Etrange Histoire

It was a Friday night in December. Here in Florida, December Fridays are never filled with that wonderful chill and the anticipation of a Saturday morning snow. That’s what I used to love about New York. We’d go out on a Friday night in the winter, get plastered and then on our way home at 5:30am after chowing down on some diner food, we’d see the most beautiful thing in the world – gigantic puffs of snow gently caressing the breeze as they headed for the concrete and brick. We’d stop and stare up at it for a while, and then trudge home to curl up on the couch with the lights off so we could watch the feathery scene unfold.

At the moment that is nothing more than a distant dream to me. It may not have actually happened. When you come to Florida you forget about the cold, what it feels like. Fifty degrees starts feeling bitter cold, and your veins turn to ice if you so much as touch water that isn’t the temperature of bath water. So a Friday night in December in Florida provides a much different feeling than a Friday night in New York, for some reasons which I will give here, and for countless others which I will not outline. It would just take too long, but use your imagination.

I think it was about fifty-five degrees on that particular Friday night. I remember wearing a long-sleeved shirt and feeling the icy cold penetrating the fabric and reaching my skin. It was around 10:00pm and Russell and I were bored. He mentioned that his friend Cathy had told him about this neighborhood where everybody decorates their lawns for Christmas in a competition to see who can waste the most electricity. I was skeptical – as a person under the age of 65 I suppose I feel that I should have something a bit, let’s say, less mature to do on a Friday night than go for a drive. It seemed to me that if I were to agree to “go on a drive” with Russell, we would suddenly turn into an old married couple who retired 10 years ago and were so bored that they resorted to taking Sunday drives and playing Bingo every Tuesday – or going for an oh-so-exciting drive on a Friday night to see a gazillion lights. Big Friday night plans everyone!

That idea did not appeal to me at all. I had already been called a hermit and a quitter by all my downtown friends who missed my antics and punchy anecdotes. You see, two months ago I decided to go on a hiatus from working at Tastings and hanging out downtown, so it had been a while since I had seen a lot of these people. I was not actually a hermit, it’s just that I became a beach bum instead. I need change every once in a while to keep things interesting because I get bored really easily. To my downtown crowd, the only thing worse than a hermit is a beach bum. When they found out that I had become a beach bum they started calling me a loser. It was all in good fun, but recently I’ve started believing it.

So anyway, my conscience told me that taking a drive meant that I would be living up to my growing reputation for being a hermit, a loser and an old maid. My mother thinks I’m going to be an old maid because I am not yet married and I don’t go out and meet enough eligible bachelors (whatever that means). In her opinion, I should be out all weekend scanning bars and libraries for potential marriage victims. She even worries that I’m a lesbian. On occasion I tell her detailed accounts of my fabled lesbian encounters just to get a rise out of her. I’ll start off with a very serious face, “Mom, I think I’m into women.” She gasps and her eyes widen in disbelief and disappointment, and she has to slowly take a seat before I start my story. It’s not that she has anything against being gay, it’s that all she really wants from my union with a man is grandchildren. Me being a lesbian completely annihilates all possibility of me conceiving biological children. I would adopt though, if it came to that. But after I’ve had a bit of fun with my story, I start feeling slightly guilty and stop, look her straight in the eyes and say, “Mother really, did you believe that? Wow, I am a great liar!” Then I laugh and walk out the door.

I am not a loser and I am not an old maid. I really did not want to go on a drive on a Friday night, but for some reason I agreed. Maybe it was Russell’s stellar green eyes, or maybe I was just too exhausted to argue my case (after all, I had only slept about 15 hours that entire week). Either way, I found myself agreeing to go on a drive on a Friday night, and so we headed for Seminole.

Halfway there I started feeling even more uncomfortable with the idea, as if I were admitting my old age and ultimate demise. Every time I saw Christmas lights in a lawn, I would exclaim, “Wow, that was an awesome light show, I’ve seen enough, let’s go home.” The first couple of times this happened, Russell laughed, but after about 10 of these exclamations I think he wanted to smack me. I wanted to smack myself, not only because I was annoying me, but because I had agreed to go on this drive on a Friday night in the first place. I made Russell promise not to tell anyone. If this got out it would be the end of my “cool” days. I would officially be lame.

We finally got there and I had a pit in my stomach. What if I saw someone I knew? How could I explain my presence in Seminole? I didn’t even know where I was. I could have been in the North Pole, for all I knew. That sure is what it seemed like. Every yard had some kind of snowy creature or Santa dressed in a red suit. The irony is dense during Christmas in Florida. Finally we saw a Santa chillin’ in a hammock wearing a flowered shirt, board shorts, sunglasses and flip-flops. It was a relief. I was happy to see that at least one Floridian decided to let go of the red suit and snow. All hail board shorts and sand!

Nearly every house had some form of ridiculous light display or another – I would say each lit house probably had about a $450 electricity for lights alone. I imagine the entire neighborhood spent tens of thousands of dollars on electricity. I bet Florida Power and Light loves this neighborhood. Then there were the darkened yards – the grinches of this miniature Christmas Light City. It was clear that they were the outcasts of the hood. Nobody talked to these jerks. When everyone was out in the evening watering their palm trees, these were the guys that everyone ignored. No one invited them to Christmas parties or baked cookies and pies for them. No one offered to watch their cats while they were on vacation in Lake Tahoe. They were blacklisted. That will probably be me in 15 years. I like the idea of being the grinch. I don’t want your crappy cookies and pies anyway.

It turns out that the Lunatic Christmas Light Show wasn’t so bad after all. The best part was the single Jewish house in the entire neighborhood. They just had a gigantic Menorah in their front yard that looked rather conspicuously like a gigantic middle finger. In essence, they were telling the rest of these wackos to take their Santas and Rudolphs and snowmen and reindeer and sleds and Jesus’ and crosses and shove it all up their yule-tided asses. Simply poetic.