Eight Years / Writing the Wrongs

It feels wrong in so many different ways. Wrong that so much time has passed now, that the world has changed so much in so many ways you wouldn't have believed and didn't get to see. Wrong that I'll be there (virtually) this Friday for the Bar Mitzvah of your youngest son and you won't. Wrong that I go sometimes weeks without saying your name out loud. Wrong that I still haven't been to your gravesite, that maybe I'm just still not ready to see that and be forced to accept the reality of it. One day soon, I think I will.

But time keeps moving, and I've been moving along with it. My fourth book will be out on shelves soon, so if you were here I'd get to say that you were wrong to think that if something was going to happen for us as writers, it already would have. I'm working on a fifth and sixth book now as well, and suddenly writing fiction again. The floodgates are open like never before and I'm just trying to keep up with all the ideas that are spilling out of my head now. I wish more than anything sometimes that I could share those with you, but that, it seems, is exactly what it cost to find myself here - having left off a life of trying to be some person I thought others wanted me to be in order to become who I was supposed to be after all. To have the faith in my vision. Losing you, my friend, was in so very many ways the catalyst for all the creative success I've had since. It feels wrong that I don't get to tell you that in some other form or format.

And now, somehow it's just a couple days shy of eight years since you've been gone. The world makes even less sense without you, if you can believe that, but I'll try to keep it connected to you, and you to it, the only way I know how. Writing the words to right the wrongs. As best I can.

Oldest Tampa Bay Bonus Content: Oldest Drive-In Theater

This is another chapter I intended to include, but Lakeland was just a bit too far to be included in the Tampa Bay area. If, like me, you are fascinated by Americana and captivated by the magic of nostalgia, it is very much worth visiting.

Oldest Drive-In Theater – 1948
Silver-Moon Drive-In and Swap Shop
4100 New Tampa Hwy., Lakeland, FL 33815

In December of 2021 Fun-Lan Drive-In Theater and Swap Shop rolled the closing credits after 71 years as the oldest drive-in movie theater in Hillsborough County. Within the county, that title will pass to the Ruskin Family Drive-In Theater, which opened in 1952 showing “Singing in the Rain.” If, however, you consider Polk County to fall within the Greater Tampa Bay area, than the oldest drive-in theater is Lakeland’s Silver-Moon Drive-In and Swap Shop, which opened two years before Fun-Lan.

When I. Q. Mize and M. G. Waring opened the theater, the 35-cent admission price included a cartoon, short film, and newsreel, during which vendors would circulate selling popcorn, soft drinks, cigarettes, and snacks. 357 RCA speakers gave credence to the theater’s claim as “Florida’s newest most modern outdoor theatre.”

Mise had a close call when a tornado passed through on May 23, 1950. The screen was damaged, but Mize was unscathed under the office’s concrete roof. In July the theater reopened with “East Side, West Side,” a cartoon and an update on the Korean War.

In 1952 Silver Moon was acquired by Carl Floyd, whose Floyd Theaters chain would eventually own and operate more than 50 indoor and drive-in theaters. A neon marquee sign, modern concession stand, and restrooms were added to Silver Moon. In 1960 Hurricane Donna damaged the screen, which was replaced with an 80-foot-wide curved steel screen.

In 1969 Floyd named Harold Spears as his successor. Spears remained president of Floyd Theaters when a year later the company was bought by Burnup & Sims, Inc. Ultimately though the heyday for drive-ins was in the rearview after peaking at roughly 4,000 such theatres nationwide in 1958. In the early 1990s Burnup & Sims merged with Mastec and first sold the indoor theaters to Carmike before turning the knife to the drive-ins.

To save these endangered species of Americana, Spears formed the Sun South Theatres and purchased both Silver Moon and the Dade City Joy-Lan Drive-In, both of which continue to operate today and have enjoyed a recent surge in popularity as an unexpected silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sidebar:
During the COVID-19 pandemic there were some experiments with drive-in concerts. Safety Harbor Art and Music Center took a different approach, creating a mobile, outdoor stage.

Giant's Causeway Pillar (Charleston, SC)

(This piece was previously published on Atlas Obscura. You can see it here.) I've been thinking about a trip Jen and I took to Charleston (probably because I just finished reading "The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires," by Grady Hendrix, which is set there). I've also been thinking about Celtic folklore (which I've been delving into as inspiration for some short fiction I've been writing). Turns out that this little stack of stones I once wrote about stands at the intersection of both of those things on my mind. And now it can be on your mind too!

A stack of stones steeped in Irish folklore, much like the hero they're connected to, hide in plain sight.

Roughly 40,000 Basalt columns formed naturally from volcanic activity rise along the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland. Minus, that is, the one found outside of Charleston’s historic Hibernian Hall. The pillar section arrived in 1851, roughly a decade after Irish immigrants began arriving in the Palmetto State escaping the Great Famine. It was also exactly 11 years after Thomas Ustick Walter completed the Greek Revival style building where the column now stands.

According to Celtic mythology the Giant’s Causeway, as the name implies, was constructed by giant/hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (aka Finn McCool). In one version of the tale, he builds the bridge to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner. In an alternate version, rather than battle his opponent, Fionn’s wife disguises him as a baby. Upon seeing such a massive child, whom Benandonner assumes is the offspring of his rival, he believes that Fionn must be a giant even by giant standards and promptly returns to Scotland, destroying the causeway in the process.

Given the frequent and massive labor needed to rebuild Charleston following fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, it seems somehow a fitting place for the fabled remnants of an Irish hero’s ruined bridge.