When I was young I was a bit of a loner. I generally felt
like I was on the edge of the crowd, of any crowd, and the more I tried to
fight my way into it, the more I ended up on the periphery. Even though I found
others who felt the same, like Steve (and Jason, and Ben and Jake and many others) I came to believe that I was an introvert by nature. It wasn’t
until much later, in my twenties, when I took a job in sales and moved to
Chicago that I started to better understand the deep craving and need I had to
connect with others. I honed that need into an asset. And it led me to realize
that the whole time, I’d just been an introspective extrovert, by which I mean I like to talk to other people about myself.
I’m half kidding there.
But only half. The other part of it, well, it might hit closer to home. Couldn’t one argue, after all, that introspective extroversion is precisely what I’m practicing here? Open
source diary keeping? A protracted public therapy session as art? Giving away front row seat tickets to a cage match between a writer and his demons?
That would probably be true if it were my story alone, but
it isn’t. It’s also the story of the people and places I’ve interacted with
along the way, especially those that are, for any number of reasons, unable to
tell it for themselves.
I gather and recount their stories, and in doing so, bit by bit, I’m filling in those empty
chairs around the table and illuminating the darkness once again. With funny
stories. War stories. Love stories. Ghost stories. Entry after entry, until I’ve
turned my memory inside out, for all to see. Until my own story becomes
the sum of all the characters and curiosities and wonders I’ve chased down or crossed paths with.
I’m wandering this world, collecting myself in
experiences like picking up pieces of some massive jigsaw puzzle. Once
assembled, will it reveal itself to be a distorted fun house mirror? A postcard from a time and place that I can’t return to? Or will it form the frame of a doorway to something new and as of yet
unimaginable?
The only way for us to know is to keep writing, to keep
reading, keep searching, alone and together. We’ll get there when we get there and not a moment sooner.
Most people are familiar with the Cuban Sandwich, but as it turns out, that is just one of many unique dishes you can find in central Florida. I opted not to include this chapter in my upcoming book, Secret Tampa Bay, primarily for two reasons: it didn't really focus exclusively on Tampa Bay, and, unlike other chapters, it seemed like I was trying to combine too many separate things rather than focusing on just one. Having a limited number of pages and chapters required me to be selective in what I included - I'm still proud of the work I did on the chapter, even if it didn't make the final cut as part of the book. I hope you enjoy it.
Epicurious
Are there any
other uniquely local dishes or secret recipes?
The Cuban Sandwich tends to hog the headlines as far as local cuisine
goes, but it is far from the only thing that Tampa Bay has to offer for more
adventurous eaters. Here’s a short list of other options guaranteed to sate
your curiosity (if not your hunger):
Scachatta: What happens
when a Sicilian-born version of tomato pie is adopted and raised by a Cuban
family? The answer is magic. Like the tomato pie you may have had elsewhere, it
is served as room temperature square slices. So what makes it Tampa-specific?
Ground beef in the sauce, egg yolks in the bread and a unique blend of spices
that give it an extra kick. You can find it at La Segunda, Moreno Bakery,
Housewife Bakery and Alessi Bakery.
Swamp Cabbage: The name may
sound less than appetizing to the uninitiated, but plenty of locals swear by
it. Technically it’s hearts of Sabal Palmetto (aka Cabbage Palm) and has a
taste described as being somewhat similar to artichokes. Finding it might
require a trip to either the Cypress Inn in Cross City or to the annual Swamp
Cabbage Festival in LaBelle.
Sour Orange
Pie: Long before Key Lime became Florida’s citrus pie of choice, the
Spaniards are credited with having brought sour oranges from Seville, the juice
of which were blended into a creamy custard. The absence of condensed milk in
the filling further differentiates this tart pie from its more recent
relatives. It awaits your discovery at the Yearling Restaurant in Hawthorne.
Island Hotel
Heart of Palm Salad: This Gibb’s family recipe features hearts of
palm, fruit, candied ginger and green ice cream (usually either pistachio or
lime). There are now several variations, but if you want the original, you’re
heading to Cedar Key.
If you would rather do your own cooking, you can find a
wide variety of exotic meats at the Heights Meat Market, including gator, frog,
wild boar, python and kangaroo.
