It's All Relative (11 page)

“We have an adventurer!” an elderly woman yelled over the ocean wind.

“Indeed!” said her husband.

“What do you think of this find?” she asked, holding out the necklace she had around her neck. At the end was a giant white tooth featuring a massive gum line and serrated edges.

“Great white!” she yelled. “Took me ten years to find one like this.”

“Rolled right up onto her feet after a huge storm,” her husband continued. “She thought it was a shell at first!”

“Thought it was a shell!” she laughed.

Ira and Dottie, I was to learn, were their names, and they would become my shark's-tooth-combing companions, my early-morning beach walkers, for the remainder of my stay.

Ira and Dottie were a husband-and-wife team along the lines of George Burns and Gracie Allen. They were quick-witted and droll, together so long they were actually one person, conjoined twins who could anticipate what the other was thinking or wanted before any thought or action had even been initiated. The husband was dapper—dressed more for a night at the theater than a morning stroll on the beach, in a polo and herringbone jacket with leather shoulder pads—while she was more Debbie Reynolds glam, long-limbed, heavily made-up, long white hair pulled into an intricately twisted bun and shimmering clasp. He would begin a sentence, which she would finish; she would begin a joke, which he would complete; they would both begin stories that never ended.

They had moved from New York in the late 1980s, where he had been a professor and she had been a dancer (how off-off-Broadway would never be determined). But
Dance!
—bold, ital, capped with an exclamation point—she could—they both said—alongside stars and ne'er-do-wells, true talents and drunks. They moved to Sarasota after visiting one summer, when prices in New York's trendy beach areas began to get too expensive and too Wall Street. “The artists could no longer afford it, and who wants to go to dinner parties with financial analysts and stockbrokers?” Dottie had asked dramatically.

“Who wants to do that?” Ira echoed.

The couple had never had children but considered New York to be their baby and Sarasota their grandchild. “Suburban neighborhoods were never for us,” Ira told me. “You have to live somewhere with personality, just like you have to love someone with personality.”

“You have to be surrounded by life, because death is just around the corner,” Dottie said.

Both of them said this nonchalantly, as if they were ordering a cup of coffee, black, no sugar or cream. And both said this knowingly, as if they were imparting a professor's wisdom to a young student. Ironically, I found incredible optimism in this statement, though it chilled me more than the early-morning breeze.

Often on our walks, Dottie would simply take off running, her old dancer's legs churning in the sand, and run headfirst into a congregation of seagulls, hundreds of them, flocked on a narrow band of beach. The birds always moved like a choreographed unit when she ran toward them, and she would spin as they flew, twirling, her hair in the wind, her arms turning, a human helicopter about to take flight.

She would return, laughing, coughing, her hazy green eyes dancing in the reflection off the ocean.

Ira would take his wife into his arms and say, “You have the spirit of a child!” before she would unwind herself from her husband's arms and pirouette to the shoreline, where she would dance in unison with the waves, the tide her partner, back and forth, side to side, arms extended, kicking high, high, higher than the waves.

“You're amazing!” I screamed one morning over the water and wind.

“You're kind!” she exhaled, returning to grab her husband's hand. “But thank you, my dear!” She sang this line, like she sang most lines, before kicking a leg—and a whole lot of sand—straight up into the air like a human geyser.

And then we would walk. And talk. About nothing important, except life and time and hopes and dreams.

Every morning, toward the end of our walks, Ira and Dottie would open a plastic Publix grocery bag they had brought with them and start throwing bits of bread and crushed crackers at a horde of gulls.

Anything having to do with birds and possible pecking of eyes caused me to panic.

“It's okay,” Dottie said. “We feed them every morning and night.”

“We feed them a lot,” Ira continued. “Some people have their hummingbirds or wrens, we've got our gulls.”

“They're a bit aggressive,” laughed Dottie, “but they are full of life. We started feeding them because”—here she danced directly into the middle of the pack, like she was moving into a war zone, the birds swarming her—“because of these two.”

Sitting rather still, in the middle of this chaos, were two cartoonish-looking old sea gulls, not even bothering to move. “These two we found bound in a plastic six-pack container. We cut them loose to save them, but their wings and legs were injured.”

“They're slower than their comrades, but still full of life,” Ira said. “We call them Ozzie and Harriet.”

“Shoo, Ozzie,” said Dottie. “Shoo, Harriet.”

The gulls didn't move exactly, but Ozzie took a step or two to the left, squawking loudly, screaming at the top of his lungs, for his mate to hurry up. She took one high step and then another, very deliberately, going at her own pace, even stooping carefully to eat a few grains of sand. Ozzie would squawk, followed by Harriet, and it was then I knew I had seen this act before: not only from my parents, but also standing before me.

True love, I thought, solidified by time, hardened by age.

A few mornings later, Dottie and Ira surprised me by announcing, “Oh, my God, we read your first book,
America's Boy
!”

Both laughed but said nothing more.

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“The library.”

“You should have bought it. I need the royalties.”

Again they laughed, but said nothing more.

“And …?” I asked. “Don't leave me hangin'.”

“I can't say we enjoyed it,” Dottie said, “but I can say it was something we needed to read.”

“Living in New York, we always assumed it was easy for people to be themselves, no matter who they were, what they did, who they loved,” Ira said. “But your memoir made us reevaluate that.”

For the next few weeks we continued to walk and talk and laugh, me always turning one final time—before I would head back to see Gary and the dogs—in order to watch this old couple walking, holding hands, an image clouded on the beach, blurred by the fine mist from the ocean, until I could see nothing more than two ghosts giggling, kissing, and then disappearing.

