this is grandma hulit, mom's mom. whenever i look at this picture, i am saddened that she is gone but i am so greatful that i had the chance to know her as an adult, one on one, long after grandpa hulit was gone. this picture was taken at her kitchen table in ocala, florida (1202 south east 14th avenue actually) during a surprise visit to her....
i had just spent 2 weeks in the dominican republic and 3 days driving across haiti and thru the moutain pass that divides the isle of hispaniola into two separate and disparately different countries, one of budding democracy and hope for a better future for their own people who live in an amazing landscape of lush wasteland on the beach; the other is a struggling 3rd world communist holdover that has constant upheaval and ongoing cival unrest resulting in machine gun bearing kids and more drownings and shark attacks than any other civilized nation brought about by such an intense desire to escape from their involuntary shackles that keep them poor and under nourished as well as under educated and ignorant of the machinations of the whole rest of the world, sad since hispaniola really does float in the center of all the other nations , and merely 20 miles from puerto rico's shores, they think nothing of tying off a few old dead tires and dangling from the center with kids precariously perched similarly and none of their already limited possessions. sadly, these tire raftups have a high incidence of breaking apart on the open water....combinations of old rope and salt water rapidly rots the tyings and suddenly, miles from land children drown while parents watch helplessly, only to follow shortly behind in the same fashion. or worse, they manage to keep the float going and together only to be attacked by the great whites that are notorious in that section of the carribean ....i can personally attest to one thing i learned while surfing in sydney every day for a year, you don't have to outswim the shark, or even be the best swimmer in the group, you simply have to swim faster than that one other person next to you. of course, my first day on the waves, a girl had her arm removed to the collar bone by a great white. she was 12 if i recall. amazingly, i didn't see any of it until i was home and watching the news....she somehow managed to have her limb completely severed, it was later retrieved when said shark was captured and killed, gross, they slice them open and body parts, still whole and wearing part of a wet suit slide to the decking, after that, she clung to her board for dear life, poking her remaining fingers at the shark's eyes as she tried to kick herself to shore while almost bleeding to death, not to mention beating the curious onlookers that come into play during a feeding frenzy for blood in the water....but i digress....anyway, the day i was leaving punta cana (don't go, i'll send you a picture and you can buy some dirty sand at home depot and then you won't have to hold a chicken on your lap for 6 hour flight in flinstone class of non-commercial airline chartered specially for those of the 3rd world who pack livestock for luck and money...fun...anyway, a hurricane was in the forecast. aimed directly at punta cana....
we sat on the tarmack as the winds kicked up and barely beat the storm by heading toward miami for an emergency landing thanks to the wind shear at take off. having landed in miami, it's 5 hours later and of course, by now the category 4 is almost directly on miami. i can't get a flight out and have no where to go, much to my great surprise, a few german ambassadors from the german mission to the u.n. (uwe, wolfgang and vince) had all been at my club med village for my last week of time and they had planned to spent a week in miami coming back...since they were 3 and i was looking lost and pathetic, they took pity on me and graciously invited me to share their tiny little hotel suite at the washington arms on ocean road. that was a beautiful moment in my life, strangers really, reached out and gave freely of themselves expecting nothing in return and risking who knows what by being gracious. lucky them, i'm not a serial killer (but cerial does apparantly hurt my hair now) they knew miami, they were going to the best restaurants and clubs all on v.i.p. access since they've got diplomatic immunity and apparantly they can buy tickets or something at the office to look more important...i'll never forget walking to dinner, we never made it, the street lamps were literally horizontal to the road and the plate glass display windows of a high end department store not boarded over, were now bowing out of the frame to an extent that they were concave then convex, concave and again convex , and it was not a quiet to witness, except the wind being so strong and driving was all you could hear - a deafening roar that sounds like the inside of a seashell when held to the ear, but decibels louder...we tried to keep going but turned back when someone in the group (um, me, i'll admit, no pride lost in being terrified of dying impaled on giant shards of glass in a horrible place like miami....)we went back to the hotel and like the other guests we scavenged the mini bar for dinner that cost us roughtly 600 for all four of us, possibly what they might have dropped at the high end place, however we all managed to ingest only salted peanuts, snack packs of cookies, gummy bears, macademia nutes and pringles with toblerone for dessert. some enjoyed bottles of water with it, others a can or two of pop, but the majority took the gourmet meal to the furthest extend with all the mini bottles of maneshevitz wine...being irish myself and occasionally noted as a bit of ajew (ask my friends) i can obviously drink the manashevitz like nobody's business since i like a nice dry wine with a screw top to retain freshness between swigs. yum. so when i didn't die in a noteworthy and messy fashion, and after not starving to death for 2 days in a room with no solid glass windows or doors (all those little pop out slats so you can't lock yourself out!) i wanted what anyone would want...my mommy....i called grandma to see if she was ok and she was beside herself, the hurricane skirted her area but the torrential rains it brought in it's wake landed much of her low lying home and an apartment building that she owned and rented out as investment property under not puddles, not pools, not even splatters or streams , but layers of solid dirt 9 inches - 24 inches up the walls, inside