More than a
Mouthful
What: Little-known local delicacies
Where: Multiple locations
Cost: Variable
Pro Tip: “Your body is not a temple. It’s an amusement park. Enjoy the
ride.” – Anthony Bourdain
On June 16th, 2012, eight years ago today, I married the woman I love. I was fortune to have found her and to have shared the past decade of my life with her. Our lives have changes significantly since we met - it seems like lifetimes ago that we exchanged our vows under an unexpected swarm of dragonflies (which we have since adopted as a symbol of our union), and in some ways it has been a lifetime. We don't live in the same small apartment or even the same state we started in and we've both changed jobs and industries multiple times. We've shared fantastic travel experiences and weathered challenges including recessions, snowstorms, hurricanes, protests and more recently a global pandemic. And through it all I could not hope to have found a more adaptable, genuine and supportive partner. I am constantly reminded that it takes a very special and patient kind of person to deal with me for ten minutes let alone a full decade, but she nods and smiles and shares the ride with me, even when my trajectory and train of thought go off the rails and crash through terrain that neither of us are familiar with. For that I am eternally grateful.
The piece below was previously published in my ebook of poetry, "Turning the Stars." It's every bit as relevant now as it was when I first wrote it. Having a true partner, I have learned, means having someone who accepts all of your quirks and oddities and history, even if it doesn't always make sense.
Young Summer Gibberish
We were kids without fences, without unlimited text messaging - who needed that, when a magic eight ball could tell us all we needed to know - to call someone or not.
Text-based computer games - pale green glowing cursor (a green you never see anymore, except on monitors in old movies), awaiting our commands while the high definition wilderness behind our friends' houses stretched across the planet.
We learned kabbalistic quack Cracker Jack magic tricks to cure migraines in dust mote choked sunbeams through the rafters of a day camp barn loft – one hand on the forehead and one hand behind the head palms facing each other "visualize streams of deep blue and green and aqua."
Maybe when I tell you all these things, like a deluge of verbal pop cap candy fizz trivia, you'll tilt your head to a cascade of dark hair; your burnt umber eyes hanging slightly ajar. Baffled, both of us for a moment until you put your hand in mine, letting me know you don't mind my gibberish.
When I travel, I'm usually focused on going from one place to the next to the next, but sometimes the places between places have their own stories to tell. (The piece below was previously published on Atlas Obscura. You can see it here.)
The alley connecting two of country music's most historic venues has a rich history of its own.
Walking from the gates of the Ryman Auditorium (which hosted the Grande Ole Opry for a time) to the back door of Tootsies Orchard Lounge is, for country music fans, akin to a short but holy pilgrimage.
It’s hard to fathom just how many country music superstars have passed between the Ryman Auditorium and Tootsies over the years. Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Chet Atkins, and Hank Williams are just a few of the famous musicians to walk this alley. Nelson, in fact, immortalized the alley in a song line “seventeen steps to Tootsies and thirty-four back,” presumably alluding to having a few cocktails at the lounge and staggering out afterward.
According to legends, the alley between the venues actually became a venue itself. During the 1950s, two young boys would sing and play guitar to Opry stars passing by in hopes of catching their attention. Night after night they played the alley, honing their craft and hoping for a break.
That break came when Chet Atkins happened to pass by and offered the boys a chance to perform with him on stage at the Opry that night. They were only too happy to do so, and went on to achieve stardom of their own as the Everly Brothers.
If you pass through the alley, you can follow, literally, in the footsteps of country music legends. A set of footprints have been inlaid on the ground.
I've lived in Tampa now for almost four years, and I've found acceptance here. It took plenty of salt water to wash all the layers of big northern cities from my skin, but I feel like I fit in now. Some of that has to do as much with the place as with me - Florida has been host to transplants for centuries - the Spanish, the English, Americans and more recently "northerners." In my travels though, I've found that some southern cities and towns are less accepting of this, and though they invite you in with a warm smile and a beer-battered meal, they subtly and politely remind you that their south and yours are not the same thing.
Deeper South
You can gawk and point fingers
At the monuments to those
Of cursed memory.
Snap pictures on the sly
Of the bones of the saints
And the Fiji Mermaids
That we keep shackled
In the vaults of our cathedrals.
Fumble your blunt tongue
Over the broken sidewalks
Of our quaint street names and sayings.
But it isn’t your blood That once cut rivers through the
Fields coarse hands work.
Those names carved in the stones
Set atop that hill, they
Aren’t any relations of yours.
To you it’s a second language; Rebranding our memories With your Instagram photos.
You’re fashioned from data analytics,
Not shale or corn cob, or red clay
Bound in plastic, not kudzu, and
The deep delta mud under your fingernails
Wasn’t born there.
As a child, you never learned the rhymes
That teach you which path will grant you
Safe passage past the witch’s cave.
