Adventures in Adulthood
A series of memoir essays by award-winning writer John Sheirer (www.johnsheirer.com). Whether you're just beginning the journey as a young adult, enjoying your golden years, or middle-aged (like John), you'll find something to enjoy in these unique looks at the one wild adventure everyone from 18 to 118 has in common: adulthood. (Updates will come online roughly once a week.)
Spring Break, Middle-Age Style
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Spring Break, Middle-Age Style
When my wife Betsy and I scheduled a trip to Florida for March, little did we know that we'd end up experiencing an American tradition that passed us by a quarter century ago. To us, Florida was just that nice, warm state with weird elections where we would visit Betsy's mother and sister, and mid-March was simply the best time take a few days off work. But to the great masses of college students who flock to Florida in mid-March, we were on our way to Spring Break at the beach.
Our first clue was the flight from New England to the Sunshine State. We noticed that nearly everyone else on the plane looked to be floating just to one side or the other of the legal drinking age. Several who floated slightly above downed a half dozen beers while we nursed ice cubes from our diet colas and munched stale peanuts. A six-pack in one sitting is quite a feat any time, but our flight departed Hartford before dawn and arrived in Orlando around ten. These kids staggered off the plane with a morning buzz and a head start on their week of sun-baked oblivion.
After a couple of days visiting our relatives in their quiet east-coast town, Betsy and I crossed central Florida (cattle ranches, orange groves, sod farms, and little else) to watch a Red Sox's spring training game at City of Palms Park in Fort Myers. We arrived at 10 a.m. for the 1 p.m. game, thinking we would be ridiculously early. But this is "Red Sox Nation South," so the place was a sea of red and blue Boston jerseys. (Mine was red and Betsy's blue.)
We were smart enough to order our tickets online way back in January, the first day they were available, so we weren't worried when we saw the line of about one hundred people waiting to buy tickets for a game that was already sold out. All we had to do was go to the "will-call" window (no line) and pick up our tickets. As we walked toward the entrance, all one hundred people in line glared at us. One ticketless fan called out, "Who the hell are you people, Pedroia's parents?" If we were, we would have had better seats.
Game time was delayed because the Sox players were protesting a management decision not to pay the expenses of some lower-paid coaches and team employees for the upcoming trip to Japan, where the Sox were planning to play some exhibitions against Japanese teams and open the "regular" season against the Oakland A's. I'm a proud union member, just like my dad, so we tried to be sympathetic to the "labor" side of the mini-strike, but it was tough to sympathize with "workers" who made approximately one hundred times our annual income. Other fans with cell phone access to the internet kept us informed as the drama unfolded, and, ultimately, the players prevailed--another victory for Manny, Schill, Big Papi, and the other "little guys" against the monster corporations.
The game finally began more than an hour late, and we were only a slight sunburn worse for wear. The one time I looked away from the action, a foul ball nearly decapitated me before I ducked at the last second. Our beloved Sox lost the game, but we didn't care because this was just spring training for the reigning World Series Champs. And besides, Dustin "Junior" Pedroia played well.
We left before the last inning to beat the crowds, but we still needed two hours to snake our way through ten miles of snarled traffic on the way to Fort Myers Beach. We had reserved a hotel room right on the ocean to enjoy our break from late-season New England winter as fully as possible. The dinner hour was approaching by the time we arrived.
While checking in, we noticed a droning reggae beat from the bar and dozens of pixie-faced revelers who bore a striking resemblance to the ones we saw on our flight south.
"It's really crowded here today," I said to the desk clerk, barely out of high school herself.
"Well," she replied, as if telling us a fact everyone else already knew, "it is Spring Break." Betsy and I exchanged a look that said, Let's not confess that we didn't know.
"Just out of curiosity," I asked, "what's the ratio of adults to college students at this hotel?"
"You don't want to know," the clerk said. "But we did put you at the quiet end of the building."
The "quiet end" turned out to be one floor directly above the bar where a live band supplied the reggae we'd heard before. The music wasn't exactly loud, not in the way that a firecracker in a broom closet is loud or an alarm clock at five in the morning is loud. But the sound was everywhere. The plastic cups in the bathroom vibrated. One of my fillings felt loose.
"How late do you think they'll be playing that music?" I asked Betsy. We've evolved into early-to-bed middle-agers, partly because our alarm clock actually does go off at five a.m. so that we can get to work early.
"Late," Betsy said. "Really, really late."
"What the heck," we said to each other. We could make the best of it. After all, we were at a beautiful white-powder beach during a cloudless evening just before sunset. We had both missed out on spring break celebrations when we were in college. Betsy worked extra hours at the three part-time jobs that helped pay her tuition, and I went back home to help my dad get our farm ready for planting season.
But here we were, all these years later, in Florida for Spring Break. We could experience a small taste of what we missed all those years ago. Betsy put on her stylish skirt-and-halter bathing suit while I donned my hiking shorts and t-shirt for a walk on the beach.
