as if Scott needed a Vette as a chick magnet. Far from it. For his sixteenth birthday I’d glued pink ribbons to an aluminum baseball bat and wrapped it up with a can of skunk spray. I’d added a card telling him he was never going to make it through high school without these added bits of chick deterrent.
We’d all laughed about it at the time, but the truth was, he’d have been better off if he’d actually used them.
I took one last look at Scott’s apartment over the detached garage before starting up the brick path to the back door. I’d lived here for as long as I could remember, but somehow, today, the beauty of it leaped at me. Perhaps, after an overdose of harsh reality the past twenty hours, I needed a generous dollop from the other side of the scales.
Our house might not qualify as a mansion by the standards of Palm Beach or Miami, not even by some of the sprawling McMansions built in Sarasota over the last twenty years, but for a gulf-front retirement town built from scratch back in the nineteen-twenties, the Wallaces’ three-story pink stucco with red-tiled roof was the cat’s meow. Nothing but the best for the railroad executives who started it all. And saw it slip through their fingers during the Great Depression.
The landscaping around our house on Royal Palm Drive was elaborate when it was built. Ninety years later, it could only be called lush. In the front, a giant live oak and its companion magnolia sheltered the house from the street. The back yard was a mass of greenery, including orange, grapefruit, and avocado trees. Scott swore the avocado deliberately dropped its fat fruit onto his roof like a thunderclap in the middle of the night just to give him a hard time. The backyard was fenced, with orange trumpet vine, yellow alamondon, and hot pink bougainvillea providing a riot of color against the coral pink stucco wall that matched the house.
Also scattered along the fence was an amazing variety of hibiscuses, with azaleas tucked into sheltered corners. In the back, along the south wall, a staghorn fern crawled up one of the original slash pines that hadn’t been cleared when Golden Beach moved off the drawing boards and into reality. Nestled between the pine and a giant split-leaf philodendron was an old-fashioned wooden bench swing, shaded to the point of obscurity by the trees and plants around it.
I’d spent a lot of time in that swing as a child, as a teen, as a black-haired gypsy trying to co-exist in a world of sun-streaked blonds with names like Bubba, Bo, Mary Sue, and Betty Jane. The odd thing was, I was more intellectually suited to my parents than Scott was. When he was nine, he’d asked if he was adopted too. Heart-wrenching maybe, but not too surprising from a boy whose father, mother, and older sister loved to learn, while Scott was a throwback to the era of knights in shining armor or maybe the barbarian hordes that overran Europe, taking the Roman Empire with them. Every last warrior well-muscled and happily illiterate. Which didn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. They simply had the right skill set for their day and age. In the twelfth century Scott would have been the King’s Champion.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the twelfth century. Mom was a graduate of the University of Florida at Gainesville; my father, a History Professor at New College. The small state-funded college in Sarasota—Florida’s answer to the Ivy League—was frequently number one on the list of the best college “buys” in the country. A reputation well-deserved. We lost Dad two years ago to a surprise cancer that was unstoppable, but we’d had him long enough to benefit greatly from his gentle humor, sharp wit, and good old-fashioned common sense. No wonder I was so naive when I went off to college, and still trusting when I charged off to New York. Growing up with the constant love and support of family, and surrounded by the peaceful ambiance of Golden Beach, it wasn’t surprising I
We’d all laughed about it at the time, but the truth was, he’d have been better off if he’d actually used them.
I took one last look at Scott’s apartment over the detached garage before starting up the brick path to the back door. I’d lived here for as long as I could remember, but somehow, today, the beauty of it leaped at me. Perhaps, after an overdose of harsh reality the past twenty hours, I needed a generous dollop from the other side of the scales.
Our house might not qualify as a mansion by the standards of Palm Beach or Miami, not even by some of the sprawling McMansions built in Sarasota over the last twenty years, but for a gulf-front retirement town built from scratch back in the nineteen-twenties, the Wallaces’ three-story pink stucco with red-tiled roof was the cat’s meow. Nothing but the best for the railroad executives who started it all. And saw it slip through their fingers during the Great Depression.
The landscaping around our house on Royal Palm Drive was elaborate when it was built. Ninety years later, it could only be called lush. In the front, a giant live oak and its companion magnolia sheltered the house from the street. The back yard was a mass of greenery, including orange, grapefruit, and avocado trees. Scott swore the avocado deliberately dropped its fat fruit onto his roof like a thunderclap in the middle of the night just to give him a hard time. The backyard was fenced, with orange trumpet vine, yellow alamondon, and hot pink bougainvillea providing a riot of color against the coral pink stucco wall that matched the house.
Also scattered along the fence was an amazing variety of hibiscuses, with azaleas tucked into sheltered corners. In the back, along the south wall, a staghorn fern crawled up one of the original slash pines that hadn’t been cleared when Golden Beach moved off the drawing boards and into reality. Nestled between the pine and a giant split-leaf philodendron was an old-fashioned wooden bench swing, shaded to the point of obscurity by the trees and plants around it.
I’d spent a lot of time in that swing as a child, as a teen, as a black-haired gypsy trying to co-exist in a world of sun-streaked blonds with names like Bubba, Bo, Mary Sue, and Betty Jane. The odd thing was, I was more intellectually suited to my parents than Scott was. When he was nine, he’d asked if he was adopted too. Heart-wrenching maybe, but not too surprising from a boy whose father, mother, and older sister loved to learn, while Scott was a throwback to the era of knights in shining armor or maybe the barbarian hordes that overran Europe, taking the Roman Empire with them. Every last warrior well-muscled and happily illiterate. Which didn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. They simply had the right skill set for their day and age. In the twelfth century Scott would have been the King’s Champion.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the twelfth century. Mom was a graduate of the University of Florida at Gainesville; my father, a History Professor at New College. The small state-funded college in Sarasota—Florida’s answer to the Ivy League—was frequently number one on the list of the best college “buys” in the country. A reputation well-deserved. We lost Dad two years ago to a surprise cancer that was unstoppable, but we’d had him long enough to benefit greatly from his gentle humor, sharp wit, and good old-fashioned common sense. No wonder I was so naive when I went off to college, and still trusting when I charged off to New York. Growing up with the constant love and support of family, and surrounded by the peaceful ambiance of Golden Beach, it wasn’t surprising I
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