and out, the dirt was picked up dry with the winds and as it spun to outer areas of the funnel cloud it was trained right into all windows, doors, cracks, crevices, autos and body parts not sealed in plastic, but it had to go thru the ensuing rain before it could get there so layer after layer of thick and solid stank and rancid mud up to about 8 inches deep in places was everywhere. grandma couldn't clean it by herself, it was heavy and that was a big house, forget the apartments....that said, i managed to spin a little bit of a tale to the enterprise rental desk and not only did i get a rental at steeply discounted price of 14.95 a day, unlimited milage but since they apparantly lost my guaranteed reservation with a prepayment for first days rental (wink wink) and since they were sold out due to folks needing to leave who couldn't get a flight , i got jaguar convertible to drive up to see grandma hulit. what a deal....sometimes it's ok to stretch the truth, ok, to invent what might have been true if i had known i'd even be in miami for longer than a layover...i despise miami...not a top pic of locales i'd ever really waste money or time to visit if i had a choice. my grandma though, i'd have done whatever it took to see her. and i did. florida is a big friggin' place...i thought she might be an hour or two from miami, you know, ocala is a famous area and miami is also famous, they obvoiusly must group the famous cities and towns near one another, right? yeah, right, dream on ....it was a beautiful day to drive with the lid off the cat car....except that the rains were still coming in bands long after hurricane was gone so randomly the blue skies with beautiful clouds along the corridor of i - 95 would just open up and the deluge literally would swamp the poor kitty kar. by the end of my NINE hours of driving and waiting for parts of homes and palm trees to be cleared off the highway from the storm, the interior of car was kitty littered! i didn't mind though, it's the first time i ever had to sit in a traffic jam in scorching heat and flesh burning daylightnot to mention some real hair frizzing humidity, i sat for nearly 3 hours....when we finally got up to a crawl and passed what i'd assumed to be a relocated trailer from near the beach or maybe part of a boat or dingy...but i'll be damned, it was a n alligator that had climbed out to sun itself in the hot radiating moisture of the blacktop and let me tell you, not only is it illegal to mess with those prehistoric hotties, it is stupid as well.that said not a single person who was out of their car surveying the hold had the courtesy to pass back the fact that it was a predatory cold blooded maneater that was keeping us at bay...perhaps then we all would have walked along those trenches on the highway for hours of waiting since if you have one on the road there will be hundreds in the trenches, this is when i found that is why the trenches were put there, gator baitors, they attract the darn things off the highways and lead to open water. when i arrived at grandma's house it was after midnight. i had called grandma at 8am asking if i could visit and stay for a bit since i didn't have to rush back for work...she was worried sick....before mobile phones and all , you know....she had called the police, the airport and my hotel, she was a smart cookie. of course she yelled at me about scaring her to death and not getting in touch to let her know i was alive...that's a theme i find a lot in my life. people seem to often mistake my not appearing to my having died or abducted by aliends...as i responded to grandma, the alligator ate my change for the pay phone on i-95 and then of course, i hadn't seen that episode of gilligans island recently so wasn't sure how to build a coconut phone...i love you grandma, but come on, don't you think if i were dead on the highway i would have pulled some kind of evil haunting on atleast one member of our clan shortly after departure? that's when she took me into the guest room and opened the closet that had all of grandpa's clothing in it. she had never had the strength to let it go, it was all she had left by herself down there. we went through the clothing together, grandpa had ugly clothes, i think he might have started buying his own or maybe uncle billy picked them for him...all i know is he always looked neat and clean in his blue work pants and industrial work shirt with "cash oil" on the oval name tag on the chest....but deep in the closet were several fine examples of what separate men from monkeys, and that would be tuxedos and the ability to tie a bow tie, we all know men look great in tuxes but it takes real monkey to tie a bow tie in one try. grandpa had two tuxedos, one was new from mom and jim's wedding (yes, it was 25+ years ago now, however this was only maybe year 8, 9 or 10 for them) it was a beautiful classic black shawl collared jacket with the marching band geek pant - you know side stripes...he didn't get the big hat with the plumes i guess....i'll be darned, grandma kept asking me to try on these hideous flame retardant mistakes against man and retail yet alone those who were only guilty of living too long in god's waiting room....so as i kept demuring, i could tell grandma was bothered that i didn't want grandpas clothing to remember him...i felt bad....it passed. i pointed out that i wasn't planning to be a refugee to any thirdworld city slum where that much pattern clash was a sign of great wealth or smart trash picking...she got teared up, she obviously understood my words easily...i think she was maybe tearing up because she didn't want that crap either and being the loving bereaved widow, she didn't want to look bad by setting out something that could burn like napalm if someone were to think it funny to set it off...i tried on the black tux. grandpa was a very large man. as a child i think i wasn't scared of him, but his manners were brusque and to a child who didn't get the drole humor behind his words he was not so cuddly and lovable...grandma on the other hand was built like a cabbage patch kid and was great for hugging and holding or just balancing against if you had no pillow and wanted to get comfy watching tv. that said, grandpa, like all big people began to lose his size as i grew into mine. we forget that perspective changes with every step and every person no matter that we all see the same object....in my eyes, grandpa was huge, in grandma's eyes, i was the same size as grandpa.
