St. George Island, Alaska

I just discovered there's a St. George Island, Alaska. The pictures posted here were taken by Al and Linda.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census SGI, Alaska is 182 square miles and populated by 152 people - 92 percent of which are Native Americans.

I've got a rummy ache.

The house we're renting is called Carpe Diem. It's spelled out on a rooster sign hanging over the front door. Every house on St. George Island has a name. A Place in the Sun. Blues Away. Casa Blanca. Cubby Hole. Fun Kissed. Bay Watch.



The rooster sign doesn't mesh with the rest of the decor, which is all sea-faring creatures, stuffed or otherwise. Wait. On second thought the rooster sign does mesh with the bullhorns on the wall in the master bedroom.



Bullhorns aside the place feels like the inside of a boat. The smell of wet wood will do that, transport you to the stern of a boat where as a girl you slept in the shape of a question mark beside your sisters and your parents on long trips to Port Colborne, Canada.



Joe and I took a day trip to Tallahassee today. It rained bucketloads, so it was a wise use of our time. We toured the FSU campus and tracked down Joe's alumni brick, which was no small feat since we had no friggen clue where his brick was laid.



We ate lunch at a diner neither one of us can remember the name of on Apalachee Parkway, passed up several nitty bookstores on our two-hour drive from Apalachicola to Tallahassee, where we settled on a big box Borders, drank fancy coffee drinks and bought an assortment of poli-sci books and literature.



I would proclaim the day a wild success had it not been for a devastating 515 to 530 Rummy loss two hours ago, robbing me of a 15-minute massage I rightly deserved given that last night's loss ended in fisticuffs.

A case of the Mondays.

On Mondays I usually plead with my fish Martha, whom I keep in a bowl on my desk, to finish writing my stories so I can write sentences that start with things like "... a man walked into a forest and stumbled into a clearing, where under the shade of a sycamore tree a redheaded woman was seated at a piano playing spy music."

So what am I doing with this moment? This 1:18 p.m.-on-a-Monday moment when normally I'd be glued to a story, the next callback, a too-tiny reporter's notepad and a bout of procrastination? I'm drinking a Coors Light on the balcony of a big blue beach house on stilts, trying to figure out why there are currents in the Gulf of Mexico that are wavy and currents that are calm.

Joe's working on an album, not at this moment but in the ongoing sense of it. He's wants to record an album concerning the various wooden sea creatures that are nailed to the walls of this house. The tracks are all named after each species of wooden sea creature. 1. The Blue Marlin 2. Hammerhead 3. The Dolphin Saves the Day and 4. How Did a Cow Get in Here? I copied these titles directly from the reporters notebook he scribbled them in.

We're burning through books and with no amenities on St. George Island save for The Big Top market located on the mainland 15 minutes away, we're off to find a bookstore in Eastpoint, Florida (population: 2,158.)

In a county where the nearest city is Apalachicola, which sounds to me like something pirates fall sick from, I have no doubt we'll find an interesting used bookstore.

Residual fireworks.

On the 6th of July I remembered four things:

I remembered the first time I tried to swim without arm floats. How the water felt like pudding and my arms felt like whisks. I was five years old and treading chlorinated water in a concrete pool in Myrtle Beach. How I prayed, even though I didn't believe in Jesus, that my father would pluck me from the water and set me back on dry land. How I regretted instantly thinking I could make it on my own to the water slide, which was the color of a robin's egg. How when my father grabbed me from the deep end it was with one hairy arm. How water ran out my nose and burned my throat when I coughed. How I was scared of the water for three days after that.

I remembered a railroad tie, a broken pier jutting into cold Lake Erie on the shores of Crystal Beach, Canada, where I stayed with my best friend Sarah's family. How Sarah's family always rented a ramshackle beach house in a ramshackle beach community that profited from an amusement park that closed in 1989 that everyone including my parents and grandparents used to go to. How my mother told me she rode The Comet coaster when she was pregnant with me. How every time I looked at that ghostly roller coaster from the end of that jagged pier I used to squint at it, frozen in time, frozen seven years after my birth, frozen before I had a chance to ride it, and imagine my mother with her red feathered hair, riding it pregnant with me. How when Sarah and I jumped from that jagged pier we'd hold hands and curl our toes just in case we landed on rocks when we hit the water.

I remembered the smell of model airplane fuel. The sweet sticky smell of model airplane fuel. How my father kept it in little bottles on his work bench in the basement. How the bottles were tiny because model airplanes don't require much fuel. How the fuel was the color of pink lemonade and the bottles were shaped like old lady face potions. How next to the fuel there was model airplane resin, that in its powder form was softer than baby talcum and whiter than sugar. How I loved to sift my hands through it. How I loved that my dad had stuff like this in our basement. Jars with skull and crossbones symbols on them. How in school they told us to stay away from stuff like that, those pale pink potions that powered fiberglass Nazi warplanes.

I remembered eating vanilla pudding pops in the summer. How we used to buy them from Crances Superette from a woman named Mary who worked behind the counter. How Mary hung a yellow fly strip by the milk freezer. How she had short brown hair that looked like a winter cap. How she lived in the apartment upstairs and had big round glasses and a sad wistful smile.
...


PS. The picture above was taken July 4 in Sarasota's Bayfront Park.

Panhandling Take 1.

Good morning.

It's 8:30 a.m. Joe is still sleeping. We're headed to SGI for a week in the Florida Panhandle. (We're staying here.) It was Joe's plan to wake up at 8, but of course he's still zonked. I've considered blasting a Toby Keith song in an effort to wake him, but that's probably not the best idea.

I have lofty post ideas for this vacay. My only concern is that I won't have wireless. If that's the case and I'm MIA you'll know why.