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The Snowbird’s Lament
Hoosiers wear pajamas on Sunday morning at home. Many Floridians wear them everywhere, all the time. The only Hoosiers who wear house shoes to dinner are the same Hoosiers who play Bingo. Floridians wear house shoes to church.
The servants at Downton Abbey dress better than elected officials in Florida, well, maybe Indiana too, but you get the metaphor.
Half of God’s waiting room sits around, not in, swimming pools speaking English with funny Yankee accents while the other half mow, trim, plant and construct while speaking Spanish.
Peg and I fall into category one, but we speak proper Hoosier. We only use our high school Spanish when we leave our geriatric condo complex.
There are parks everywhere in Florida. Nobody uses them except people with dogs. Indiana does not waste farmland on parks. Hoosiers flock to the few parks they can find and play softball while Floridians remain Bingo-bound and look at all the parks.
Indiana in winter provides proper weather. Ice, snow, sleet and frostbite are reveled in by Hoosiers who honor school closings and worship tow trucks. Floridians don parkas at 60 °, give unsolicited advice to Hoosiers such as, “Just quit your job and move down here”, and ask, “What’s a tow truck?”
The grass in Indiana has the courtesy to go dormant in October and remain in repose until April. Grass in Florida prides itself on providing year round off the books employment to the three million illegal immigrants who have accepted Emma Lazarus’ open invitation on the Statue of Liberty. By the way, within a month of arrival, each traveler puts, at least, two more cars into Florida’s kamikaze traffic. Hoosiers drive cars too, but in Indiana, dodge’em as a sport is discouraged.
Hoosiers eat breakfast at breakfast time, i.e., before eight a.m. Restaurants in Florida do not even open until nine and Floridians consider it gauche to eat an egg before ten.
People in Indiana harness the Ohio and Wabash Rivers for industry and recreation. Florida is also surrounded by water, but the only ones who use the ocean are a few middle aged surfers who greet everyone with, “Hey, Dude.”
In summary, Floridians dress funny, talk funny, drive crazy and have no winter. Hoosiers are normal, but freeze half the year. If you want to contact Peg or me before spring, send us a letter.
And 9 Tiny Flamingos
Peg and I spent Christmas in Florida. It was sunny some of the time and the lowest temperature was 70°. Of course, because Peg was in charge, our main pastime was shopping. Oh, we could have played golf or gone to the ocean, but our major activity was avoiding being rammed on the streets by some demolition driving snowbird from New York or being rammed in WalMart by some bargain chasing octogenarian pushing a cart with one hand and a cane with the other.
I actually got to where the challenge of “dodge cart” was exhilarating. Since I am in my 70’s, I had a distinct advantage over most of the treasure hunters. However, it was not unusual for some blue-haired, tennis shoe wearing lady, clad in a tee shirt emblazoned with some catchy phrase such as, “So’s your old man”, to surprise me with a shove to the back of my knees.
According to Peg, we had to go to Florida at least once in 2015 to check on the small condo her mom gave us to make sure it was okay; it wasn’t. The first thing we ran into was a commode in need of surgery. We fixed it with only three trips to Lowe’s. Then the “new” garbage disposal leaked. Not to worry. One more trip to Lowe’s and 80 bucks did the trick.
Just as I had Peg convinced to return to where Christmas is celebrated properly, the two main windows were damaged by a rainstorm. As I am a man, I was willing to ignore things for another year, but Peg’s female side took over. She demanded we act responsibly. So we stayed to save the interior from even more rain that the Weather App predicted.
I knew the repair jobs were not that much more than we face in Indiana on a regular basis. That was not really the problem. What caused me to continually dream of a northern Christmas was the amalgam of tinsel and plastic contraptions Floridians use for Christmas decorations.
If one pictures Clement Moore’s vision from ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas then juxtaposes it with a scene from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, you too can have Christmas in Florida.
As Peg and I wandered around in short sleeves and short pants, we saw numerous attempts to reconcile Florida with Christmas. There were white plastic snowmen sitting on lush green lawns as they were being sprayed by automatic sprinklers. There were Santa Clauses, plastic of course, dressed in heavy red snow suits. There was the normal plethora of tiny white lights but now on palm trees.
And worst of all, there were plastic sleighs sitting in sand piles. At least they were not being pulled by eight flamingos led by a ninth with a glowing red beak.
Jesus of Palestine
During these Twelve Days of Christmas my thoughts have been occupied with the birth of Jesus. According to Matthew, Chapter 2, and Luke, Chapter 2, Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of Herod the Great, which was from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C. The Roman emperor Pompeii conquered the area of Palestine, which included Bethlehem, in 63 B.C. Bethlehem is an ancient city whose history dates back a thousand years before Christ.
Today Bethlehem is in the West Bank area of Palestine about ten kilometers south of modern day Israel, which was carved out of Palestine in 1948 by the United Nations.
Jesus was born in the city of Bethlehem. Bethlehem was then and is now in the country of Palestine. Some who wish to deny ancient or biblical or Roman or contemporary borders may cling to the fiction that Palestine never existed and Bethlehem today is part of the so-called “Palestinian Authority”. Such legerdemain simply pours fuel on the conflagration that is the Middle East. Call it a rose or call it a thorn; Palestine is Palestine.
Just as so many who reach our shores from foreign lands know, if your child is born in the United States, he/she is an American citizen. Ergo, either Jesus was born and died a Palestinian or, if one is a believer, Jesus was born and still is a Palestinian.
When the National Judicial College had me teach fourteen Palestinian judges and lawyers, including Palestine’s Attorney General who lived in Bethlehem, I found them evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. The Attorney General was Palestinian Christian and very proud to live in the “Little Town” of Jesus’s birth. He held out hope the Prince of Peace would return and bring peace to His birthplace and the world.
In this season of hoped for peace, my thoughts have turned to the origin of our troubles in the Middle East. Until the country of Palestine was occupied by forces enabled by our power and money, America had no problems with Palestinians. There was and is no just reason for us to help oppress Palestinians. We have somehow gradually stumbled our way into a morass of injustice and intrigue.
It would be interesting to see what today’s government of Israel would do with a group of rabble rousers such as the twelve apostles as led by that radical Palestinian, Jesus. Would Jesus today, just as Jesus two thousand years ago, be arrested at the behest of the Israeli hierarchy and held in jail?
Perhaps the people of contemporary Jerusalem would call for the release of some other alleged criminal, such as a contemporary Barabbas, and call for the crucifixion of Jesus as a terrorist. If so, would we in America finally have the scales fall from our eyes or would we play the part of new Romans and be complicit? At a minimum, now that we find ourselves in this deep hole, maybe we should at least stop digging.
Anyway, Merry Twelve Days of Christmas to all and to all a peaceful New Year.