An ice storm in Nashville closed the airport while I was back in Long Beach for a long weekend. My flight was canceled and rebooked twice, giving me a couple bonus days in my home town on the shores of Lake Michigan in Indiana. With temperatures dipping into the single digits, my friends and I were forced to stick to inside activities. I mostly spent time reading, but we also spent some time reminiscing. Tina remembers one spring break when we still lived here, my family’s planned trip to Florida was postponed for a day due to snow in Chicago. “I felt so sorry for you all,” she said. I realized as she described the storm, and the reasons why we couldn’t fly out, that the trip she referred to, would have been the year we would move over 1,000 miles away. It would have been the week my parents planned to find and purchase the home to which we would move. It would have been a trip I would have gladly traded in for a whole week of being snowed in rather than face the reality of that move. It would have been a time when I thought life was definitely not cool.
Dad picked us up at the Sarasota/Bradenton airport a day later than expected. I didn’t have much airline experience but I knew that deplaning a jet via its stairs onto the tarmac meant the airport was a small one. I looked around at the strange landscape of palmetto bushes, cypress, white pine, and sand (lots of sand) with a sullen expression as Dad drove us north on U.S. 41 to his rented half of a duplex in East Bradenton’s Oneco section. Far from the boomtown atmosphere of both the Manatee Avenue and Cortez Road access points to Anna Maria Island, Oneco was sparsely dotted with new construction that was well hidden. Old trailer parks, migrant fruit picker’s dwellings, as well as what can only be described as ramshackle white-washed cabins, gave the area a general overlay that bespoke of the abject poverty that dominated it. “Welcome to your new home,” I sarcastically thought aloud. This was definitely not cool.
“What was that?” Dad asked cheerfully.
“Oh don’t pay any attention to her,” my mother said as she suppressed the urge to turn around and snarl at me.
My sister and I dragged our small suitcases into Dad’s temporary living space where we would share a pull out couch for the next several days. I craned my neck to see that there was a small pool in the backyard, and allowed that maybe the next few days wouldn’t be so bad with that as a distraction. I also started to imagine that since this Bradenton, Florida, thing was going to happen whether I liked it or not, I might be able to like it if the house Mom and Dad bought came with a pool. That, I thought, might make things more tolerable, maybe even cool.
Susan and I were not invited to join our parents for their house hunting. We, instead, stayed at the duplex and played in the pool. With Dad’s landlord as the grown-up in charge, we were mostly on our own. He fixed us bologna sandwiches for lunch that he served with Cheetos, but otherwise he puttered about doing repairs, and general maintenance to the three properties he owned and rented out in the neighborhood. As the sun began its late afternoon descent, our caregiver came to check on us to let us know that Mom and Dad were on their way back and that it was time to get out of the pool and get ready for going out for dinner. After giving us our directive, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, and with a look of genuine concern on his face said, “Oh girls. Oh girls. Oh dear me, dear me.” Susan and I looked back at him with confused expressions as he continued to shake his head and say, “Oh girls.” We soon found out that what he could see was that we were very sunburned. Not cool.
Mom was furious. She and Dad had an argument about it. She then yelled at us for a bit for being so stupid. How in the heck were we supposed to know? We’d never been in Florida in March before. We didn’t know that the sun was stronger here. We never had to wear sunscreen in Indiana. Hell, sunscreen hadn’t even been invented yet. There was a general yelling session that then took place as I defended Susan and myself. In the end, Mom always seemed to know what to do, and this situation was no exception. Taking matters in hand, she grabbed her purse and walked to a little general store across from the duplex and bought a bottle of vinegar. Man, did it sting, but Mom knew her home remedies because it soothed the burning. We got blisters on the edges of our ears, but were otherwise fine. Cool.
With our sunburns under her watchful eye, and seemingly in control, we drove out to the island that evening for dinner on the beach. Never mind a pool in the backyard! I now set my sights on the notion of living out at the island with the whole Gulf of Mexico to play in. Now that would be really cool. But, alas, it was not to be. Mom and Dad were golfers, not beach goers. The house they bought, consequently, was situated about a half mile from the Bradenton Country Club. “The perfect lay out,” Mom enthused. “I can drive my golf cart to the clubhouse,” Dad added. “Is there a pool?” I asked. “The country club has a pool,” I was told. And so, 3801 17th Avenue West, a brand new home, was purchased. Dad moved in on the day they closed, and we followed at the end of the school year.
The house had some very unusual embellishments compared to those built during that time. And it was these embellishments—thick stucco exterior, real plaster walls and Italianate inscribed ceilings, hurricane enforced tile roof, security system, real wood door casings and doors, and the aforementioned perfect floor plan—for a comparable price that set it more than just a cut above the rest. For this was no ordinary contractor’s house, this house was built according to special instructions by Tony Rossi, the founder of Tropicana, as in orange juice. Cool.
Tony, so the story goes, built the house for his mother-in-law, an Italian citizen who would soon be issued her U.S. immigration papers. The Rossis had been systematically arranging for their relatives to emigrate from Italy to the U.S. over the past ten years, and his wife’s mother, and Tony’s youngest sister and her husband, would be the last in a long list of earlier arrivals. With a friend in the state department in Washington, D.C., it had been easy for Mr. Rossi to get the names of his family members moved to the top of the list each year, bypassing the normal waiting period, as well as receiving exemptions for any imposed caps to the number of allowable Italian immigrants in any given year. But there had been a snafu. It was called: Watergate. No one in Washington was doing any more favors for anyone, and there was no way of knowing how long the heat would be on, whether Mr. Rossi’s state department friend would get swept up in the massive investigations that were taking place, or whether business as usual would ever be the same again. There would be no names moved to the top of any list this year. Mr. Rossi had no choice but to put the specially designed and built home for his mother-in-law up for sale. The timing just happened to work out that the house went on the market and my parents were the first to see it. They made the offer, and there was no counter offer. It was a done deal in less than 48 hours. To my sixteen-year-old self who was being uprooted from a beloved home on Lake Michigan in Indiana, not cool at all.
But time has a way of soothing more than just sunburns. Forty years later, with both my parents deceased, my sister and I now own the house that Tony Rossi build. And it is on the market for the first time since Mom and Dad bought it with all its beautiful embellishments (and its little know history) still intact. Cool.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015
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