CoconutH2O Notes

Growing Older But Not Up

I hated being the smallest kid in the class.  All legs, all teeth, no butt.  Everyone else was growing up, getting facial hair, getting their period, growing boobs.  But not me.  I had the longest, thinnest legs that anyone had ever seen, and my nickname was ‘Sexy Chicken Legs.’

 

Once a year, we got to send carnations to our secret crushes.  One dollar bought a flower and a note, and you could drool to your heart’s content over that year’s target of your affection.  That year, I sent four carnations to Jim Harris, the tall, blond, smart senior captain of the lacrosse team.  I bought the flowers from one of the many eager members of the Anchor Club, for which the annual event was a huge fundraiser. 

 

The day after the carnations were given out, Jim Harris stopped me in the hall to say thank you … and I wanted to melt into the floor.  Who had told him my identity?  Why wasn’t the ground opening up to swallow me and my red face?  I just wanted to disappear, to run away.  I felt so exposed.  That afternoon, my girlfriend told me that the entire school was talking about the flowers that I’d sent to Jim.  I’d managed to buy the carnations from – of all people – his girlfriend of two years, pretty homecoming honey Janie Millerton.  My reputation as “Sexy Chicken Legs” was now complete.

 

Thirteen years later, I came back to school for my tenth-year high school reunion.  I saw Jim Harris at the homecoming tent, and he came over to tell me that he still thought of the flowers that I had sent him in the ninth grade.  Even as a grown woman, I still remembered how to blush.

Let Them Eat Cake: Why So Few Homeless Shelters in Los Angeles?

As the Burbank community debates the permanent closure of the winter homeless shelter at the Burbank Armory, courtesy of a few disgruntled neighbors concerned as to a possible negative impact on their neighborhood property values, I would like to invite members of the Burbank City Council to visit their city staff counterparts in Santa Monica for a tour of the impressively-successful Ocean Park Community Foundation network of shelters. 

 

http://www.opcc.net

 

Not only have these various shelters notably improved neighborhood property values, they have extended grace to members of our community who have found themselves for a variety of reasons out on the street.  I would strongly encourage the Burbank neighborhood to step up to the social network plate, and ignore their most primary NIMBY ('not in my backyard') tendency to look away from the issues of homelessness in our community. 

 

I have lived in the Burbank area since moving to California in 1986, have been an active volunteer with OPCC's Turning Point Shelter since 1987, and their advocacy on behalf of the less fortunate among is exemplary AND effective.  We have absolutely nothing to fear, in our neck of the woods, by reaching out to the less fortunate in their time of need.  God knows, many of us are just one paycheck from being out on the streets ourselves.  And besides, it's just plain good manners.

Captain Sid and And The Lady Mary

 

Tampa was hot and wet that August, even more humid than the local lore would warn you, and danker than I’d experienced since moving there a few years earlier. I’d met Captain Sid Stansfield for the very first time, and looked forward to being shown the town from the perspective of a local Florida boy who’d made it big after World War II armed with nothing more than a pickup truck, a can-do attitude and a cowboy hat the size of the Panhandle.

Sid Stansfield had been raised in the tiny Everglades area town of Wauchula, Florida, one of several English expat families who’d done their best to recreate London’s best in the heart of the Florida swamp. Sid was classic cracker, and loved life. He’d taken his pickup truck and successfully bid on contracts that eventually laid railroad track around the state, but his pride and joy was the work he’d done to build MacDill Air Force compound in southern Tampa. All in all, Captain Sid was a self-made man who made no bones about his likes, dislikes and opinions, and wore his trademark ten-gallon hat with a swagger.

 

 

 

My genteel Welsh uncle Howell had suggested that Captain Sid would appreciate what he called my spitfire attitude, and so made the earliest introduction to my father’s favourite aunt, Mary Nelson.  I had never met any of my father’s family before that summer, as we’d always lived overseas on a tiny island the size of an average shopping mall in the U.S. It hadn’t struck me as odd that I’d never met anyone from the King side of the clan, since we seemed to be in the middle of our own universe, and far from the typical trappings of home and family. Uncle Howell opened many doors for me, and regaled me with stories of his work as a journalist in the Bahamas in the early 1930s, his marriage to my father’s other aunt Blaine, who was Mary’s older sister, and his eventual retirement to sunny Tampa, Florida.

 

 

 

Howell introduced me to the lovely Aunt Mary over tea one afternoon, and I listened to stories of our family that I’d never heard before.  Aunt Mary was my grandmother Marguerite’s younger sister, and had been raised in Baltimore as one of nine children born to a relatively well-off ship’s broker. All of the sisters had studied at the finest schools, Howell told me, and had made the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe after graduating from college.

 

 

 

She didn’t tell me anything at all about Captain Sid during that initial afternoon, no matter what curious questions about him I directed her way. But I was excited to be meeting someone that my father had cared for so much as a child and young man, and thrilled to make her acquaintance.

