It’s pretty cloudy out, overcast really, a serious bummer considering I’m staying at a little dive hotel just steps from the unbelievably gorgeous white powder sands of Siesta Beach.  I’m here in Sarasota to go to my 30^th high school reunion (holy shit, 30 years? Really?) and taking a little break from work and family back home for a little “me” time, something I haven’t done in quite awhile.

And for my wife who’s probably reading this, I do not consider my frequent business trips “me” time for the following reason.  Today I woke up and cycled 35 miles before breakfast, came back, showered, bought the New York Times, took a leisurely stroll to my favorite restaurant in the Village, drank coffee, read aforementioned NYT, ate a nice omelet along with some fruit and yogurt, went to Davidson’s Drugstore (where my mother worked for over 25 years and which is owned by kids I went to school with), bought 3 postcards, a tee-shirt and socks for my daughter, and a beach towel, came back to dive hotel and wrote 3 postcards, one to my daughter, one to my mother, and one to my office (nyeh nyeh!), and am now composing a post which will be read by at most 10 people.  Suffice to say, I don’t do any of these things on business trips.  Well maybe a little posting now and then.

Though I’m here for the reunion, I honestly was not close to many of my classmates, though there are a couple people I wouldn’t mind seeing.  I was gone shortly after graduation, never to reside here again, but my parents were here for many years and I was a frequent visitor.  My mom moved after my father passed away in 2002 and it’s been years since I’ve been back to my old stomping grounds.  I’m here mostly to get away while coming back.

My cycling this a.m. took me up and down Siesta Key several times, and each pass provided new memories.  There are the woods we used to go to and get high, Turtle Beach where I had plenty of winter surfing sessions, the first apartment of three that we lived in when we moved here in 1973 and dad was looking for a house, the second place we lived which is now gone and replaced with an ugly monolithic condo (more on this kind of change in a moment), the third place we lived where we used to play tag on the elevators and where I had one of my first tastes of s-e-x, Palm Island beach access which was where all the local kids went to the beach, Siesta Village where I had more adventures legal and illegal than I could list here, too many houses where friends lived than I could list here, various beachfront condos where we would “pool hop” all the way down Crescent Beach, Stickney Pointe Bridge which we would foolishly jump from when we thought the bridge tender wasn’t looking and swim across the channel to escape, the street where Shipwreck Kelly’s Bar used to be where we could get in when we were seventeen on nickel beer night and shoot pool all night long on tables too close to the walls so every shot was made with the cue practically vertical, Anna’s sandwich shop with the best.fucking.sandwiches.ever, the storefront that used to house Siesta Surf Shop which was my second home and the owner Ron taught me everything I know about surfing along with some life lessons, and Sea Winds apartments where my friend Eric lived and we could get high in his room and listen to Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic non-stop while the most his single-divorced mother would say to us was “please keep the bedroom door closed.”

One thing that was overwhelming on my jaunt this morning was the amount of god-awful mansions that have popped up on the south end of the Key.  Progress, as they say, is a bitch.  Where there used to be pleasant little one-story beach houses that actually were a part of their surroundings there are now these behemoth houses, all of which, and I mean all, fronted by ten-foot high walls made from everything from concrete to high-grade steel with electronic gates and competing alarm company signs.  If it weren’t for the mosaic of colors you’d swear these were mini-prisons, or, lacking moats, medieval castles.  My question is what the fuck are these folks afraid of?  Now I’m no expert on statistics, but my guess is that the south end of Siesta Key is not a haven for criminals.  Maybe the white-collar type, but not the type likely to break into a mansion to steal a stereo for drug money.  But like I said, I’m no expert.  If they want to wall themselves off from the world, all the better for us.  I just prefer the sleepy little beach town I moved to in 1973, but I guess that’s progress.  There, rant over.

Tonight is the first night of the reunion and I honestly don’t know what to expect.  I’m planning on a couple of glasses of red wine, some conversation, pulling out the kids’ photos (actually thumbing through them on the iphone—that damn progress again!), and just comparing notes.  I don’t know exactly who will be there, but because of this internet thing (say it with me now—progress!) I know that in my class there is a well-known plastic surgeon with a website full of boobies, a millionaire (billionaire maybe) developer, a mayor, a right-wing lobbyist in D.C. (she was the smartest person in our class—so much for that measure of intellect), a novelist (no, you’ve never heard of him), several reporters, several executives (both dying breeds really), flight attendants, business owners, pilots, many attorneys, a judge, military folk, a semi-known actor/model (the coke commercial where the secretaries are ogling a shirtless hunky window-washer—he’s the window washer), former athletes, a police officer, housewives, househusbands, parents, and grandparents.  Safe to say I’m the only investigator who represents death-row inmates.  Imagined conversation with the right-wing lobbyist?—“Hi, I’m Paul.  I’m an atheist, pro-choice, pro-gay, independent, anti-Fox News freak show, union-backing, peace-loving, anti-war, Sierra-Club, pro-intellectual, proudly far-left defense-investigator for Death-Row inmates in California.  And what is it you do?”

Should be fun.  Stay tuned.