So occupy the outer rings of our circles
Sample our music and shine
Purchase a plot of land,
But know you well, Not one or all
Of those things
Will ever make you
In my travels throughout Florida and the southeastern US as a whole, visiting various lesser known monuments and historical sites has revealed to me a stark and disheartening difference in the way some of them have been preserved. While removing or relocating confederate civil war monuments and statues has triggered outrage among some (especially and not surprisingly white supremacy groups), important historical reminders of black history such as cemeteries and, in at least one case, an entire town that was destroyed by racial violence, have been plowed over and erased from the map for decades with hardly any notice. In the wake of George Floyd's murder and the ongoing protests around the country over systemic racism and police brutality, it seemed like the right time to shine a spotlight on some of these little known spots. There are a great many other sites, including those along the Florida Black Heritage Trail, but this just reflects some of those with which I am most familiar.
1. The Harlem of the South
During segregation, roughly half of all black people living in Tampa occupied the area known as the Scrub. Central Avenue there became the black business and entertainment district, known as the Harlem of the South, with almost 100 shops and storefronts. Those businesses included a boarding house where "The St. Pete Blues" was recorded by a little known musician at the time named Ray Charles. That song would go on to be his first major hit. Today Central Ave is the site of Perry Harvey, Sr. Park and displays along the sidewalk illustrate the development, culture, history and key figures that made Central Avenue a success up until it's decline the sixties. The shooting of a 19-year-old black man named Martin Chambers by a white police officer in 1967 led to rioting and essentially closed the chapter on Central Avenue's many decades of prosperity.
2. Progress, One Step at a Time
In other posts I've mentioned my deep affection for St. Augustine, with it's centuries of history dating back to Spanish and English occupation. On a more recent trip there, I discovered that it also contains an important piece of much more recent, Civil Rights history, in the form of several bronze footprints near the corner of King Street and St. George Street. Known as Andrew Young's Crossing, the footprints terminate abruptly at the spot where the young activist was knocked unconscious by an angry white mob while leading a peaceful protest march on behalf of Dr. Martin Luther King. Young and his marchers remained true to the ideal of passive resistance and endured the brutal beatings. This has been cited as one of the events which led President Lyndon Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Bill on July 2nd, 1964. Young went on to become America's first African American U.N. Ambassador and subsequently Mayor of Atlanta. He has since returned to St. Augustine multiple times, completing the path from which he was once forcefully prevented.
3. Where is Rosewood?
If you've ever visited the quaint beach community of Cedar Key, you likely drove past a historical marker along Florida State Road 24. That marker is essentially all that remains of the town of Rosewood, which was torn apart and set ablaze when racial tensions erupted into a violent massacre. Rosewood was once a peaceful lumber town, but that all changed on January 1st, 1923 when a white woman accused a black man there of assaulting her. According to the marker, "In the search for her alleged attacker, whites terrorized and killed Rosewood residents. In the days of fear and violence that followed, many Rosewood citizens sought refuge in the nearby woods. White merchant John M. Wright and other courageous whites sheltered some of the fleeing men, women and children. Whites burned Rosewood and looted livestock and property; two were killed while attacking a home. Five blacks also lost their lives: Sam Carter, who was tortured for information and shot to death." The death toll is actually now believed to have much higher and that the female accuser was trying to cover up an affair. Though profoundly tragic and disturbing, many have not heard of the events that transpired in Rosewood, because for almost 60 years the massacre was a taboo subject, until former residents began reluctantly opening up about it in 1982.
4. Green Benches, Invisible Bars
As far back as 1916, the city of St. Petersburg knew it was going to become a major tourist destination. Toward this end, Mayor Al Lang realized that amid the beaches, shopping and other attractions, visitors would appreciate a comfortable place to sit. So he began regulating the dimensions, size and color (green) of the benches around the city. Thousands of them sprung up - you can still see the smiling faces of people sitting on them in old postcards. Smiling, old, white faces, that is. According to Ray Arsenault – John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, "the black residents of St. Petersburg had their place, but that place was not on the green benches." They weren't expressly forbidden from them, but they didn't have to be - it was simply understood. Eventually, in the 1960's, the City realized the error they had made and removed the benches in an attempt to rebrand the city as younger as more diverse. But the damage was done and the connections between the green benches and systemic racism was inseparable. Today you can still find one of those few remaining green benches in the Florida Holocaust Museum.
