Squinters for Obama!

I should have gotten a press pass ... 

Attending Barack Obama's rally today in Sarasota hadn't occurred to me, until I was held up at University Parkway and U.S. 41 as Obama's motorcade passed. 

For the hell of it, I turned toward my buddy Roger's favorite Ed Smith Stadium, and walked one mile to the field, where I ferreted my way through the town's underground democrats. 

Before I leave for my 4 p.m. massage, I'll leave you with four observations from the ground:

1. One Obama supporter was in such a hurry to park his Ford pick-up truck that he drove it off the road and into a grassy ditch, where he instantly buried the back tires in the mud. I'm not sure how the christ he's going to tow the thing out. He ran the hitch underground.

2. Two teenage boys discussing the nature of their mothers' apathy: "My ma never votes," said one boy. "Where does she live?" Asked the other. "Pennsylvania," the boy replied. "Shit, dude. That's a swing state," said his friend.

3. Sarasota City Commissioner Fredd "Glossie" Atkins doing a kind of Christmas storefront Santa Claus jig in the front row bleachers. When the speech was over, Glossie held up five fingers and repeatedly yelled, "Five days."

4. An exasperated man in a Montgomery Air Conditioning & Heating uniform elbowing his way through the crowd, frantic because he couldn't find, "the wife."

Meet Ricci.

My friend Ricci is a bit of an inspiration. She's reading this so I'll refrain from using clichés. When we first started at the same newspaper in Sarasota we were instructed by the editor to avoid clichés like the plague.

Like the plague.

The first time I set out to write a novel I started a chapter about Ricci that went something like ...

"She was frazzled. Maybe she was nervous, or the opposite of nervous. Now that I know her, I know she's what my father would call a sparkplug, but like the blue scooter she bought one month earlier from a man in North Sarasota, sometimes Ricci's would misfire. When that happened if we were there for her, she'd be OK. On her first day of work she took out a watermelon, sliced it in half, pulled out a shaker of salt and doused it right there at her desk."

We became fast friends. We signed up for salsa-dancing classes. We swam opposite laps in the same lane at the YMCA pool. At Halloween we carved disturbing faces into pumpkins. We took photographs of each other jumping in the air for no reason other than the pictures looked cool. We drank two-for-one vodka cranberry tumblers at the same bar downtown. When I started riding a bike, Ricci got one too. We shared clothes. We fought. The worst fight we ever had was on top of the Ringling Bridge and I swear on my father's temper, I never fought with anyone like I did with Ricci that day. We yelled at a decibel so fierce passing coots on Bird Key shot us the stink eye. Then we moved on.

We canoed. We kayaked. I dragged her to cheesy films. She dragged me to dark arty films. We sat for hours on Shell Beach reading magazines and gossiping. We dissected each other like 8th graders skinning bullfrogs. I was 23 and she was 22.

When Ricci announced last year she was moving to Africa I never doubted it. Senegal, she said. Dakar, to be exact. She had a plan, but it was a Ricci plan. She'd photograph Senegalese women and freelance for any outfit that would pay while living with an African family in the city. She'd live there for three months, return to the states, move to Chicago and start working for American newspapers again. Two months in she called me using another American journalist's international cell phone.

"Any word on when you're come back?"
"I don't know," she said. "I'm going to extend my stay."

It's been six months. She's back in town for just a week to shoot a wedding in Jacksonville. My grill master friend Roger threw her a BBQ Wednesday night and because Ricci's a tough one to tie down for more than 15 minutes I managed a partial interview. 

--

Distracted by a pan of fudge brownies being passed around, she snatches one and says, "They don't have brownies in Africa. Do you know how special this is? Wait. Are you writing this? Don't write this. They probably have brownies in Africa."

What American thing do you miss the most?
R: Diet Mountain Dew.
(Roger butts in and says, "That's a direct affront to me because I forgot to buy you Diet Mountain Dew for the party.")

R: Yes. 

What was your biggest worry on the flight back to Sarasota?
R: That I'd be that girl. The 'This one time in Africa' girl.'

