice the shrieking stark naked youth.  The fact that the tide was going out was not to his advantage.  He sat there, immobile, knees pulled to his chest, as his bare bottom was revealed with each receding wave.

“We are seeing the worst moment in this kid’s life”, Kayla said,  “past or future.”

She was right.  Twenty years from now, he’d be reclined on a leather couch saying, “Well, doctor, I suppose my downward spiral really began that day at the beach”.

“MOM, PLEASE!”, he howled.

His mom continued conversing with the other heartless adults.  When the screams reached 150 decibels, they gestured to his red trunks and insisted that he could get them himself.

He refused to even turn his head.

“MOOOOOOOOM!!”

In the adults’ defense, the boy could have crawled on his elbows to his salvation relatively unnoticed. In the kid’s defense, when you’re 10, completely nude on a beach surrounded by dozens of onlookers, logic and survival skills may evade you.

The skimpiest bikini I will ever own

“I HATE LIFE!!”, he bellowed.

After a full 15 minutes of this nightmare, a guy (with a killer bod) took mercy on the child and retrieved the drifting swimsuit Baywatch style.  Or perhaps, like the rest of us, he couldn’t take any more of the agony.  A few people actually clapped.

Despite his restored modesty, the kid was irate.  With his swimsuit pulled up past his belly button, the newly robed boy marched over to the negligent woman who bore him and screamed, “I LOOKED LIKE AN IDIOT!”  

He had looked like a total idiot.  Every onlooker would undoubtedly go home and recount the appalling scene to their friends and family.  But at the same time, every person there had at some point publicly looked like a total idiot.  It’s a rite of passage.

Downtown Delray Beach

Delray Beach is the residence of the one and only Serena Williams.  Well, she has a vacation home there which she visits on occasion.  I fantasized a lot about randomly meeting Serena on the street. I would play it totally cool and say something like, “Can you believe this weather?”  She’d tell me how awesome I am and thank me for not making a big deal about her being a celebrity.  

Then she’d insist on having me over for dinner to meet Drake and they’d tell me Hollywood gossip over champagne.  The three of us would laugh, get matching tattoos, and take selfies cementing our friendship forever.  From that day on, they’d give me shoutouts in their respective acceptance speeches.

It could happen.

Tri-Rail sign explaining how to purchase tickets.

In Michigan, the only signs accommodating non-native English speakers are “Piso Mojado” and “Salida”.  Because, you know, Spanish speakers don’t know to avoid a wet floor or how to exit a building.

In South Florida, many signs and announcements are in three languages!  Delray Beach has 12.37% of the population speaking Haitian Creole and 7.02% speaking Spanish as their first language.

At the grocery store, I always heard people speaking a combination of the three.  And guess what, xenophobic people against multiculturalism?!  IT’S FINE.  It’s wonderful, in fact, that the public is making an effort to build an inclusive high-functioning society.

When an announcement is made over the Tri-Rail intercom in Creole, it’s not like native English speakers on the train collapse on the floor, writhing in pain, screaming, “NOOOOO!  MY FREEDOM!”

My family’s sole purpose is to serve our pets.  We do anything they tell us to.  My cat cries until we sit in the driveway.  We don’t have to pet her, we just need to have our lower halves on the concrete while she rolls around.  Scout, of course, gets jealous and has to join us.

My Raison d’Etre

Last year, my friends Nicole and Kate each sent me a Christmas card from America.  Both cards included a photo with their respective husbands and dogs.  I happily showed the pictures to my Turkish coworkers who were all perplexed by the canine presence in the family portraits.

“Americans are really, really crazy about their dogs”, I said almost apologetically.

And it’s true.  I see more Facebook photos of people's dogs than newborn babies.  From across the Atlantic, this started to seem strange to me.  All that changed when I was reunited with Scout.

Most of my time in Florida was consumed with covering her up so she wouldn’t get too cold in the 80 degree (28 C) weather.  I constantly berated my parents for not giving her enough attention. 

“What’s going to happen when I leave”, I moaned, “Who will give my angel the care she needs?”

My cat, Rummy, was less receptive to my arrival.  Despite me showering her with love and kitty treats for fifteen years, she ignored me for the first month I was in Florida.  I think she was punishing me for being gone for so long.  Eventually, she came around and allowed me to dote on her.

One evening, I went into the darkened guest room to retrieve a book. When I turned on the light, I saw that Rummy was sleeping on the bed, or at least she had been before I so rudely awoke her. The look she gave me was so fowl that I actually held up my hands and said, "Oh. I'm so sorry. I'll come back later. Sorry." Then I turned off the light and tiptoed out of the room with nothing to read that night.

All the way from NYC! - W4L

Chelsey and I spent a windy day at the beach.  We walked up and down the coast poking at a vibrant array of dead jellyfish with a stick Chelsey had found.  Even though their nerve nets had ceased to function, we were still wary of these fearsome beasts. I expected some sort of postmortem zap, if I got too close.

A blueberry condom on a bed of eggplant spaghetti, AKA a Portuguese man o' war

Chelsey spotted a message in a bottle.  We were both absurdly excited and handed the empty Jack Daniels bottle back and forth trying in vain to open it, in the process, smearing our hands with an unidentified grease.  Finally, the cap came off and we fished out the damp piece of paper.

Kitesurfers were loving the weather.

I’m not sure what we hoped for- an SOS note from a castaway, a letter written by a child 50 years ago, or a haiku about the Atlantic.  We would have been happy with anything that resulted in a viral online article featuring a flattering photo of us.  Instead, we found a crumpled up piece of paper with nonsensical scribbles, undoubtedly penned by delinquents the night before.

We swore quite a bit about these miscreants, as we tried to wash our hands in the saltwater.

The night we got the good news AKA the best day of my life!

My mom is a very modest and private person, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk a little bit about her battle with cancer.  Through all this awfulness, my mom has been unfailingly positive and is constantly looking for silver linings to her situation.  

If I had to find a silver lining to this experience, it would be that I realized how exceptionally strong my mom is.  It’s not a case of her rising to the occasion in the face of misfortune, but rather striving to be her usual self while coping with chemotherapy, nasty side-effects, and a terrified family.   She’s been incredibly courageous all my life, but I was too dense to notice it before.