Thirty Years in Florida
Exactly thirty years ago today, on my 21st birthday, I arrived in Naples, Florida.
Around 11 am the 15th of May, 1989, I took my Spanish Literature final at LSU. When everyone was done, our small class walked together to The Chimes for lunch, just off campus and a little up Highland Road from my roach-infested apartment-home of the previous three years. Seriously. Looking back, I have no idea how I didn’t get bubonic plague, or at least a serious case of rabies.
After lunch that day, I said (what I thought at the time was a temporary) goodbye to my classmates, and walked back home — I used to walk much more in those days, even though I needed it much less than I do now. I also said goodbye to the roaches (they had bought me a little gift in exchange for all the free food and whatnot) and to my human roommate, Moisés (who deserved a better goodbye).
I didn’t know. So much I didn’t know.
I packed a bag, maybe two, and got in the car to visit my parents, who had moved to Naples from Belle Chasse, Louisiana about a year earlier. My brother Adam was still in high school, so he went with them. My brother Michael was thinking about staying in Louisiana or going back to Utah (where he graduated college), but he was in a bad car accident shortly before the move, and ended up going to Florida with our folks as well, because he couldn’t use one of his arms for a while.
I turned twenty-one on the road. Just after midnight on May 16th, 1989, I was near Lake City, Florida, where I-10 and I-75 meet. This fact will somehow date me even more than my age itself: I bought a Bartles and Jaymes wine cooler, just to see if I would get carded by the gas station attendant. I did not. I also did not drink the wine cooler, and then felt like I probably should have saved the money, of which, unlike health, I have more now than I did then.
The remaining late night and early morning hours of the trek down I-75 in my ’84 Toyota Supra were a blur of Marlboro reds and loud, cassette-driven music. I’d stick my head out of the window occasionally, using the wind to force my eyelids open. There were no energy drinks in those days aside from coffee, so we’d get creative.
I hadn’t driven this stretch of road before, so didn’t realize how bloody long the peninsula is. For every twenty miles I drove, Naples got thirty miles farther away. It was like a telescoping zoom shot from a Hitchcock film. Still, somehow, at 4 am EST, I arrived at my parents’ home off Exit 16, in the subtropical woods of 6th Avenue Southwest.
That exit is numbered 107 now. That street is called Tamarind Ridge Drive. Most of the woods between those two points are long gone, replaced with several additional lanes of road, some strip malls, banks, restaurants, and a massive fifteen hundred acre housing development ironically called “The Vineyards”.
Oh — they have cockroaches here, too. Big’uns, but just as friendly.
I didn’t plan how it all happened after that. I didn’t mean to leave you. It just…happened. I suppose you understand by now. We don’t really realize how much time has passed until days like this, thirty years on.
I’ve written before about how my life unfolded once I got to Florida: the call from New Orleans great Charlie Brent to play a gig with him here in Naples, which resulted in more gigs, and then a band, which resulted in not going back to LSU for my senior year. I started full-time work as a musician, then as an audio engineer, then as an entrepreneur in business with my brother Michael — and later with constant, patient help from the best venture capitalist a young businessman could ever have asked for. You know who you are.
I’ve likewise written about the losses over those years: both parents, all grandparents, far too many friends.
The crests and the troughs. The sine wave of one’s life.
Isabella and I talk sometimes about how oddly unpredictable yet similar our lives have been. We both left cultures we knew and loved, and ended up in this (then) relatively unknown place, only to find each other.
When you make a big move, there’s a long period — harder for Isabella, no doubt — when you don’t really know where you belong any more. Even though my family’s roots were in Illinois, I barely remembered it. I was a Louisianan. I had attended all of middle school in Moss Bluff (Lake Charles), finished high school in Belle Chasse (New Orleans), and spent three great years at LSU (Baton Rouge). My friends there still consider me one of them, occasionally asking when I’m coming “home”. I carry much of that culture with me to this day, from my love of The Saints to cooking my own Cajun and Creole food to my piano-playing style. I use funny words like “lagniappe” and “muffuletta”. I can still spell “Tchoupitoulas” without looking it up. But none of that culture belonged in Southwest Florida.
Isabella, likewise, left everything she knew in another country — one as rich with culture as Louisiana — to stay here with me. After a while, she wasn’t completely Italian any more, but also wasn’t completely American, just as I was no longer living in Louisiana, but I wasn’t really a Floridian.
Florida simply became the place where she and I had sacrificed some big things in order to make something even bigger. Together. I’m grateful for that.
There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about my multiculturalism. I’m American. I’m an adopted Italian who speaks the language and knows the culture. I’m a Louisianan who speaks the language and knows the culture. I’m a Floridian. I had a Catholic father of Polish-German descent and a Jewish mother of mixed Eastern European descent. Even Illinois, Texas, and Utah had a small hand in who I am now.
Yet nowhere have I spent more time than I have in Naples, Florida. Thirty years today, did I mention that?
Which is why it’s so damn odd that I still feel like I don’t belong here — or more precisely, like I’m not from here. At a time when probably millions of others my age are making plans to move to Florida for retirement, I’m trying to figure out when will be the right time to leave the place.
Where will we go? I don’t know yet. I’m betting on one thing, though: wherever it is, I will find cockroaches. Here’s hoping they’re friendly ones.