The first sight to greet our eyes as we stepped onto the sand was a girl roughly the same age as our own children, clad only in what looked like three postage stamps held together by dental floss. A pirate's eye patch is expansive by comparison. A shoelace has more fabric.
The girl's bare butt stood out for all to see--and all did see, including a man my age who stared openly and nearly slobbered onto his flabby, fish-belly-white gut. I had the good sense not to stare, and only said, sounding like a parody of a middle-aged man, "Oh my, my goodness, oh my." Regrouping, I managed to add, "I hope she's using sunscreen."
The beach behind our hotel was filled with similarly attired youngsters chasing Frisbees, chatting in high-pitched voices, or milling lethargically while downing beers. The girls had way too much flesh hanging out of their nearly nonexistent bathing suits, while the guys wore shin-length trunks with a foot of plaid boxer shorts sticking out above their drooping waistlines and an inch or two of pale butt crack visible above those boxers. I had the urge to offer the girls large beach towels to wrap around themselves and to tug up the guys' shorts and knot the drawstrings to keep them up. I wanted to offer each of them a good book and send them to their rooms. It was almost too much to absorb, so I took on the persona of an anthropologist on a distant island conducting ethnography. These kids were citizens of another culture whose strange customs I might not understand but could learn to accept and even respect.
Betsy and I made our way through the youngsters and kept walking along the beach toward the flawless sunset. After a few hundred feet, the median age of the beach population doubled. It seems our hotel, the least expensive in the area, was the only one filled with teeny-boppers. Farther along, we met people our own age and older, intrepid souls speed-walking with knee braces, dipping their canes into the surf, sweeping metal-detectors across the sand. We hadn't quite returned to our native culture, but we felt a bit closer to home.
To these people, however, we may have looked like the bare-butt girl looked to us. My lower body still resembles the athlete I was in college, thanks to frequent hiking and occasional "old-guy" basketball games. (The resemblance ends and the waistline, so my shirt stays on.) I could spike a beach volleyball on any of the young studs, were it not for my surgically reconstructed pinkie finger … and ankle … and knee ... and other knee … and shoulder. I still have my own hip joints in original condition and fine working order.
Betsy is far more an object of envy than I am--even at more than twice the age of the college students. Thanks to daily doses of yoga, pilates, and the elliptical machine, she has kept a figure any of those college girls would be proud to display in one of those "girls gone wild" videos. We even got a few harsh looks from the older beach folks who seemed to ignore my gray hair and focused on our fit legs. To some of them, we were a couple of crazy kids out showing ourselves off. They probably wanted to send us to our rooms.
If we were going to be labeled as part of the youngster crowd, we decided we might as well act like it--at least to a limited extent. On the way back to our room, we detoured from the beach to the street and stopped at one of the many liquor stores to pick up a four-pack of wine coolers, our small contribution to the festivities. We sipped our drinks on the balcony as night fell across the Gulf of Mexico before retiring with a slight buzz at 11 p.m., two hours past our usual bedtime. We watched the TV news and got tomorrow's weather forecast before drifting off to sleep. Amazingly, the pulsating music from the bar below us faded to silence around midnight, and we slept until seven, two hours beyond our normal waking time. That morning, the beach was ghost-town silent, and the only other people at the hotel restaurant were the bleary-eyed cook and waitress who prepared and served our pancakes.
We had one last spring break tradition to explore. To paraphrase the kids I knew in college all those years ago: Did we "get lucky" on our Spring Break trip to the beach? Oh yes, we got lucky! What could be luckier that knowing that we would soon return home to the last of New England's melting snow, to our dwindling number of student loan payments, to our low-fixed-rate mortgage, to our rewarding careers, to our comfort-of-the-living-room televised Red Sox games watching our newly adopted son Dustin Pedroia on our new high-definition TV, to our own real kids' college accomplishments and tuition bills. And, best of all, we're lucky to have each other and the memories of our middle-aged-style Spring Break trip to the beach together at last.
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John Sheirer
John Sheirer (pronounced Shy-er) is the author of the new memoir Loop Year: 365 Days on the Trail, which received the Connecticut Green Circle Award for environmental activism, as well as the 2005 memoir Growing Up Mostly Normal in the Middle of Nowhere, a finalist for the Sante Fe Writers Project Literary Award.
He teaches English and Communications at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut, where he has been honored multiple times by Who's Who Among America's Teachers and recently received the Distinguished Service and Educational Excellence Award.
John lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wonderful wife Betsy Barone, terrific stepkids Danielle and Daryl, and Daisy the amazing hiking dog. John's website is www.johnsheirer.com, and he can be reached at jsheirer@acc.commnet.edu or (860) 253-3138.
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I love to listen to the stories! I find myself laughing out loud as if the author of the stories is in the room with me. I have to admit a couple of the stories did bring a tear or two to my eye.