T-De Leon Discovers Florida, or See If the National Guard Will Pick Up Chips, Too

I flew out Friday night and returned home Sunday afternoon, a quick trip down south to see how T was doing.

He's doing very well, thank you, having gone from being a short muscular white man to a short muscular dark brown man.

Oh, and one other thing: now that he has discovered Florida, he wants it closed to tourists.

"Look at these," he says, shaking a child's plastic bucket at me. "They leave their stuff on the beach when they go home, certain that someone else will use them, I suppose, when really all that happens is that it gets sucked out by the tide."

He's got a point, of course.

T now lives on an island, far from the icy climes of the Great State of Minnesota, in an area defined almost entirely by banking institutions, all-you-can-eat buffets and medical facilities.

And the ocean. We spent a lot of time in it, bouncing blithely and limiting our saltwater intake to only those waves that hit us in the face.

It's an incredible thing to live on a strip of land that is a block or so from the ocean on the one side and four to five blocks from the ocean on the other and it suits T just fine.

Me, I don't trust it.

The signs posted along Gulf Drive are clearly marked: it is a hurricane evacuation route, one lane in each direction.

That's one lane in each direction, two bridges.

For cryin' out loud.

I told him if a hurricane hits that he should forget the car, stuff the two cats in a carrier and run, that he'd stand a better chance of actually getting off the island hoofing it than sitting in the inevitable traffic jam/fist fight that will occur before, during, and after the hurricane hits.

He pointed out to me that I am prone to death by freezing.

I pointed out to him that I am still a stranger to storm surges, objects delivered through living room walls via 200 MPH winds, and waiting for the National Guard to deliver emergency cat food.

It's nice to see that our relationship has not changed.