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You can go home, but don't pet the cat
© St. Petersburg Times FORT LAUDERDALE -- Just off the interstate we come upon a McDonald's so disgusting, my husband won't eat there. It is positively overrun by flying insects. An X-file of a place. My kids do not object when I announce, "We're leaving." The past 48 hours have worn them down. Two rain-whipped drives across the Everglades, a putrid hotel room, a vicious house pet and my relatives will do that. Maybe you really can't go home. Not if home used to be Broward County, Florida. Few things could induce me to haul my cantankerous brood to the land of the early bird special and the grade-school gang banger. But Aunt Rose is turning 80. To me Aunt Rose is girlish laughter and homemade knishes. She's childhood afternoons in 1960s Brooklyn, where New York cousins introduced me to miniskirts, Mad magazine and the Beatles. To my kids she is more of an abstraction. The only child in her family born in America, I say, and they are mildly interested. Sarah, my daughter, is far more excited that the cousin hosting Sunday's party is a lawyer. She's never met a lawyer, and she's pretty sure she wants to be one. Talk like a lawyer, she'll implore later. I remember too late that this cousin has three house cats. My husband and both kids are allergic to cats. She has a backyard pool, but it never stops raining. We've booked a hotel that faces the back end of a Macaroni Grill. I now get it about nonsmoking rooms. Ours smells like a high school toilet. Enough complaining, right? We're here on a mission. It's funny how when you're single -- as I was in Fort Lauderdale, ever at Aunt Rose's door for a hot meal and a washing machine -- you are singular. Marriage transforms you to a plural, from "when will she grow up already?" to "why can't they control their children?" That's because children, deprived of outdoor exercise, are unguided missiles. "Don't touch Tigger, he bites" is just so much noise, like "Stop jumping on the furniture," and "You look just like your mother." Now, every good family reunion needs a "Moment." Something to rehash over second helpings of whitefish salad once the offenders are safely across the state. So of course Sarah pets Tigger, who leaps in a flash and both scratches and bites her, leaving puncture wounds that turn swollen and purple up and down her arm. Talk like a lawyer? Sarah hears a textbook disclaimer. Had we been a drinking family, the scene might have turned police-report ugly. But, quick as the cat, my cousin morphs from lawyer to human being, generous and nurturing as she leaps to Sarah's aid. A physician in the family prescribes an antibiotic. Younger cousins distract Sarah with cartoons and video games. By the time my husband returns from the drug store, battling traffic that's like Tampa's, only worse, all is forgiven and the police are free to chase the politicians. The older guests are thinking, and one actually says out loud, "Am I glad those days are over for me." I wouldn't trade places with any of them. Maybe my standards have fallen in adulthood. Maybe we are those schlubs you sneer at in tourist season, clogging the highways in our McDonald's-bound minivans, squabbling incessantly in short pants and flip-flops. But nobody bled on anyone's white furniture. The crystal is intact, the doors are on their hinges. Having seen my younger cousins tend to Sarah, I am almost optimistic about South Florida's future. I never thought I'd say this either, but my husband is a tolerant man. So we leave Broward County with our dignity, a bag of kosher cookies and a fresh supply of Band-Aids. The sky does not clear until we enter Tampa radio space. The kids don't even fight much on the way home. And, after a decade of living here, I do call Tampa home.
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