Barrying The Outhouse Bones --- THE RETURN OF DAVE BARRY?
B. Elwin Sherman
February 01, 2006
Dear Dave:
In the grip of another New England winter, I imagine you sitting in Miami on your “defenseless toilet,” remembering how you used to be funny in the place where neon goes to die. There in the land of palm fronds, aqua-toys and one-season radials, shadow-bathing in the climate where underwear is outerware.
Southern Florida --- the home base for the folks Fran Lebowitz calls, “the audibly tan” --- versus my Northern New England digs of “the pale stinkers,” (that’s a New Hampshire inside joke from Massachusetts).
Then again, I wonder if Florida is really where you’re hanging your shingle. There are now so many ways to contact you in care of someone else, maybe you’re living in a perpetual motion limousine like a low-flying Howard Hughes, with a gaggle of brown-nosing comedy writers Kleenexing imaginary fly-scat from your laptop.
Besides, we all know real Floridians have no tan. Just as real Yankees know that today’s audible frostbite is tomorrow’s three-toed boot, native Sunshine Staters know that yesterday’s audible tan is today’s noisy melanoma.
You once wrote to me: “Elwin, I don’t know about great minds melding, but maybe our minds are.” I was so moved by that, I smathered it on the cover of my new book: TOOLKIT IN PARADISE,” at no cost to you.
But, I now need you to help me dispel this notion that all Yankees spend their days bag-balming their moaning bovines enroute to maple sugar cheesehouses, and their nights running triptoe to the outhouse with the backdoor flannel flapping on their L.L. Bean union suits.
If you’ll accept this, I’ll try to promote the idea that all Miamians are not blue-haired dwarfs (former Yankee eight-toed retirees) being ushered around in wheelchairs by exiled Cubans.
Like all stereotypes, the truths lie somewhere between Disney World and the cheesefarms. But, there’s a few items you’ll have to help me with, leftover from my last trip to the Orange Peninsula:
Your winter weather anchorpersons report the “tan factor,” the flipside of wind-chill in my neighborhood. And, they seem to do it with a gleeful, high-handed reference to the stormy radar blotches and sinking temperatures gripping us beleaguered, hop-footed sodbusters in the Northeast Kingdom.
The hen of our neighbors appears to us as a goose.”
I think some beleaguered Chinese weatherman said that.
In New England, the start/finish lines are on the same fence posts. Everything begins where it ends. Southern Florida, however, is the act of going; there is no end or beginning to the road. It is the home of the transplanted transient. We know it holds water only because it leaks. If you want to go somewhere and get there, you have to live here in New England.
True, sometimes you can’t get there from here, but that’s because you have no business leaving here and/or going there in the first place.
I saw rows of thrift shops, “dollar” stores, pawnbrokers and storage warehouses where you can buy, trade, sell, hock or put on hold whatever it is you can’t bring wherever it is you’re going --- until you get back to where you finished.
Even the used car dealerships had little mobile home offices in parking lots with signs declaring: “BUY HERE, PAY HERE.” This apparently caters to the car buyer on the run, unaccustomed to being anywhere long enough to complete both transactions. But, it doesn’t exactly inspire consumer confidence when your car dealer’s office has its own trailer hitch.
To be fair, this fly-by-night commerce has crept into our backwoods, but only because we’re all beginning to forget our endings.
Florida water quality is not a concern; no one drinks it, anyway. Quantity is the thing. Even-numbered homes water their lawns between four and eight a.m. on designated dates, etc. Commercial car washes (the only way to do it legally) are modified with some kind of citrus hybrid technology that uses sixty per cent less water than their northern counterparts.
Get caught washing your car or hosing down your kudzu on an off-day and the crime is comparable to chucking a cherry bomb in an occupied sub-zero outhouse.
And, by using 60 percent less water, your cars get only 40 percent clean. This was confirmed by a finger-message I saw written in the dusty patina of a hatchback’s hatch, which read: “I only wish my wife was this dirty.”