5. Separate and Unequal... in Death as in Life
I dedicated a chapter to this subject in my upcoming book, "Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure," and the story is unfolding in real time as more cemeteries are discovered, so I won't say too much about it. Suffice it to say that as many as a dozen of the Tampa Bay area's oldest black cemeteries very quietly slipped off the map and became lost. The oldest of these, Zion Cemetery, was recently discovered to have been underneath public housing for the last 70 years. In their haste to cash in on available land, the developers never even bothered to move the coffins. To compound the pain of those family members who are learning that the graves of their relatives were ignored and built over, many of the residents there have had to be relocated. More recently another black cemetery was discovered under a local high school and now it appears that a third may have been found in Clearwater. Still others will likely be rediscovered in the coming days - a painful reminder of how black history and bodies have been bulldozed, erased and forgotten.
As mentioned previously - these are just a very few of the vast number of historically and culturally significant black history sites in central Florida. There's the home of Zora Neale Hurston, Fort Mose, the Bing Rooming House Museum, school houses, churches, cemeteries and monuments. I plan to explore this topic further, and I look forward, as always, to sharing with you what I discover.
I flip the turn signal and make the next left. The beams of the headlights of my Ford Taurus slice through the jet black darkness as the road bends and curves under a canopy of trees.
After we pass a half dozen intersections, Steve jumps in with a "right."
I flip on the turn signal again and we wind deeper into the unknown, my friends alternating in giving instructions.
We didn't do it that often and the three of us didn't spend a lot of time together. I was the shared friend between the two of them - Jason, with whom I went to the same high school and Steve with whom I had grown up. I seem to recall that the three of us had just finished a new issue of Dharmacation, which was the successor to Driftwood, the magazine that Steve and Geoff and I had had started together - a local zine/literary magazine (possibly one of the very first to include online submissions). Geoff had moved on to other projects and Steve and I had continued our endeavors under a new name, and brought Jason in. It didn't have the same dynamic, but it worked well enough, for a while.
Our goal that particular evening was just to get as far from what we knew as we could, while still being "responsible" enough to get back home at a reasonable time. I was living with my dad at that point and he may or may not have been traveling in some other state or country, so "a reasonable time" was pretty loosely defined. Generally I interpreted it to mean at least a couple hours before sunrise.
The few times we tried this activity/experiment or whatever you want to call it, we seemed to always end up in Morrisville out around New Hope and the New Jersey border. The challenge was to get to some place we had never been before, and then see if we could retrace our route back to those roads and streets that we knew like the back of our hands.
It was a weird bonding activity, but hey, we were weird kids. While some kids drank or smoked or played with drugs, our form of rebellion manifested itself in trying to get lost - something that each of us had been advised to do on a fairly frequent basis. And as we attempted to get lost and then unlost, we listened to punk rock and alternative music, or we just turned the radio on and listed to the Princeton college radio station. I think REM's album, Automatic for the People came out around that time - maybe that's what we were listening to.
There was a sense of satisfaction when we finally realized that we had achieved our goal and nothing looked familiar anymore. And there was an equal sense of accomplishment in getting back to our small known world. Manufactured stress and artificial relief - but to us it was real enough.
And now, nearly 30 years later, Steve is gone, Jason is somewhere, and I find that I'm doing something similar to what the three of us did together as teenagers. I go for long drives, hours some times, looking for something I haven't seen before. It's different now in that I always know where I'm going - I have a specific destination in mind. And you can't really get lost anymore - not with seemingly every point on earth now mapped out in a smartphone application. I don't have to stop and ask for directions, unless what I'm looking for is really hard to find - a miniature roadside monument, an abandoned cabin deep in a swamp, an enigmatic gravestone or something to that effect. It's never because I don't know where I am.
Having to pull into a gas station and have someone behind the counter pull out a map and puzzle over how the hell we ended up wherever the hell we did - that's probably not an experience that teenagers today or at any time in the future will be able to relate to. We've lost our ability to be lost, and with it, I think, something important, a kind of wonder. Or rather, the potential for wonder. We don't puzzle over what's around the next bend in the street - we can see it all on google maps. Where to stop for a snack, where to fill up with gas, where to take the best picture - it's all right there at our fingertips. But once known, once the route is planned and plotted and mapped, it cannot ever again be unknown. There are some things that can only be found when you're not looking for anything. And for all the big, ten dollar words I've so carefully accumulated and collected over the years, I have trouble articulating quite how that makes me feel - trying to hold onto a shared memory when those you shared it with and when even the very world in which you shared it have all vanished. Wonderloss, I guess; a very specific type of nostalgia heartache, and it's heavy on me tonight as I write this.
I feel rather than hear that familiar, silent voice whispering, "go on, get out of here. Get lost...
