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I am definitely one of those people who woke up this morning, heard that the royal wedding was over and done with, and heaved a huge sigh of relief. If you had asked me, I would have told you that the huge fuss and incredible expense was nothing short of criminal, and that I really could care less about the whole thing.
Apparently I was wrong.
Watching the footage just now, I cried like an idiot. Don't ask me why. I guess I'm just a sucker for a good love story, and like it or not, I'm enjoying the fairy tale. So much so, that Prince William's salad plate sized bald spot didn't bother me one bit as I watched him put the ring on Kate's finger.
I think what did it for me was the post-wedding royal kiss on the balcony. It was just so "happily ever after", it was like the endings of all of my favorite Disney movies rolled into one glorious smooch. I guess it's just that, all these years, that kid has had my sympathy vote - after his mom died, having to live with Charles and Camilla couldn't have exactly been a picnic.
Ever since November, and the royal proposal, I've been avoiding the wedding hype as much as I could. We all know how these things usually end...with laughable tabloid stories and embarrassing accusations.
But just for today, I think I'll put the daily cynicism of life aside, and enjoy the fantasy. There's time enough for reality tomorrow. Best wishes, you crazy kids. Someone hand me a Kleenex.
With the demise of the space shuttle program in the news lately, I've been thinking about Merritt Island quite a bit. Here's one of my favorite "Merritt Island Musings" blog postings. I think I wrote it back in 2004 or 2005, so it's a bit dated, but it captures my feelings about that place, and that time in my life. Here's to a bit of nostalgia on a Sunday morning...
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I remember the water. Water, water, everywhere. We did, after all live on an Island. Merritt Island, about 60 miles due east of the Magic Kingdom, is a small island that rests just off of the central Florida mainland. It has been described as being the shape of a tooth x-ray, wide at the top, and tapering off into two longer wedges toward the bottom. Bordered on the west by the Banana River, and on the east by the Indian River, with the waters flowing into each other at various points, and dotted with ponds and swimming pools, the place is really more water than it is terra firma. My family arrived on the scene in 1971, and I believe that we had pruned skin for most of the six years that we lived there. The water was a constant; every drive to the grocery store, to a friend’s house, to the library, to church, or to the dentist, involved a glimpse of water. More days than not, the water sparkled in the reflection of the sunshine, intense, like the reflection from a million prisms, and almost always it was home to a flock of graceful sailboats or groups of fast moving ski boats.
The northern portion of the island was for the most part occupied by Kennedy Space Center, which at that point in time was sending man to the moon at a steady clip. The space program brought an influx of newcomers to the area, and if that wasn’t exactly what brought us to town, we enjoyed the benefits of being there at that time anyway. The frequent Apollo launches were looked forward to, when we could view the rockets launching on the nightly news, and simultaneously look out our front door at the same time to witness them firsthand. The ground under our feet shook, and like everything else during those six years, we took it for granted.
My grandparents purchased a home in the southern part of the island (on the left root of the tooth,) my mother purchased a smaller home nearby, and we settled into a life of beachcombing and sunburns. Street names like “Palm Avenue”, “Tropical Trail”, “Hibiscus Boulevard” or “Island Beach Boulevard” were really accurate descriptions of our town. The local landscape was amazing. “A palm tree in every yard” must have been an old campaign promise from the 1950’s, because most yards boasted five or six. Coconuts and bananas were ripe for the picking, and citrus trees were everywhere. Initially, my sister and I set up fruit stands along South Courtney Parkway, five oranges for a dollar, but eventually we resorted to leaving unmanned fruit in bags on the driveway, with a large sign that said, “Free fruit”. Apparently we were not the first or only entrepreneurs to give this shot at instant wealth via citrus a try.
There was a dragon named Annie, too. Built in 1971, Annie was a concrete dragon sculpture who stood guard for thirty years on the southernmost tip of the island. We didn’t make it down her way too often, but from time to time we would take the Eau Gallie Causeway westward into Melbourne, and see Annie in the distance, through the windows of my grandfather’s Dodge Dart Swinger.
We saw a lot of things through the window of that Dodge. My grandfather was a gypsy, whose goal in life, if he wasn’t fishing, was to get up in the morning and see just how far from home he could drive in one day and still make it back by dinnertime. At the time, there was a lot to see. Walt Disney World had just opened in ‘71, and there were a lot of tourist dollars waiting to be grabbed. It seemed like every road led to a kitschy tourist attraction. Close to home we had “Tarzan’s Jungleland” in Titusville. St. Petersburg had the Sunken Gardens (I can’t remember that one too well and I’m not sure I want to). There was Sea-Orama at Clearwater Beach, and an uncounted number of reptile attractions. (That King Cobra snake exhibit still gives me nightmares). And who could forget Six Gun Territory, complete with gunfights, or the Old Jail Museum in St. Augustine, which offered real jail cells in which you could lock your children? (Let’s not get into those nightmares). If I had to pick one as really standing out in my mind, I think it would be the “McKee Jungle Gardens” simply because I’ve never gotten more mosquito bites in my entire life than during the four hour period of our visit.
The bottom line was that we loved hanging out in the water more than anything. A short drive over the Merritt Island Causeway, past Kiwanis Island on the left, and the Merritt Square Mall on the right, brought us to Cocoa Beach. Or if that wasn’t on the agenda, the local YMCA was a bike ride away. Later, after I had befriended the Quenzlers, I was invited to go sailing with them on the “Calamity Jane”. Sometimes we would hop in the old dingy that they kept moored behind their house, and row out to the island that sat between their place and the city of Cocoa on the far side of the bank. This unsupervised rowing worried my mother, but the truth of the matter was that we were superb swimmers. One of the first things that my mother did after our arrival in Merritt Island was to sign us up for swimming lessons at the local YMCA. We were only “Minnows” at first, according to the Y groupings, but with time and training would become “Sharks”. The water was our second home. The way kids from some states whispered in hushed tones about bizarre farm equipment accidents, we spoke of bizarre boating accidents, or shark attacks.
Eventually, NASA decided that men and women didn’t need to be sent to the moon via Apollo rockets, and began concentrating on something that they called a space shuttle. This seemingly insignificant fact changed our lives, because my parents, whose jobs were closely tied to the Apollo launches, became unemployed. “Texas” became the buzzword. I realize that all things come to an end eventually; it’s just hard to face that fact when you’re eleven. We moved away, and things on the Island changed. Annie the dragon has crumbled into the river. Erosion has destroyed much of my beloved coastline. I’m pretty sure that the YMCA on South Courtney Parkway is long gone. The nearby King Cobra exhibits and Tarzan’s Jungleland are just recollections and weeds. My grandparents left the Island, moved first to Cocoa and then to Titusville, and are now passed away, both resting somewhere near Melbourne. I find it amazing to think back and calculate that we were only living in Merritt Island for six years. How is that possible? It seems like a lifetime’s worth of memories. But no matter how many years time adds, the view in my mind’s eye is still sparkling, beautiful, and blue.
