Now I Turn On the Bathroom Light at Night

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Florida is much more than just oranges and palm trees.  Pesky alligators, palmetto bugs (as if giving another name to the largest cockroach makes it loveable) and snakes are put a few of God’s creations that make living in the Sunshine State challenging for some, and terrifying for others.  I am in the latter category.

One Saturday morning in the summer of 2002, I unenthusiastically got out of bed to begin my day.  Not that I’m ever enthusiastic about getting out of bed, but I recall feeling fuzzy that morning.  Anyway, I entered the bathroom the separated our room and DJ’s, opened the toilet lid, and just as I was about to sit down, something that looked very bloated, with EYES, stared and hissed at me!  I slammed down the lid, and ran out in the living room, pants around my ankles, trying to scream for Dave, but nothing was coming out!!!  And I am a loud person.  He appeared in no time flat, and asked what was the matter.  I could not speak.  Instead, I could only point madly to the bathroom, my eyes bugging out of my head, it seemed.

Cautiously, he slipped into the bathroom, and checked the closet.  Nothing.  Nothing in the sink or the tub, leaving only one other place to look.  The toilet.  Guardedly, he raised the lid enough to see the biggest rat he had seen that close! The lid went down with a crash.

Initially thinking he’d go after the rat with a hammer, it occured to him that he had just installed that toilet not too long before, and he hated to crack the bowl.  He opted for a plunger, thinking maybe he could drown or suffocate the rat.  Though wary, he approached the opponent with the calm and confidence of a bomb defuser.  The fight was fast, with the rat furiously thrashing in an attempt to ward off the plunger.  Dave persisted, and soon had the rat subdued.  Thinking he had smothered the rat, Dave let up on the plunger a bit, only to have the rat emerge, more prevoked and enranged than ever!

I remained in the living room, still distressed but less hysterical.  Finally, Dave signaled that the coast was clear, the rat was dead.  Since this all happened right before he was to head to work at West Marine, he took time to call in and report he’d be a little late.  Then, with a net, he scooped up the rat and disposed of it in the Intracoastal.   

I know he had a wonderful time telling this story to his co-workers for days to come, because he told me so.  Evidently, everyone had a good laugh at my expense. 

I was so grateful it was daylight when I initially went into the bathroom.  Typically, until then, I would have used the toilet in the dark.  Can you imagine what might have happened then?!  We are talking PETRIFIED. 

Have I mentioned that I like living in Kentucky?

Ignorance = Bliss?

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Before our first wedding anniversary, my new husband had convinced me to leave St. Louis for a life of sailing.  Never mind that neither leaving home nor sailing had ever entered my mind.  I am now convinced that true love conquers all.

I won’t get into everything that led us to end up in Key West in the fall of 1979.  But there we were, sitting in our Volkswagon camper, eating dinner.  When, out of the corner of my eye, I sensed something scampering along the stove/sink area.

“What was that?!!” I anxiously asked Dave, who was sitting opposite me.

“I think it was a gerbil,” he calmly lied and continued eating. 

Knowing how a mouse had freaked me out a year earlier, he knew better than to tell the truth this time.  If he told me it was a RAT, there is no telling to what degree of hysteria I’d go into. 

So, we finished dinner, cleaned up, and got ready for bed.  There isn’t much room inside a VW camper-van; it’s cramped quarters, but that didn’t matter because we were still in the honeymoon stage, when I hung the moon on Dave’s every word and believed everything he told me.

As we lay in bed, we heard scratch, scratch.  Not too long after, we felt something scamper across our sheet-covered feet.  Right away, Dave flicked on the light.  “I’m going to get a mouse-trap,” he announced.  “I can’t sleep with that going on,” and I, too, was dressed in a flash, ready to go, because I wasn’t going to stay in the van alone.  Even if it was only a little gerbil.

We walked to the Tom Thumb up the road and I looked at magazines while Dave took care of the transaction.  It was only afterwards that he told me he had initially asked the clerk if they had rat traps.  But no, they didn’t, only mouse traps.

Back at the van, he baited the trap with peanut butter, something I had never seen before (having grown up in my mother’s sterile environment, and all.)  He got out our largest pot, and we both got back in bed, him laying there with the mousetrap between his ankles. 

Lights out once again, it wasn’t five minutes before scratch, scratch…SNAP!

Lights on again, and from there I truly can’t remember.  I must have had an out-of-body experience because Dave has always told this story:

“When I turned on the light, Maria had the sheet pulled up to her chin, taut as could be.  The rat, dazed, sat on her chest facing her.  I said, “Maria, flick the sheet,” but there was no response.  Realizing she was, too, was in a daze, I raised my voice and ordered, “Maria, FLICK THE SHEET.”  She did, though without not much oomph.