 

After Aunt Mary left Howell’s apartment, Howell casually commented that Mary had told me him that she was embarrassed to have me meet Captain Sid, given what she perceived to be a world of cultural differences between the two of us. I excitedly insisted on meeting Captain Sid anyway, and Howell introduced the two of us at a diner in Hyde Park the very next weekend.

 

 

 

I was caught up in Sid Stansfield’s spell, as Howell was certain that I would be. He was rough and gruff with a heart of gold. After lunch, he took me to the offices of Southern Railroad, which he still ran with an eagle eye more than forty years after striking gold and building his transportation empire.  Sid told me stories of building his business, railroad tie by railroad tie, and introduced me to the men in the company who had been working with him since the early days. “Afternoon, Nigger Theo: meet my niece Kimberly. She’s from the Ba-ha-ma Islands. Lots of your kind of people there, I reckon. She won’t be scared of you,” he laughed.

 

 

 

I cringed, but Theo was nonplussed and turned around to futz with an old coffee-maker. “Hey, Nigger Bill, have you met my beautiful niece from the Ba-ha-ma Islands yet?”  Sid hailed yet another black man working the biggest, oldest adding machine I’d ever seen.  “She’s living here in Tampa now, no lie. Sweet, huh?”

 

 

 

Theo saw the confused look on my face, and handed me an extremely ornate porcelain cup of coffee that seemed wonderfully odd and out of place.  “Miss, I knows that you all does drink tea from where y’all is from, but coffee is the onliest drink we have at the moment,” he said gallantly.  I accepted the cup gratefully, and started to sip at the hot brew, to which he had added about four teaspoons of sugar.  “Makes it easier to go down for you English persons who een used ta coffee, I know," he smiled. "And miss? Don’t minds Captain Sid calling us niggers no how.  He’s always been good to us, y’hear.”

 

 

 

“Have you worked with Captain Sid for a long time?” I asked quietly.

 

 

 

“Close to thirty some odd years, yes indeed. Started out sweeping, and got my own hours today,” boasted Theo.  “None of the rest of them boys would have hired any of us back then.”

 

 

 

“You really have been here a while.” I said hopefully.

 

 

 

“Hey, this work sent my boys off to college, and built my house, too.   Cap’n may not talk too smart, but he’s a good good man.”

 

 

 

Captain Sid then called over to me that he was going to take me on a tour of the MacDill air force base that afternoon, and we loaded up his pickup truck and headed south over a freeway that after a few miles turned into a narrow street that went through a military security gate and then turned into gravel, before leveling out as wide open space in the middle of the city.

 

 

 

“Kimberly, do you know how I come to marry your beautiful auntie Mary?” he asked.

 

 

 

“No, sir. How did you two meet?”

 

 

“Well, I had done pretty well with my contracts here in Tampa for the longest while, and was building me up a beautiful house on Bayshore Drive,” he beamed.  “I soon realized, though, that I needed a beautiful wife for to run the house.”

 

 

 

"Oh, yeah?" I flirted.

 

 

 

“So’s I took myself up to New York City to meet myself a lady,” Sid drawled.

 

 

 

“You went all of the way up North in those days just to meet Aunt Mary?” I asked incredulously. 

 “Must have taken forever to get there.”

 

 

 

“Well,” he said, “it was very well worth the trek, I reckon.  I sure didn’t want to take any of these women 'round these parts for a bride, wouldn’t know who I was and wasn’t related to.”

 

I miss Captain Sid.  I really, really do.

 

 

Summertime Sounds

My husband's entire extended family visited our place in Harbour Island several years ago. His brother and sister and their families stayed in the Seashell House, and my stepson and his fiancee stayed with us in the Jolly View cottage. The June weather was breezy and warm, with clear blue skies caressing our morning coffee and fresh-baked Bahama bread, freshly-sliced and swathed with Irish butter and homemade guava jam.

My stepson and nephew wanted to go scuba diving to do their checkout dives while they were on the island, and my brother-in-law offered to go along as well. Joe was a nice fellow, married to my husband's sister, but he had a macho streak that concerned me. Scuba diving in and of itself isn't very difficult ... but it's all about knowing what to do, calmly, in the face of anything going wrong. I wasn't so certain that Joe could get past his gung ho bluster, but I went ahead and signed him for the next morning's dive as my dive buddy.

Andy and Maxwell at Harbour Divers helped us load up our gear for one of my favourite dives, the Plateau off North Eleuthera. The Plateau is a gorgeous series of row reefs set in 90 feet of water, with a coral arch over the northeastern stretch that descends to 120 feet. Marvellously huge grouper and sand sharks and angelfish made the place their home, and I had been diving this spot with this very same dive shop for more than twenty-five years. Joe set his mask as Maxwell lifted the tanks onto his back, and helped him tighten the gear. He then floated out from the back of the boat while Andy got me ready to take to the water. I dove in, signaled to Joe, and we descended to the first furrow.

The water was lovely and clear, with 200-feet visibility in either direction, and I loved showing Sam the various lobsters and sea anemones that I spied along the way. We swam and ducked and minnowed over coral that was thousands of years old, and the silence of the undersea reefs was as always, deafening. Because of the depth of the dive, we were only going to stay at bottom depth for twenty minutes because of the decompression stops that we were going to need along the way to the boat.

