A Rant: Remember Bay Pines
She will chop off the part about the shot glass coming from ABC.
The prepositional phrase my writing teacher will bring down is part of a sentence about my departed mother’s evening cocktail: “[T]he drink always contained precisely two ounces of bourbon measured in a shot glass from the ABC liquor store.”
Before the instructor could even get to it, I clipped off the twig at the end of the sentence, which mentioned the store’s location on Bay Pines Boulevard. Forbidden foliage, that. Include only the branches, the parts that move the story forward, skyward, or perhaps over the fence into the neighbor’s airspace.
Maybe that’s where the story lives, but it’s not where I live. I’m off in the old gnarly bits or the tangled new shoots of color, that, were they paint, would be named Key Lime, or Test Tube, or Gecko. Of course, I can’t talk about color unless it moves the story forward. Everyone knows new growth is yellow-green, so it’s redundant to mention it.
Adjectives bog readers down as they race to the end of the story. Does everyone read like that – bounding across the branches of a story like a pair of squirrels in the morning? Does no one want to read about a kid’s initials in the tree or maybe some lost binoculars hiding up there? Do I care what imaginary readers want? If I’m the only one who reads it, have I made a sound?
This is not a story. There’s no conflict, no arc, and I don’t learn a thing. Nothing happens, except me taking a drive out Bay Pines Boulevard in St. Petersburg, Florida, the place where I grew up.
The ABC liquor store on Bay Pines where Mom bought her shot glass had a dark, air-conditioned bar where I had my first martini, rocks with a twist. The cocktail came compliments of the most inexplicable boyfriend I ever had. Late in the game, I learned he lived with a woman also named Janice. I guess that explained my appeal to him.
When I was a kid, my school bus drove out Bay Pines past Milne-O’berry, an old-fashioned place that packed and sold boxes of citrus, which tourists shipped home to their families and friends. Mr. Lily, the driver, left an entire busload of unsupervised kids in the parking lot one afternoon so he could run inside for a box of oranges. It was highly irregular, but I don’t think he got in trouble. My classmate, Lori Geyer, once got in trouble for greeting Mr. Lily with “Hi Lili, hi Lili, hi-lo” as she boarded the bus. Fun was disallowed at that school unless you liked Bible drills.
I attended Keswick Christian School for six years. It was a few blocks north of Bay Pines, just off 100th Way. The campus was curtained off from the street by massive live oaks laden with impenetrable Spanish moss. I won many Bible drills there. Also, I experienced fear, shame, pride, confusion, sloth, love, friendship, defeat, jealousy, anger, and loathing. Kids’ stuff.
Past the street to Keswick, Bay Pines branched off on the left to the bridge for Madeira Beach. In college, I had, let’s call him a dalliance. He lived there. His two young daughters did not care for me, or even the idea of me. He wanted to get married and move to San Francisco. I just wanted to move to San Francisco. He went. I stayed.
My last stop on the purportedly irrelevant Bay Pines Boulevard is back the way we came, but on the south side of the street. Bay Pines Veterans’ Hospital and the National Cemetery overlook Boca Ciega Bay. My older brother, Bruce, is buried there. As an Army captain, he served an extended tour in Vietnam. Bruce died when he was 62. He made killer key lime pie. When I visit St. Pete, I buy key lime juice from Publix and leave it with him. (Technically, I think key and lime are both adjectives there.)
I can go overboard. With too much key lime pie, for example. (Think dessert one night, then breakfast followed by lunch, and maybe dessert again if there’s any left.) So, I get it. Less is more, yada, yada. I, myself, hated all that long-winded exposition in the Iliad right before one guy ran another through with his sword. On the other hand, I like it when Louise Penny tells me what those Canadians of hers are having for breakfast in Three Pines. Or when Abigail Thomas mentions the street in Manhattan she and Chuck just crossed when one of them says something wise or hilarious.
I realize that Ms. Penny’s mythical township could never include a place so trailer-camp as the ABC liquor store. And that the Manhattan streets Ms. Thomas mentions crisscross the very center of the universe. In contrast, Bay Pines Boulevard bisects what’s, in essence, swampland in Florida. I see the difference. But this is not an era in which to be squashed by the east-coast liberal elite. I’ve got that ABC shot glass of my mother’s in my liquor cabinet. I could use it tonight with some cut-rate bourbon if I had any. Though Mom wouldn’t blame me for substituting craft distillery gin. (Two adjectives. I made it a double.)