There are no homeless in Florida. Home denotes shelter and destination. Most of the year, shelter is not necessary. And, because no one (including the people with shelters and destinations) seems to live there, anyone who might be deemed homeless is really just passing through on their way back to where they left to get there.
Contrary to New England motoring, nothing in your community is tangential or obscure. There are only four compass points. No one goes northwest. It’s north. Then west. Nothing curves, winds, loops or runs against the landscape grain. And, when you’re ready to come back from a return trip to leave again, you simply reverse this as you head out to where you’re coming from.
Sorry if this is confusing. Don’t worry, Dave, your chauffeur knows the way. He’s probably from New England.
We have gypsy moths and dump politics. You have jet-skis and Jeb Bush. I don’t often laugh out loud, but when I saw an audibly tanned huckster selling potted maple tree saplings from the back of his Hummer, my deciduous side nearly ran off the road.
We have garages, shutters and sod. You have carports, window awnings and turf. Yes, there is a difference between sod and turf. One is fed by the bones of a great-great-great-grandma, buried right over there. The other is a skin graft from a migrated brother-in-law’s lawn and garden center.
We have tractors lugging along in the breakdown lanes. You have golf carts in the gutters.
On a good day, however, we have tractors pulling disabled golf carts out of the gutters. It’s a cottage industry up heah.
And, lastly, we have signs warning of thin ice. You have signs that caution against swimming with alligators in the public parks. My favorite was a bridge sign on the Intercoastal Waterway:
Warning! During Hurricanes, The Western Leg Of This Bridge Is Under Water.”
I can’t think of a New England peril equivalent to finding myself trapped in the north-by-east corner of my limo, heading south-by-west, and being consumed by a storm-tossed reptile at the end of my column --- unless it’s sidestepping mad cowpatties in a blinding blizzard on my way to an arctic commode in a self-refrigerating cheesehouse.
Pick the pen back up, Dave, and forget Hollywood. Nothing kills the image of an exploding, defenseless toilet more than seeing it on film. A humorist’s helpless hopper should remain blown up where it belongs:
Privy to our imagination.
See you in the spring, Dave.
Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.
E-MAIL ELWIN!
In the grip of another New England winter, I imagine you sitting in Miami on your “defenseless toilet,” remembering how you used to be funny in the place where neon goes to die. There in the land of palm fronds, aqua-toys and one-season radials, shadow-bathing in the climate where underwear is outerware.
Southern Florida --- the home base for the folks Fran Lebowitz calls, “the audibly tan” --- versus my Northern New England digs of “the pale stinkers,” (that’s a New Hampshire inside joke from Massachusetts).
Then again, I wonder if Florida is really where you’re hanging your shingle. There are now so many ways to contact you in care of someone else, maybe you’re living in a perpetual motion limousine like a low-flying Howard Hughes, with a gaggle of brown-nosing comedy writers Kleenexing imaginary fly-scat from your laptop.
Besides, we all know real Floridians have no tan. Just as real Yankees know that today’s audible frostbite is tomorrow’s three-toed boot, native Sunshine Staters know that yesterday’s audible tan is today’s noisy melanoma.
You once wrote to me: “Elwin, I don’t know about great minds melding, but maybe our minds are.” I was so moved by that, I smathered it on the cover of my new book: TOOLKIT IN PARADISE,” at no cost to you.
But, I now need you to help me dispel this notion that all Yankees spend their days bag-balming their moaning bovines enroute to maple sugar cheesehouses, and their nights running triptoe to the outhouse with the backdoor flannel flapping on their L.L. Bean union suits.
If you’ll accept this, I’ll try to promote the idea that all Miamians are not blue-haired dwarfs (former Yankee eight-toed retirees) being ushered around in wheelchairs by exiled Cubans.
Like all stereotypes, the truths lie somewhere between Disney World and the cheesefarms. But, there’s a few items you’ll have to help me with, leftover from my last trip to the Orange Peninsula:
Your winter weather anchorpersons report the “tan factor,” the flipside of wind-chill in my neighborhood. And, they seem to do it with a gleeful, high-handed reference to the stormy radar blotches and sinking temperatures gripping us beleaguered, hop-footed sodbusters in the Northeast Kingdom.
