I want to live in a country of grown-ups!

In response to a question I posed about moving to other countries, fellow blogger in the UK (it occurs to me I've been reading his blog for weeks and have no idea what his name is) writes a list of reasons, beginning with:

1.    I dont want to live in the UK. I've never really lived here and it doesnt feel like home. The only place that does feel like home is Exeter where my kids are.

So you see I'm not the only one who feels alienated in their homeland.  No, silly.  Of course I'm not.  Lots of people feel this way.  Look at the Palestinians!  (Ok, ok, that's a bit different.)  But still.  How did ordinary Germans feel about being Germans when Hitler was appointed chancellor?  Probably not unlike how I feel being a citizen of the US in this day and age.

I struggle with this so much because I have a deep connection with rural Florida.  I've lived here my entire life.  I know it like the back of my hand. 

I grew up on the most beautiful, magical little 5 acre farm in a 100 year old farmhouse (the kind that's just ugly and awkward from too many cheap additions rather than the kind you see in magazines that are carefully preserved or restored).  It had a small orange grove on one side and a barn we had converted into a mother-in-law house for my grandmother who died when I was eight; and a storage area where my brother wrote his name in the wet cement in 1973; and a kumquat tree my grandmother used to make kumquat jelly from; and a 2 acre cow pasture with a little pond in the rainy season (summer) and a stand alone garage one part of which my friend and I spray painted day-glo orange polka dots on (this was mid-eighties break-dance era) and got in trouble when I was eleven; and it had about a dozen oak trees with arms that swooped down to almost brush the ground and being little girls we used to pretend that the branches were horses with wings and would climb up and bounce on them and there was a dog house where our dog would have puppies and I would crawl into it with a book and read to them and one time my parents were about to call the police because they had looked all over and couldn't find me until my sister asked if they had checked the doghouse and there I was asleep with books and puppies.

I know, doesn't it just make you want to gag?  Lol.  But it really happened.  That was my childhood.  It was the perfect place to grow up. 

I have a true love/hate relationship with Florida.  I wondered out loud to my coworker today why there are so many Florida mystery writers (it seems we have more than our fair share here for some reason).  He said Florida's a weird place, makes for good settings for surreal happenings.  He said over half the people in Tampa are from somewhere else.  He's from New York City  But I said Florida's not weird at all.  Not the Florida I know anyway.  Ok, granted I'll give you Miami, como dicen, es otro pais.  But the rest of it, even Orlando and Tampa, even Daytona (Daytona's like the simple but kind-hearted party-loving little sister, a bit of a country bumpkin, a little loose, with her Nascar races and all but irresistably cute anyway) all these places are not strange and exotic they're... they're... home.  They're just home.  They're real folks, waitresses and mechanics, shop girls and high schoolers live.  They're adolescent cities that're outgrowing themselves; they have that awkward self-consciousness about them, that shamelessness, that impulsiveness that leads to unthought-out decisions, poor planning and the like.  Sometimes they do stupid things like build sprawling tacky theme parks on the breeding grounds of endangered animals (I highly recommend this book if you want to find out more about that) and you want to scream at them and tell them to get their heads on straight but in the end you know you love 'em.  They're part of you.  All that stuff that's so quirky and quaint, it's not embarrassing it's endearing. 

Isn't it? 

Then as a gas guzzling SUV cuts you off as you're manuvering the latest billion dollar construction project underway being built to accomodate even more SUVs, and they're tearing down even more of that old Florida you love and you think with a malicious little laugh, no.  No, it's not endearing at all!  No.  It's arrogant and stupid and sick!  And anyway the land belongs to the Seminoles and the Miccosukee -you've no right to it in the first place. 

And it's not just Florida, it's the whole country, gone crazy, with a delusional fool at the helm.  And not just a delusional fool, a dangerous delusional fool because he's a delusional fool with access to nuclear weapons and all the firepower of the most powerful country on the planet at his fingertips! And your fellow citizens were afraid of Saddam.  Are afraid of Osama! 

And you start looking at other countries, you start looking at Spain, at Denmark, at Sweden and those places make so much sense to you.  They've moved past the ugly adolescent phase.  They aren't even obnoxious twenty-year olds.  They're adults.  Calm, mature, reasonable adults.  They make sense.  You long to be hanging out at their table.  Having thoughtful reasonable discussions.  Not shrill freak-show shout-outs with Junior here whose idea of foreign policy centers around the words "yee-haw" and who might just throw a tantrum and put us all in Guantanamo lock-down for the rest of our lives for writing stuff like this.

Yeah, I can understand why my blogger friend wants to move to Romania, although being from England (hardly an adolescent country) he must be going through something entirely different.  Maybe it's a case of senility?  The demented old grandmother getting caught up in the teenager's foolishness?  I don't know.  All I know is right now, to me, any place looks better than here.

 

Comments

[WhineyLimey]

Stephen.....

This is interesting; am starting a thread over at my blog " What age your country, what gender and why?"

[Paul Wright]

I used to want to go to New Zealand, until I read the chapter in Douglas Copeland's "Generation X" entitled "New Zealand gets nuked too".
Maybe I should switch Douglases. The British Douglas new all along that the whole earth gets demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
http://www.hitchhikersmovie.com/

[Jake]

I was just talking about this with my girlfriend today.

She was born and raised in Lakeland Florida (where we both currently live) and I've lived in major cities most of my life. She still clings to the town she knew as a kid but at the same time is dying to leave. It has the problems of a big city without the benefits.

Towns like this have a way of making you feel lonely even though everyone knows your business.