“I smacked the rat to the rear of the van with the pot and then hammered it until it stopped moving. Then I opened the rear hatch and swept it out of the van.  Next day, it was gone.”

To this day, I do not recall that rat that was no more than 12 inches from my nose.  All I know is that rodents are but one of many phobias I have. 

To be sure, true love does conquer all.

“Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore…”

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We took our time getting to nowhere in particular in the summer and fall of 1979. We had not been married a year. At twenty-four, I really had not been anywhere to speak of, so just crossing over the bridge into Illinois and leaving St. Louis for what might have been ever was exciting. After several days of driving and traveling southeast on highways that linked Paducah to Nashville and Rock City, we found ourselves at a dive site in northern Florida that we had read about called Ginnie Springs.

As part of our preparation to someday live on a boat, we had taken scuba diving classes in St. Louis. After several weeks of classes in a swimming pool, our open-water certification dive was scheduled at Norfork Lake in northern Arkansas. There, visibility was arms-length at best. So when we entered the waters at Ginnie Springs, we felt as though we had reached the nirvana of diving. Even though it is known as “the world’s favorite freshwater dive” and described by Jacques Cousteau as “visibility forever,” most of it is located in and around caves, where it is pitch black. And silent. Without a flashlight, a diver’s tank bubbles could not be seen as going up or down. Disorientation, and the slow anguishing last-few-minutes of life, is the death sentence awaiting most of the doomed. We, armed only with our recently acquired open-water certifications–the training wheels of scuba diving–unknowingly ventured to a place marked with signs like, “Divers have died here!” Ignorance is bliss, indeed. Thirty years or so later, Ginnie Springs and everything associated with it makes for a divers paradise, and we knew it when it was nothing. As it would turn out, many opportunities like that have crossed our paths, some of which we’ve grabbed onto and some that we’ve let slip away. Hindsight is 20/20.

It took days to make our way down the peninsula of Florida. We had no jobs and therefore, no schedules. We detoured west, towards Tampa, and camped and dove in a place called Dunedin, and then backtracked to Orlando and did Disney World for a few days. Epcot had just opened. Having never been out of St. Louis–my mother’s pilgrimages to Our Lady of the Snows and my church’s youth group’s soirees in Tan-Tar-A at the Lake of the Ozarks not withstanding–our weeks of traveling to new places were exciting, eye-opening, and thrilling! I discovered that I loved the spontaneity and the uncertainty of life on the road.

By this time, I had known my husband approximately fourteen months. We were learning as much about each other as we were about all the places on our journey. In retrospect, the months we lived out of our VW camper set the foundation for what would be a normal lifestyle for us: we–even when ‘we’ included two kids and all their stuff/pets/etc.– functioned extremely well in tight spaces. That attribute would figure greatly in the years ahead.

Something we had in common was a penchant for scuba diving, and we fit it into the agenda whenever possible. Off of Key Largo is John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, which is another must-dive site in Florida and is on many bucket lists. Which is understandable, given the eight-and-a-half-foot statue of Jesus Christ, arms extended upwards, that sits in twenty-five feet of crystal clear water, with coral reefs that are decades old abounding everywhere, as are the schools of fish–protected in the state park–swimming about, unconcerned. Like when I dove Ginnie Springs, I remember that a big part of the diving experience at Pennekamp was the complete and utter silence. At times, it could be deafening.

We looked for boats as best one could, given that we were traveling most of the time. Sometimes we bought local newspapers and perused the classifieds; sometimes, we would stop at marinas and browse. Up until then, our only hands-on exposure to boats was his parents’ ski boat at the Lake of the Ozarks and a weekend basic sailing class we had taken on Carlyle Lake in Illinois. Nevertheless, by the end of 1979, we were the proud–albeit green–owners of a sailboat whose history included being seized in a drug bust and that we bought “as is,” from the assistant state’s attorney down in Key West. Cheap. Cash. Stripped.

This was a most interesting time to be living in the Keys.

Over-Educated? I Just Want a Job!

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We remained in Key West for the remainder of 1979 and into1980 for a number of reasons. Foremost was that the boat, ripped to pieces during the drug bust during which it had been seized, needed a lot of work before it could be deemed seaworthy, especially on its engine which was as good as useless. We continued to live out of the VW camper, which was now parked at a campground on Stock Island. To get to the boat, which was docked in town at what used to be the old naval submarine basin, we bicycled. We lucked into securing dockage at what then referred to as Truman Annex; the Navy had just closed down the base and except for a few contractors, the place was abandoned. It was big, almost a town unto itself. The city, anxious to collect any revenue as soon as possible from its recent acquisition, began renting dockage. Besides our boat, there were only maybe half a dozen others.

