No coffee, the sounds of food prep done by others as music while the house-on-stilts where we are staying in Cedar Key sways beneath us. It's like being back on a cruise ship. Apparently I was able to sway the whole house by doing yoga last night after the others went to bed. I would NOT want to be here in a high wind.
There is no place like Florida in the winter time: Birds, breezes, empty beaches--and golf carts galore. On the way to the beer shack last evening, I saw a cart bedecked with pirate skeletons and sea booty. Now THAT was a golf cart I would drive! I'm sorry I didn't get a picture, but the week is young. Pre-covid, I used to spend a long weekend every January in Destin for a spin-in. Imagine a conference room in a resort, filled with hard-eyed, hard-drinking, hard-shopping, hand spinners of all ages, pronouns, and declensions, and you get the picture. It was my January Joy. But the average age was probably 60 so the Boomer Doom (aka Covid) killed the in-person meeting. It still goes on (it's happening this weekend even), but over zoom. I am so heartily sick of zoom that it would have to be a really incredible live activity for me to be willing to join it. Until we have VR headsets with other sensory input (smells, temperature) for zoom, count me out. Even then, count me out.
Florida is also old people. Wise people. My kind of people. (See above: hard-eyed, hard-drinking...). Except for the dearth of teeth. I'll go gray. I'll take wrinkles and saggy boobs, but I will not give up my teeth.
So, old people. Let's talk about old people for a moment. When I was 27, a friend and I were making
tiropita for the University of Chicago's annual linguistics conference (CLS)--traditionally catered by the first year grad students. Yours truly was the organizer for my year and I decided to do a Greek feast--hence the tiropita. Karen Deaton and I made HUNDREDS of little phyllo pastry cheese pies--many of them while watching Lethal Weapon. There is one scene where Mel Gibson walks to the refrigerator naked. No stunt butt. We were watching on VHS, and we used the rewind button to watch him walk back and forth, and back and forth, and back forth like a Hobbit (there and back again) as we cackled like mad . I see that Mel now, and I could not be less interested. Absolutely zip, zero, zilch attraction for me. But Mel Gibson now, in Fat Man... The Mel Gibson that looks like my spouse on a craggy day... Now THAT is a hot guy.
I am aware that I have been becoming invisible to younger people. I am gradually being replaced by an old-person cut-out. Arguably, for anyone under 30, I have been unknowingly there for awhile. But it is more apparent to me now as I am more often looked through than looked at. And I remember looking at "old" people when I was in my 20's and thinking how horrible it must be to be old, and no longer attractive, and looked through by the young and vibrant. Now I recognize that thought as spawned by the arrogance and ignorance of youth, and I chuckle, quietly and evilly, to myself realizing that I look through them as much as they look through me. Thirty-somethings are not remotely attractive to me, (apologies to friends in their 30's but...). Instead, they seem larval and I feel parental. I know someday they will be interesting, but right now all they've got is hubris.
Returning to the beer shack of yesterday, my "type" now must have grey hair--or at least salt and pepper, weather-worn skin with lots of laugh lines, and a solid, relaxed, I'm good-in-my-skin-ness that (for most people) does not come before 55 or 60. A man who knows how to laugh, live, and love for today. As I looked at the scruffy, old, hippy guys sitting and watching the world go by, I felt an urge to flirt. Obviously not because I am looking for anything, but because I was attracted, and felt like appreciatively expressing that attraction. Well-oiled, sleek, firm bodies on the beach just irritate me and make me want to yell "Get Out of My Sun!"--the old woman equivalent to "Get Off My Lawn".
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