it was touching. especially because grandma's much smaller height to weight ration gave her a child's perspective of grandpa her entire life and that's how she now was seeing me....who would have guessed that his tuxedo was something i could put on immediately of the closet and head right out to something boring or trite. grandma insisted i have it. i was thrilled. i used to have atleast 2 boring things a year for work and there is always someone at an office dying to get out of attending something trite with the spouse by working late so they offer up freebies to the philharmonic, or perhaps the opera and sometimes even something that you might consider buying access too, like a charity event for mis-shapen children who will never be top fashion models due to grotesque hairlines and misshapen fingernail beds....generally those type events are attended by the bosses who buy the tickets since it is usually very important situation that the benefit addresses, and it's important to be seen there....after all who wants a cindy crawford with perhaps a receding hairline? that's right, no one we know. then grandma pulled out what i can only call the king of classic men's clothing, by which i hope you've just read as "the hideous error in judgement allowed by some color blind or maybe just blind seamstress circa 1970's" that would be the powder blue two button tuxedo with full on puffy shirt ruffled from shoulder to shoulder in tightly tucked little riffs of excessive ugly fabric that refused to die a timely and gracious death the first time it looked hideous...i am convinced those ruffles were on so wide and so tightly picked and stiched so that when someone who was normal beat the hell out of you for wearing that nasty ass pimp suit, you had some padding overyou chest to avoid inducing a heart attack...the ruffles were probably also good to fend off stray bullets and knifings in the inner city...you know, city folks, they get excited and celebrate in weird ways....i took that blue one too since it fit. it made it all the way back to maimi international airport in the trunk of that hot little bargain car tucked safely under the removed hardtop for added protection against the elements. unfortunately, that same cautious packing failed me later when i returned said car to rental garage and then caught my tram to the main terminal. it wasn't until i got back to new york that i realized i had left that precious blue suit in the boot of the car. bummer.
about a week after i got home i had to go to the federal express office to pick up a delivered package that they weren't able to leave with a signature. it required my renting a car and driving in a bad area that scared me. worse, i wasn't expecting anything that i could recall. i'll be damned, those enterprise car agents are sharp (and dangerous apparently, especially if armed with a modicum of knowledge about you). not only did they find that blue suit and have it pressed since it was a bit rumbled (*who could tell with that blouse:?) but they packed it ever so gently wrapped in sheet after sheet of tissue paper, then shipped it next day air at maximum cost. wow, now that's service. almost....i got my diners club statement a few days later and found that not only are they thoughtful and smart but they won't fall for anything no matter how good the story is...yep, hot little high end car was 14.95 a day, but the pressing of that heinous blouse shirt was nearly 20.o0, they bought acid free tissue to wrap it in for another 10.00 and the piece du resistance? why the cost to ship it next day via fedex air a mere 62.00.
you've got to be putting me on, right? wrong...but wait, there's more....
you'll recall i wasn't expecting a package so wasn't there to sign thus necessitating a car rental to pick it up...well in nyc, you can't get a car for under 150.00 a day, plus gas, tolls and then there's the street cleaning day ticket i got before i left for work the next morning, that was another 35.00. having grandpa's baby blue mercerized cotton blend apparantly dipped in polyester liquid for shine right there in my two hot little hands? absolutely priceless, no actually when i tried to give it to the thrift shop asking for a donation reciept for my taxes back when a right off would have made a difference of pennies to me, the gave me a reciept itemizing jacket, pants and shirt, used, good shape, precleaned and pressed, wrapped in paper, not something they would ever be able to sell so they couldn't give me an amount against my taxes, if anything they indicated they might have a right request payment from me to them since they were going to now be storing that non-biodegradable lumb of fibres until the earth melts it down into a nugget of off color for the next generation of rock pickers inhabiting our planet to eeeew and ahhhhh over.
and i swear every word is an exact quote and just the story of actual events. not a single chicken was held on my lap as i remembered this visit and all that led up to and out of it...thank goodness, there's nothing worse than typing and having to choke the chicken so it doesn't peck your parts.....
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