Secondly, our funds had dwindled after many weeks of living large, seeing the sights all the way from St. Louis to the Keys, so we had to find jobs. He was lucky; it so happened that he was a handy sort of person, and a private contractor hired him to do odds and ends, electrical and otherwise. It was the perfect situation, because he could work on our boat in between jobs. Also, he got paid in cash, which was just as well because we didn’t have a local bank account. Like a library card, a bank account was impossible to get without a local address or phone number. Our mail was being forwarded to “General Delivery, Key West, FL 33040” and we didn’t have a telephone.

Finding a job was more difficult for me. I got rejected for every one that I applied for, something I had never experienced. Jobs such as refueling airplanes at the airport and working in the mail room of the local newspaper, the Key West Citizen were unattainable, the reason given usually having something to do with being “over-qualified.” I had to stop admitting that I had even gone to college let alone had a degree, which is kind of funny, considering how driven I was to complete four years’ worth of work in three. Where we were was a lot different from where we had come. Key West was not yet thought of as a destination; it was considered the end of the road–and it literally was for U.S. Highway 1–a place where one could escape conventional America and allowed to do one’s own thing, unabashed. People who had “pasts” came here to escape, as did people whose alternative lifestyle might have made it too difficult to live elsewhere. Things like homosexuality and pot smuggling were accepted and unquestioned. Only people like long-time Conchs and Hemingway admitted to having last names.

 

I succumbed to a waitressing job at a nightclub called Captain Horn Blowers, not that I think I am above waitressing–actually, I loved my job–but the owner of the nightclub, Captain Horn Blower himself, was a coke-head. His temper was unpredictable and would often be misdirected at the help. After a few months, I quit. Concurrently, the boat we had named “Foreigner” was ready to go, as well. We began thinking about leaving Key West.

You Only Get One Chance to Make a First Impression

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The night my parents met him was the day he asked me to marry him. I had telephoned them to say that we were coming over right away; I had some exciting news! They had already gone to bed and didn’t bother changing out of their night clothes for our visit. Not that it matter; I lived just five minutes away. I rang the doorbell and we waited on the front porch. My mother opened the door wide. My eyes were wide, too, when I realized that the bright light from the living room lamp behind her cut right through the thin material of her nightgown, leaving nothing to the imagination. I could only imagine what he thought, seeing his future mother-in-law like that for the first time.

 
I was mortified and jumped in front of my mother to give her a big hug while edging her away from the light of the lamp. Herding everyone inside the living room, I introduced him to my half-asleep parents, first by name, followed by, “and we’re getting married!!!” We didn’t stay but a minute; in retrospect, I think my parents were in shock. But by that time, they had gotten used to my impulsiveness and usually didn’t question things I did anymore.
 
My mother’s side of the family is Polish, and since there were ten brothers and sisters, major occasions such as weddings and funerals garnered groups as large as five hundred relatives and friends. There would be enough food to feed an army and a full-bar at both weddings and funerals. The only difference between the two was that there was be dancing to a polka band at a wedding.
 
My future husband had only been to wedding receptions that fed cake to a few people who sat politely. There was no way he could imagine the hoopla that made the next five months fly by, and although our wedding was small by my family’s standards (only 250 people) it was a day neither of us will ever forget.
 
The cold and often snowy winter in 1978 gave rise to more and more discussions about living on a sailboat, something that he had been considering for several years. It was all very exciting and seemed very romantic to me: carefree and tropical, everything St. Louis was not, especially not in the winter. I, who had never been on a vacation, was easy to convince. So, all through the spring, we were making preparations to leave at the end of the school year. The house we lived in was put up for sale; both of our cars–including his 280Z–were traded in for a Volkswagon camper and we sold a lot of our stuff–including wedding gifts–which was the nest egg for our dream.
 
Our families were dumbfounded when they learned that we were going to quit our jobs. My mother, in particular, could not fathom that anyone in their right mind would want to leave St. Louis. But we had dreams, and by the summer of 1979 we were leisurely making our way to… Well, we didn’t know! That was the missing piece of our plan: we didn’t know where we would end up. But we had a camper, a pocketful of money, and were two adventurous souls. We had heard that jobs were plentiful in California, but the boats in Florida were lots cheaper. It wasn’t until the day we left that we flipped a coin to determine our direction: Florida.
 
