Late posts #3: Bay City

Florida greets me with a broad, oven sun and cordial passerby decked with college sports regalia, the pervasiveness of which I always seem to underestimate. I have three days here before my dad road-trips to see my play and we head back over the flat state toward the other coast. Yet for now I am in the comfortable expansiveness of the Bay City, which is to say Tampa and its surrounding estates along the crab claw of the bay: Tampa and St. Petersburg and Manatee and Brandon and Plant City (where they grow strawberries), all traversed easily by the low bridges that span across the green Gulf waters where it would not be surprising to see a dolphin at eye level.

We spill out of the plane quickly and ahead of time, and I catch Mr. LaBrant just outside of the terminal train. Things are much more speedy here without passport control and, when the Border Agent looks me in the eye and says, "What's up?" I issue a polite, cursory reply and "Happy Easter," then, as we do, I turned the question around. "What's up?" I ask, thinking I will be asked what I'm bringing into the country (even though I just flew in from DC), my purposes here, if I have any plants or vegetables or monsters that are not native to this area... Instead, she cracks a big, weary smile and says with humor, "I'm tired. I can't wait to go home." Then we're off. That quickly. And I can't believe it. In fact, even the tollbooth attendants are cheery.

Staying with the LaBrants, or Mr. LaBrant specifically, is a history lesson. They are Keri's parents, a friend from college who is taking the world by storm in her own way at Duke. She's a friend who's perhaps most patient with me, listening and offering feedback on all of my film ideas, whether conventional like the myopic look at a student in DC and his community and the way he subtly exerts influence on big things, or the more... um... visionary sorts of films, like when zombies rise up, but they're really all Canadians and nice unless you mess with them or make fun of hockey... This is Keri, patient and encouraging and fun, and her parents are likewise awesome.

But there are three days here, and too much to take you beat by beat. Suffice to say, Mrs. LaBrant has to work, so Mr. LaBrant and I hit the road the next day, whipping around his old shrimping grounds -- where one can walk, shallow, almost all the way across the big inlet to the bridge -- Eckerd College, which he attended in its very first year; the once-Bohemian neighborhood with a view of the beach that contained their first home together and, in typical Florida fashion, is not postage-stamp-thin, five-story condos; and where he could catch stone crabs and where he carried Mrs. LaBrant in from a boat so she wouldn't get wrapped in the seaweed and dolphins decide to show off for us on the pier. It is a good day.

Peggy gets me from a mall Starbucks and we go rather quickly to school. I haven't spent much time in community colleges, where she is getting her AA before going on to study historical anthropology (yes, she's that awesome), apart from filming with a group of students who needed extra hands in Jacksonville. We learn factorials, which are exciting because they are illustrated by an exclamation point (2! = two factorial!), and then the prof takes some time with Peggy and me to tell us about the play he is writing about the two thieves on either side of Jesus. Random? Yes, as is our dinner, too late for Sonny's -- I had been craving milkshakes, which we got at Steak n' Shake, and good ol' I'm-about-to-go-work-in-the-fields-and-hence-will-burn-off-all-this-fat-that-is-smothered-in-delicious-sauce Southern barbecue -- so we go to the local Scottish pub, "The Tilted Kilt".

It turns out to be more of a British Isles pub, before the 1916 Easter Rising and Ireland's subsequent independence (see my earliest posts for that history), by virtue of alliterative names like "Killarney's Killer Baby Back Ribs" and such that I doubt hail from our immigrant ancestors' family recipes from the old country. Nevertheless, they have a killer barbecue sandwich, and Peggy and I have much to catch up about, like the fact that she usually takes on the whole world with multiple jobs and does well, but now she's squarely set on the future, finishing school, and getting excited about anthropology. It's good to hear it. I'm distracted a good bit, though, by the tilted kilts that the waitresses are wearing, a type of kilt that William Wallace might have only worn if he was in Bermuda, or about to go to the tanning bed. Yes, it's that short, and tight, and they wear another, even smaller kilt on top. Not usually my kind of place, or Peggy's, but it's open, and our waitress is a young mom who went to high school with Peggy and sat with us for a bit and needed to talk. In my crew days, I used to walk around in Spandex, and I will be living in biking shorts this entire summer. I'm not a Hooters kind of guy, but people are people, no matter how, um, breathable their clothes.