Yeah, because you know in a room full of journalists we've got no tolerance for self promoters.
R: It's a lot easier though. I don't talk as much as I used to. In Africa I don't speak the language fluently so I guess it's easier for me to stay quiet now.

Has anything changed here in the six months you've been gone? (Roger butts in again and says, "Yeah, I got better looking.")
R: Yes. Roger got better looking.

How do you describe Sarasota to your peeps in Senegal?
R: There's a lot of money and a lot of white people in Sarasota who don't dance well. I have a proven theory - the more oppressed you are the better you dance. Dancing and money are inversely related.

What's it like buying the necessities in Senegal. Like tampons?
R: There are too many choices here. I don't deal well with decisions, you know that. In Senegal it's like you have one brand. One choice. I prefer that.

What's the most annoying response you've gotten from people in the states?
R: The jokes about Islam.

Do you rock that yellow dress in Senegal?
R: The lady I buy vegetables from gives me a hard time if I show my knees.

Is it weird as a journalist to come home to journalists?
R: Being around journalists ... you guys listen better. Not to sound like a jerk or anything, but journalists are better listeners. I think there is a greater appreciation here for stories. Nobody's eyes are glazing over when they see me.

Do the Senegalese have dogs?
R: No. There are no cute dogs over there. Mangy, mangy dogs. Nobody really has pets. Some foreigners have dogs. My friend has a dog but he keeps him on the roof. They're not as nice to their dogs as we are over here. They kind of have a lot more shit to deal with, you know? Dogs aren't extensions of their lives.

That's a direct affront to me. And the pug.

R: Sorry it's true.

What's the nastiest thing you ate?
R: The goat intestine. That process ... it was ... well, to see the goat alive, being killed, dead and then eaten. I don't know. It was weird because the night before the goat was killed I had a dream that I died.

Did you use a fork to stab the goat innards?
R: Everyone eats with their hands. But it's like whenever they pray their hands must be clean and since they're Muslims they pray fives times a day. The cab drivers keep sanitizer in their cars. And with eating you usually end up eating with everyone out of one giant bowl. At first it bothered me but it doesn't anymore. Not after I realized how clean everyones hands are.

What's the crapper like?

I peed in a hole in the ground when I was staying with Mama's family. There was no shower curtain. The bathroom was all tiled. It's like a self-cleaning vehicle. The water and soap from the shower washes everything in the room. I hate shower curtains now.

You're mostly the same Ricci. But you've changed somehow ...
R: I'm more calm now. I've got more faith not just in God, but in myself.

Epilogue: Ricci takes spectacular pictures. Some photographers get lucky. Not Ricci. She's a wrangler. She stands on chairs. She climbs trees. She lies on streets. She zooms in on faces. She zooms out on action. Expressions are the hardest thing to capture and Ricci does it consistently. When pictures aren't contrived, imagine for a second what the person taking them looks like. When Ricci takes pictures she looks like a chipmunk hunting for nuts, then storing them in her cheeks before winter.

The photo above is by Ricci. For more like it visit Ricci Media.

A-Maizing what we'll do for coffee and heat

So here we are. Joe asleep. Me awake. We're on dog-sitting duty at my friend Roger's house in Sarasota this weekend. And as anyone whose ever babysat, dog sat or house sat knows, staying at someone else's house can be troubling because you are beholden to their gadgetry (ie: TV with rabbit ears, microwave you have to pummel to make work, toilet handle that sticks so jiggle it after you flush, etc ...)

This is normally not a problem with Roger because as my sister PK would say, "Roger's a minimalist," which is why I'm stupefied by the fact that he's ditched the old coffee pot I gave him and replaced it with a French press. (What the Christ is a French press?)

(Side note: The coffeemaker by the way was Joe's. It had it's quirks too. Like gurgling Folgers over the side like a coffee fondue. But I mean, snap the lid down tight on the top of that thing and you'd be fine. I often balanced a phone book on it to seal the lid.)