That was our first lesson on appreciating “the journey.” We’ve been doing it ever since.

Chance Encounter

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I met him thirty-five years ago when I was twenty-three years old. A friend with whom I had gone to school with but hadn’t seen in years had invited me out for drinks one afternoon after work. The date was May 10, 1978. I was a special ed teacher and my friend was a flight attendant. I lived in the city and she lived near the airport. Neither of us were seeing anyone special. In fact, the single life wasn’t so bad. We each had our own apartment and drove nice cars. Life was pretty good.

There is such a thing as love at first sight because I was attracted to him the moment I laid eyes on him. It was the ‘total package’ that I liked, especially his smile. The fact that we sat at the end of the bar and that he was the bartender ensured that he would be front-and-center in my line of vision for the duration of our stay. I hoped it wasn’t too obvious that I was scouting him out.

When my friend and I were about to leave, I asked him, “Do you go out with anyone?” He seemed to be taken aback, but I couldn’t help it. I am basically direct by nature.  Also, I had recently broken up with someone I’d dated off and on for years. To make a long story short, he was dating someone else at the same time as me. I was still smarting from the hurt and humiliation. Even though the break-up happened the year before, my ego and self-worth were still bruised. So my question, although direct, would weed out potentially datable guys from those who were taken.
 
When he didn’t answer me right away, I was both suspicious and confused. Still, I gave him my phone number and left to go home. I had to go to work the next day.
 
A couple of weeks went by quickly. I was disappointed that I did not hear from him, but it was the end of the school year and so many activities and functions were going on. I was kept busy. One day, though, I happened to be home when the phone rang. It was him! Did I want to go out to eat? Sure.
 
My apartment in St. Louis was located on a street that was divided by a grassy median. I loved sitting on the balcony that overlooked it. Despite being a thoroughfare, there was a peacefulness to just watching cars and occasional buses go up on side and down the other. I remember watching and waiting for him, wondering what kind of car he drove. Not that it mattered.
 
A silver sports car went up the street, turned, and began making its way towards my address. It pulled up in front of my building. He got out of the car. Good Lord, I thought: he drives a 280Z! Not that it mattered.
 
That night we ate at Calico’s, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant by St. Louis University. I ordered a salad and barely picked at the Provolone cheese the covered the top. I was starving, but I didn’t want to let on how much I could really pack away; not on our first date, anyway. Besides, I was listening to his explanation of why he didn’t answer me weeks before when I asked if he was going out with anyone. His story was that he shared an apartment with two other people, one of whom was a girl that he had brought to St. Louis from Columbia, Missouri a few months before. She wasn’t able to find a job in all the months she was in St. Louis, and he was getting tired of supporting her. According to him, things hadn’t been going well between them for quite some time, but he just had not gotten around to kicking her out of the apartment. The reason I had not heard from him for a couple of weeks is that he needed that time to break things off with her and move her back to Columbia. He wanted his slate to be clean when and if things were ever to become of us. That told me he was an honest guy.
 
That evening, I learned other things about him; that his full-time job was actually that of an elementary school counselor, and that our paths might have crossed at least twice before at concerts that we both attended. He had a gentle way about him, and I liked that. He took me home afterwards, always the gentleman, opening and closing doors for me along the way. That was something that my dad always did for my mom. Our good-bye was short and sweet.
 
The next day, a box containing a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses was delivered to my apartment. I remembered being absolutely blown away since that was a first. Ever.
 
No one could have guessed that we would be engaged within a month and married in five.
 
Not that it mattered.

Hello world!

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Welcome to my very own website! I love to write, and because I took a “road less traveled,” many people have encouraged me for many years to write a book. Well, been there, done that….twice, actually (“The Best Tips from Women Aboard” and “From the Galleys of Women Aboard.”) Writing a book is the easy part; selling it is way different.

There was nothing unusual about my upbringing. It was when I was in my twenties that life took on a whole new meaning: my new husband and I sold our house, two vehicles, and nearly every wedding present we received a few months earlier and headed out of St. Louis, Missouri in June 1978 for an adventure. And did we ever have one! We lived aboard a twenty-eight foot sailboat in Key West at a time when Jimmy Buffett sang for free at local bars, bales of marijuana washed up on the shore almost daily, and we were almost enticed by big Cuban bucks to participate in the Mariel boatl-lift that was sanctioned by then-President Jimmy Carter.

Many events that happened during that time and since have been woven into what is My Life. I hope you enjoy what I am about to share with you…