And then one morning they
were
gone.

After the weekend, they did not meet me for our regular walk on Monday. Or Tuesday.

I had never asked where they lived. They had never offered it. So I didn't know where to look for them.

I began to ask passersby and homeowners along the beach about the couple, only to receive very little information. Sarasota, it seemed, was a town of transients, coming and going, staying one step ahead of the snow and then one step ahead of the heat.

Finally, one day, I happened to ask an older woman who walked the beach nearly every day about the couple.

“I heard Ira had a heart attack while they were visiting friends in New York over the weekend,” she said. “Dottie decided to keep him there to be closer to their friends. She said she needed the support.”

I ran back to Gary and cried as if something had happened to one of our own parents.

The remainder of our time in Heaven's Waiting Room, Gary and the dogs accompanied me on my early-morning walks, me continuing
to search for shark's teeth and the meaning of life—this precious little sliver of time we all have but tend to waste too carelessly in youth, like pennies, finally taking on incredible importance to me.

Those simple morning walks with Gary comforted me, contented me, filled my soul, and I began to cling to each walk, each found shark's tooth, as our holiday began to dwindle, as if I were clinging to a lifesaver in the middle of the Gulf, or, worse, desperately to middle age.

Most mornings, at some point during our walks, Marge and Mabel would break loose and bound into a seawall of gulls, and then Gary would laugh and call for them. I would reach into my pocket, retrieve some bread crumbs, and toss them to Ozzie and Harriet, and then Gary would take my hand in his and say, his words carried out over the ocean and into the vast, cloudless sky by the breeze, “I love you!”

And we would continue to walk, our bodies disappearing into the mist like ghosts.

“What do you mean, you ‘don't believe in homosexuality'? It's not like the Easter Bunny, your belief isn't necessary.”

–LEA DELARIA

M
y father had a rolltop desk in our family room that served as his virtual home office in the 1970s. I remember sitting in his springy swivel chair as a kid and staring at three photos that adorned his desktop: One was of him in college, wearing goggles and sporting a flattop, mixing something in a beaker; one was him at work, checking the fluid levels in a piece of monstrous equipment that manufactured windows; and one was him with our family, on Easter, my brother and I holding baskets filled with faux grass and board games but no candy or eggs.

That's because even during his off-hours, my father remained an engineer, a man driven largely by mathematical precision, his mind always working on ways to outsmart the world.

Even children.

Which is why my dad used to bury our Easter eggs as if they were plutonium.

Every Easter, no matter how hard we searched, my brother and I could never locate the eggs.

I used to listen in awe to the stories of my friends' Easter-egg hunts, where they would skip around merrily, filling their baskets with tons of candy.

My father, on the other hand, would spend hours trekking through our five acres of yard and woods, searching for the perfect spots to insert his minispade and bury our eggs.

He would finally return to the porch, my brother and I watching from behind the patio door, our breath steaming the glass, and give us an excited thumbs-up. We would blow out of the house, dashing around the yard looking in every place any typical five- and nine-year-old would consider most obvious.

Patio? No.

Front porch? Uh-uh.

Planters? Please.

Hanging baskets? Right.

Ground next to the tulips? Too easy.

Low limbs of the dogwoods, or crook of the old oak? Of course not.

Rather, our eggs were buried deep in the ground, like a mob body in Jersey, only the dull tips of the plastic eggs popping through the earth.

A bloodhound couldn't have located them.

Although I was a chubby kid who would blind another child just to get the last Peep, it simply wasn't worth the effort to get so filthy and frustrated.

Instead, I would cry.

“They're still under ten, Ted,” I remember my mother saying to my dad. “Wade can't even do long division yet. And we're not a family of moles. How can you expect them to find buried eggs? You have an evil streak.”

But my father was a competitive sort. We had to work hard to earn our reward. And my dad always liked to win—at any game, at any price—and he seemed to revel in the fact that logic always won over emotion.

I cry. I give up. I lose.

I keep looking. And digging. I win.

So when my brother and I finally got old enough and smart enough to map out our yard, tote our own spades, and work as a team on our Easter-egg hunts, my dad, like any good engineer, improved his methodology and began scaling our solid oaks and skinny sycamores, hiding our candy-filled eggs in tree limbs and birds' nests, places no normal child, unless they were the offspring of Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, could venture, places that no parent, unless they were drunk, would allow their children to go.

“My Lord, Ted,” my mother said to my dad. “We're not a family of squirrels. How can you expect them to climb that high? You have an evil streak.”

Still, I know deep down that my father never did this to be mean. I believe he did it to test himself, his engineering acuity, to see if he still had game. Perhaps, when you reach a certain age, you also do such things to show your children that you are still superior.

As an adult I asked my dad about those Easter-egg hunts, and he told me, “Weren't they a blast! You know, I just wanted to make them fun. We didn't have a lot growing up, and I wanted to create great memories, make it a
real
hunt.”

“Oh, it was,” I told him.

And then I made him watch
Blood Diamond
.

Looking back, I don't know why my brother and I wanted to find those eggs so desperately anyway, since there was nothing hidden inside worth eating. My Depression-era grandma often filled the eggs for us, meaning we didn't even get
real
candy, like mini chocolate bars or little marshmallow bunnies. My grandma was too frugal. Instead our eggs were filled with breath mints and nickels. It was like Easter at Guantánamo.