Well whatever. Roger wasn't buying this rigmarole, so he went and bought a French press. The guy with no cable TV, who for the first time in years has a microwave because it came with the rental, a guy who washes paper coffee cups from places like Starbucks (though he'd never go to Starbucks) but you get the picture. That sort of guy. A minimalist. Or as he likes to call himself, "a luddite." This guy buys a French press.

(People's priorities amaze me. Why some of us chose to error on the side of convenience while others go a few extra rounds in the ring when it comes to any number of things is a fascinating study in human habits.)

Roger loves coffee. Loves coffee more than any show on TV. Or movie. Or fancy car. Or slick video game. He's beyond his years in this regard. So I Googled French press and apparently the thing captures more of the coffee's flavor and essential oils, so of course he'd get one.

I'll ask him about this when he returns and I'm sure when I do, he'll say it's worth the extra elbow grease if the coffee tastes like Juan Valdez himself delivered it via mule. And like most things in his life he doesn't need a drip coffeemaker or CNN because he gets the NY Times, or he doesn't need Tivo because Hemingway on the nightstand, with a receipt for a French press marking the chapter, is by far a better way to pause a story than to Tivo it ... which leads me to this next tale in human priorities:

My father soaked a pretty penny a couple years ago into replacing my family's old oil-burning furnace with a corn-fueled heater. If you ask him why he did this, he might respond that his reasons were 10 percent environmental, 50 percent money-saving and - this one he might not admit - 40 percent mechanical curiosity.

The corn heater, called A-Maize-ing Heat, was as big a Time-Suck my mother had ever seen. Before this it was the two-seater Cessna named Isabella that we called The Other Woman. Now it was Mistress Corn Heater.

According to my mother in the first six months of the corn heater's homecoming my dad spent every evening after work in the basement tinkering on her, re-calibrating her, feeding her purer corn, building her new parts, ordering her new parts, communicating with her maker in Iowa ... all the while singing her praises to anyone in town he ever overheard bitching about heating costs and G.D. oil companies.

"Get a corn heater," he would say.

A corn what? They'd ask.

"It's fantastic I tell you. She runs on corn alone. Wave of the future."

Nonetheless, to make what is a long story short, no one in North Collins got a corn heater that year as far as I know, and after one year of near Sisyphus-ian re-tooling, my dad's corn heater burned out. Not one to throw in the towel after one knockout, my dad refused to go back to the oil furnace despite the corn heater's failings.

If they got cold. There was always a space heater.

"It's a faulty heater," he told the guys at the Iowa A-Maize-ing Heat plant.

Yeah. Right. They said. Ship her back then - but you cover the shipping costs. They suggested it was his constant tinkering that caused her to quit.

"No," my dad said. "I'll drive it back."

And so he did. He and my Papa, in my Papa's truck. Drove the A-Maize-ing Heat corn burner from New York to Iowa where they toured the A-Maize-ing Heat manufacturing plant, studied the machines and quizzed the guys who designed them. And finally after a a few hours of diagnosis, they were told that in fact my father was right. She was faulty. Perhaps even the tinkering extended her lifespan. Like putting stents in arteries that were blocked.

So, off they went. Back to New York in my Papa's truck. The new corn heater riding bitch in the bed. She runs like a charm now. Or at least I haven't heard any dispatches from the basement trenches lately. But then again it's 80 degrees in Western New York right now. The nicest April my dad can remember.

As for my priorities - my corn burner. What I threw some Andrew Jacksons down on recently? I won't say. Not right now. The Thing I Bought requires no maintenance. No boulder-pushing-up-a-hill bittersweetness. No trip to Iowa, no nose-to-the-grindstone glory. None of it. I couldn't even bother with Roger's French press this morning. I heated up a cup of water in the microwave and dropped a tea bag in.

It's almost 11 a.m. Joe is still asleep. Maybe I'll go make a Starbucks run. Joe is not really a tea kind of guy.

PS. The picture above is of my dad, who viewed Lance yesterday and wasn't that impressed by him. I'm sucking up by posting a picture of his Lance, The Corn Burner.