Florida is full of former military brats like me. Some of us ended up here when our parents, fresh out of the service, went for the state's income-tax reprieve. Others, whose folks settled (or were still stationed) elsewhere, took advantage of the armed forces' dual-residency opportunities to go to college in Florida at in-state rates. Then there are those who just happened to come of age while living on one of the state's multitude of military bases, and those who simply fell prey to the well-documented (if sometimes misleading) siren song of sun/hurricanes, fun/crime, eccentricity/freaks and opportunity/corruption.All told, there are too many of us brats here for the phenomenon to be satisfactorily explained by statistics, geography and chance. Ordinary citizens might not notice, but looking at it from the inside, one can't help but suspect there's some unseen force at work.
(Texas is another place that gets way more than its fair share of brats. It's just one of a host of strange similarities connecting the regions Sunshine and Lone Star; somebody really needs to do a master's thesis on the unholy relationship between what are indisputably the two weirdest states in the nation.)
This reliable influx of new residents obviously contributes to Florida's expanding population, leading to fallout both positive (more money, cultural diversity) and negative (overdevelopment, traffic hell). But there are smaller and more specialized side effects as well.
Such as, for instance, the fact that at least once a year, I run into a brat I haven't seen, spoken to, and in some cases thought about, for 15 years or more.
Sometimes these encounters are entertaining, like the time I walked out of a nightclub bathroom after smoking a joint and literally bumped into a brat with whom I'd gone to high school in Spain; synchronicity, dude. Occasionally they're less so, like the time our quarterback from the same high school noticed me in the restaurant where I was shucking oysters, bussing tables and wrangling live crawfish around the raw bar. Not that he was a superficial guy, or that crawfish wrangling isn't a respectable profession. It's just that, were one able to pick the moment at which one would be reunited with an inordinately popular peer from a decade ago, one probably wouldn't pick a moment when one was carrying a bus-tub full of burger-rinds and broken glass, smeared with mudbug feces and being dressed down by a bartender for not providing a fresh bottle of Clamato in a timely manner.
It happens all the time. And not just to me — Florida plays its bizarro cosmic version of This Was Your Life with grown-up military brats all over the state. Hell, sometimes it throws an even bigger dose of its mojo to those who don't actually live here; all you need, it seems, is a Florida connection of some, of any sort.
Around this time last year, I got an e-mail out of the blue from a guy, now in Colorado, with whom I'd been very close early in high school; he was one of that small group of tight friends who defined so much of my existence right when the teenage years started to get serious. I'll call him Fitz, because that was the nickname we gave him.
Anyway, Fitz, who had been married and divorced during the intervening years, was getting hitched again. And it just so happened that the girl he was marrying was a girl from our Spain-days clique, a girl all of us had crushed on wildly and unrequitedly back in the day, thousands of miles away, on another continent. They'd gotten together while she was living and working in Tampa, Fla. (!), and one thing had led to another.
Synchronicity, dude.
Now consider this: This year, amid the torrent of photos I'm continuously getting of the family Fitz's beautiful baby boy, came an e-mail from another member of that same circle, inviting me to her wedding. She was betrothed to a third member of our little freshman- and sophomore-year boys' club. (A fourth, it should be noted, lives in Tampa, and has a growing family of his own.) The last I'd heard, that particular gentleman, whose nickname I won't use here because, in hindsight, it's just nowhere near as cool as Fitz's, was doing some military schooling in Pensacola, Fla. (!!).
I'd missed the previous wedding, and the accompanying chance to see all these people who'd met, parted, set foot in Florida, met again and fell in love. I wasn't going to miss this one, if I could help it, and it turned out I wouldn't have to. They were getting married on the bride's parents' home turf.
Sarasota, Fla. (!!!).
So I went down to Lido Beach (holding my breath as I navigated St. Armands Circle for fear of choking on all the affluence), and watched these two old friends pledge their lives to one another on the sand. Afterward, I circulated through a hotel ballroom full of people who had been much more responsible about keeping up with the continuing paths of one another's lives than I had been. I felt a little ashamed, but mostly I was thankful that whatever entity it is that runs this peninsula's Implausible Reunions Department has a thing for military brats.
Around the time I began to wonder if things could possibly get any stranger, if the sense of Destiny as a warped, moody, favorite-playing peer could grow any more pervasive, the single girls gathered on the dance floor, and the bride threw the bouquet. One of the single girls was a woman I'd dated and loved back in high school, a woman that I, despite my mother's occasional and unsubtle suggestions over the years that I get in touch, hadn't laid eyes on since 1987.
Try and guess who caught the garter.
Shit like that just doesn't happen in Montana, people.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2004.
