Back to Boca, Baby!
Diane & I made a trip to Boca Raton, Florida, this past weekend, a good place to escape the dreaded Polar Vortex scolding us all for our misdeeds. It was a birthday present, a trip down memory lane for me. I hadn’t been back in more than thirty years. Jazus! It feels weird to say that! My parents moved us all down there when I was seven, and then again when I was in high school. I liked it more when I was little—that house had a pool. In high school and college, I was only there for the summers and never quite got over feeling like a visitor, never completely unpacked.
We spent a fair amount of time at the beach—drinking coffee in anticipation of the sunrise, watching the seagulls and pelicans, walking the beach and cautiously side-stepping the Portuguese man-of-war that have lately begun washing ashore with the seaweed. Apparently, even deceased they remain dangerous.
Boca is largely a retirement community. New York snowbirds easily outnumber native Floridians. Dinner at a New York style pizzeria feels more like an episode of the Sopranos. On the beach, that demographic is manifested by receding hairlines and bulbous bellies hugely outnumbering bikinis. It can be hard to watch. You don’t see that on Trip Advisor.
I had a blast taking Diane on a walking tour of my old neighborhood, trying to determine whether this or that was the beloved pool house. I found myself admiring the tropical landscaping, something I never would have done as a youngster. Diane, as always, was fascinated by the birds. We stumbled upon a small flock of white ibis and a trio of Muscovy ducks. Of course, you can’t walk ten feet without spotting curly-tailed lizards, the squirrels of Boca, darting in and out of the hedges. Slow progress!
There are any number of invasive species, other than New Yorkers, residing in Boca these days. Burmese pythons have famously soared to the top of the food chain in the nearby Everglades. Muscovy ducks have been driving everyone crazy by spreading disease in their droppings. Even the ubiquitous curly-tailed lizards have only been coming since the 1940s. But of the relative newcomers, my favorite were the green iguanas. We counted eight warming themselves on the branches of a Florida pine one one morning.
It’s always strange to go back to a place and see how it has changed in your absence. Was it always that way or was I just focused on other things? Boca has grown and grown and grown. There’s more of everything—hotels, condos, mansions, restaurants, shops, cars, yachts, and people, always more and more people. It seems a bit more chic. I’ve never seen so many Porches. But sadly, it still seems pretty segregated. Money still talks along Royal Palm Way.
Amidst all that changes, the beach remains the beach. The ocean still casts its spell, calling the faithful home. The sea turtles still come ashore to lay their eggs, and the locals have taken to turning off the streetlights along A1A during certain times of the year to ensure that the anxious hatchlings get started in the right direction. The ocean was a bit warmer than I remember for early February, another troubling sign of our misdeeds. But the bellies and the bikinis spend their days lounging, trading war stories, reading trashy novels (not mine) and walking up and down the beach shopping for shells. And, like me, everyone’s got their phone—texting shivering relatives back up north, snapping photos of the sunrise, searching for dinner options. and looking up the names of all that we’ve forgotten.