The hen of our neighbors appears to us as a goose.”
I think some beleaguered Chinese weatherman said that.
In New England, the start/finish lines are on the same fence posts. Everything begins where it ends. Southern Florida, however, is the act of going; there is no end or beginning to the road. It is the home of the transplanted transient. We know it holds water only because it leaks. If you want to go somewhere and get there, you have to live here in New England.
True, sometimes you can’t get there from here, but that’s because you have no business leaving here and/or going there in the first place.
I saw rows of thrift shops, “dollar” stores, pawnbrokers and storage warehouses where you can buy, trade, sell, hock or put on hold whatever it is you can’t bring wherever it is you’re going --- until you get back to where you finished.
Even the used car dealerships had little mobile home offices in parking lots with signs declaring: “BUY HERE, PAY HERE.” This apparently caters to the car buyer on the run, unaccustomed to being anywhere long enough to complete both transactions. But, it doesn’t exactly inspire consumer confidence when your car dealer’s office has its own trailer hitch.
To be fair, this fly-by-night commerce has crept into our backwoods, but only because we’re all beginning to forget our endings.
Florida water quality is not a concern; no one drinks it, anyway. Quantity is the thing. Even-numbered homes water their lawns between four and eight a.m. on designated dates, etc. Commercial car washes (the only way to do it legally) are modified with some kind of citrus hybrid technology that uses sixty per cent less water than their northern counterparts.
Get caught washing your car or hosing down your kudzu on an off-day and the crime is comparable to chucking a cherry bomb in an occupied sub-zero outhouse.
And, by using 60 percent less water, your cars get only 40 percent clean. This was confirmed by a finger-message I saw written in the dusty patina of a hatchback’s hatch, which read: “I only wish my wife was this dirty.”
There are no homeless in Florida. Home denotes shelter and destination. Most of the year, shelter is not necessary. And, because no one (including the people with shelters and destinations) seems to live there, anyone who might be deemed homeless is really just passing through on their way back to where they left to get there.
Contrary to New England motoring, nothing in your community is tangential or obscure. There are only four compass points. No one goes northwest. It’s north. Then west. Nothing curves, winds, loops or runs against the landscape grain. And, when you’re ready to come back from a return trip to leave again, you simply reverse this as you head out to where you’re coming from.
Sorry if this is confusing. Don’t worry, Dave, your chauffeur knows the way. He’s probably from New England.
We have gypsy moths and dump politics. You have jet-skis and Jeb Bush. I don’t often laugh out loud, but when I saw an audibly tanned huckster selling potted maple tree saplings from the back of his Hummer, my deciduous side nearly ran off the road.
We have garages, shutters and sod. You have carports, window awnings and turf. Yes, there is a difference between sod and turf. One is fed by the bones of a great-great-great-grandma, buried right over there. The other is a skin graft from a migrated brother-in-law’s lawn and garden center.
We have tractors lugging along in the breakdown lanes. You have golf carts in the gutters.
On a good day, however, we have tractors pulling disabled golf carts out of the gutters. It’s a cottage industry up heah.
And, lastly, we have signs warning of thin ice. You have signs that caution against swimming with alligators in the public parks. My favorite was a bridge sign on the Intercoastal Waterway:
Warning! During Hurricanes, The Western Leg Of This Bridge Is Under Water.”
I can’t think of a New England peril equivalent to finding myself trapped in the north-by-east corner of my limo, heading south-by-west, and being consumed by a storm-tossed reptile at the end of my column --- unless it’s sidestepping mad cowpatties in a blinding blizzard on my way to an arctic commode in a self-refrigerating cheesehouse.
Pick the pen back up, Dave, and forget Hollywood. Nothing kills the image of an exploding, defenseless toilet more than seeing it on film. A humorist’s helpless hopper should remain blown up where it belongs:
Privy to our imagination.
See you in the spring, Dave.
Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.
E-MAIL ELWIN!
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