I saw that Joe was swimming further and further away from our group, ignoring the basic dive rule to not be any further than a breath away from your buddy in case something went wrong. Andy signaled to me that he was keeping an eye on Joe, and asked me about my remaining supply. I responded with the hand signal that I still had 1800 pounds left. A few minutes later, I started to taste a little bit of water in my regulator, coming in with each breath. I looked around for Joe, and he was long gone and about fifty feet above me. I then signaled Andy that I was taking in water, but let him know that I was all right. I stayed at my first decompression stop for the necessary five minutes, and wasn't uncomfortable at that point, as the water I was taking in was minimal and besides which, I was ninety feet under the surface of the ocean. Had I breached to the top in a sudden panic, I would invite the bends or nitrogen narcosis or at the very least a massive nosebleed.

I came to the second decompression stop at fifty feet, and started taking in more water with each intake. I kept calm, and let Andy know via hand signal that I was taking in more water. He swam over and checked my gauges, and gave me a buddy breath from his regulator. So far, so good. The water was calm and cool and supportive, and I took care not to panic too much by doing yoga meditation exercises while keeping my eyes on the surface above my head. I stayed at the stop for the needed five minutes, and then started to ascend to the next stop. More water started coming in with each breath. Andy at this point was staring straight into my eyes to make sure that I was all right, and we handed odd breaths on his regulator while I breathed on mine in between.

At twenty feet below sea level, my air stopped completely. I signaled to Andy with a slash across my throat, as I struck out my gauge to try to figure out what was happening. I really had no more air, and I still had twenty feet to go before making the surface. Andy swam over to me to check the gauge as well, at which point I simply urinated all over him. I sped to the surface, taking a chance on a nosebleed but with very few other options. Andy popped up beside me, at which point I tried to woozily, groggily explain that I was fine, and that he should go back down to decompress else he get the bends as well.

Andy asked me what happened, and someone else's voice took over mine as I stammered nonsense about being stuck with a whale five hundred feet below surface. He shook me gently, made sure that I was really all right, and descended to take his decompression stop. After a moment, I swam over to the dive boat where Maxwell was wide-eyed with alarm. “Your asshole dive buddy's here," he said sarcastically. I told him what had happened.  “I know," he said.  "But you're fine. You're fine," he emphasized.  “First time in twenty-five years that h'anything bad happened to yuh, and that h'ain't a bad thing."

Andy surfaced a few minutes later and gave me a hug, and I took pains to not make a scene on the boat in front of my stepson, his fiancee and the other guests on the boat. The ride back to shore with my brother-in-law was very quiet.

Once we got off of the boat, we walked quietly to our golf cart, and made small talk about the dive all of the way back to our houses. I dropped Joe and his gear off at the Seashell House, and made my way up the hill to the Jolly View, where my husband was sitting out on the back patio, reading a book and smoking a Cuban cigar. I sat there in the golf cart, simply stunned at what had just almost happened. When I saw him, I just fell into his arms blubbering, crying, sobbing about the incident with Joe, losing all traces all of the cool and grace that I had been able to maintain on the boat, and the drive up to the house. I was just so relieved to see him, and to be back home again.

Island Gyal Drinkin' Bush Tea

Sister Mary Catherine of the Order of St. Benedict in Nassau brewed a pot of the stinky, smelly bush herb tea for my stomachache, which seemed to me had gone on for days and days. My protective father had left me at the convent on the big island a week earlier, which parting was more difficult for him than it was for me, as all that I could see and hear of the convent detailed acres and acres of green grass, two garrulous pigs squealing in their backyard pen, big dogs running wild and more than thirty other island girls to play with. And after years of sharing a bedroom with my two younger sisters, I now had a cool older suite mate to compare notes with, which seemed eminently more interesting than fighting with my sister over access to the full-sized David Cassidy poster that took turns over our individual bunk beds.

I sipped the nasty tea quietly, waiting for it to cool down so that I could knock it back instead of having to actually taste it. I had heard so much about cerasee tea and its various healing powers. Back home, I had once helped Nurse Raho midwife Louise's mother's baby by pouring cup after cup of the tea to help her speed up her labour contractions. Another time, my classmate Ruth had an awful head cold that was magically cured after a few doses. And now, despite the white Franciscan nuns' earlier admonitions at the local island elementary school that herb tea was only for unsophisticated savages, I had an entire pot of my own to explore.

I was eleven years old and on my own for the very first time, and felt terribly grown up. After all, I had just spent three months overseas visiting my grandmother in California, and therefore assumed the role of the world-weary traveler, which much have greatly amused the wise Sister Mary Catherine and the other nuns.

The massive odor of the herb caught my fancy, and forced me to focus on what I was asking my body to ingest without complaint. The leaves swam low in the cup, and offered a residue of rotten eggs, sulphur blues and essence of stale seawater, heightened by the wretch of fragrant spoiled mushrooms. But I was determined to make the tea my own, and without complaint, just to show that I was a big girl and ready to make my way in the world.