Greetings from Meredith Key

I was born and raised on Meredith Key, an island on the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico along the panhandle of Florida. I'm guessing that when you read "Florida" and "coast" in the same sentence, you probably thought of golden sand, sparkling blue water, and pretty girls in bikinis. But that's not the part of Florida that I grew up with. Not at all.

No, in my forsaken corner of the Sunshine State, most of the coast is a tidal saltmarsh where a tangle of mangrove trees blends into shallow water full of seagrass. That's a perfect place for baby fish and crabs and such to grow up, which is why it's illegal to clear mangroves or seagrass and why the fishing around Meredith Key is famous among hardcore fishermen. But it wasn't such a great place for me.

For one, there really isn't a real beach anywhere around here. All those mangroves make it difficult to find a clear spot for sandcastle building, and except for a few hidden sandy nooks and crannies, all that seagrass doesn't make swimming very pleasant, either. And, of course, the lack of beach leads to a serious shortage of bikini babes.

So while nearby communities have grown into the "Redneck Riviera", ie, a bunch of over-built vacation destinations overrun with tourists from across the south, Meredith Key has remained the same sleepy little country town, seemingly forever. The only lodging down there is a 20-cabin motel with a private dock that caters to serious fishing aficionados. You can still see a sign on the main road into town that proudly declares "Meredith Key: A Slice of Real Florida!" It's a small slice, tho, since the sign also reads "Population 900".

As I grew up there, I realized that "Real Florida" often equaled "real boring". For entertainment venues, we had a one-screen movie theater, a combination pizza joint / video rental place with stacks of used VHS tapes that smelled of pepperoni, and a little park on the edge of downtown with some old playground equipment and a basketball court. That was about it. The older folks seemed satisfied just fishing and shooting the breeze. But for me, my main source of entertainment was dreaming about getting out of there.

I had more even opportunities for daydreaming than most of my friends because of my parents' busy work schedules. Like many remaining residents, they still lived in the place were they were born and raised, but they worked outside of town. My mom was a waitress at a fancy restaurant in a resort a good 30-odd miles down the coastal highway, so she got home late almost every night. About the only time I saw her during the week was when we passed in the doorway in the afternoon; me just coming home from school, she heading out in her starched uniform.

My dad was in construction. Not much building ever took place on Meredith Key outside of fiddler crab holes, so he'd often be out of town for a week or two at a time working on the high-rise hotels and condos popping up like pimples along the gulf coast. He'd hire himself out for remodeling and general fix-it jobs around the Key when work was slow, and sometimes he'd bring me along on these local gigs during the summer to learn the trade and help out a little. But for the most part, I saw him even less than I saw my mother. When home, he was usually grumpy and tired and wanted me to stay out of his way.

So in all, I was on my own for much of my childhood, and I was seldom at home. This was due to the fact that while Meredith Key was boring, my house was even more so. My parents made pretty good money, but they "didn't believe" in cable TV (god forbid satellite), and there's only so much tube-watching you can stand when the old-fashioned rabbit ear antenna only picks up four stations. They also thought that video games were a complete waste of time and money. And since I came of age a few years before the internet became ubiquitous, surfing the net was not an option, either.

So for all those reasons, I was out and about for hours every afternoon and evening, traveling everywhere by bicycle, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. This was especially true if my father happened to be out of town during the summer, since I could go wherever I wanted all day as long as I beat my mother back to the house, and she usually didn't make it home until around midnight.

I knew every inch of the greater Meredith Key area by the time I got to high school – every good place to swim, every secret fishing spot, all the best trees to climb, every crack in the city basketball court – and pretty much everybody in town.

That's why, while pedaling along the two-block "business district" with a couple of buddies near the end of my 9th grade year, I immediately noticed The Sign. It was just a neatly hand-written placard in the window of an empty restaurant reading "Coffee Shop – Coming Soon". It may seem crazy, but that little sign changed my life.

For many years, that space between the hardware store and the real estate office on Main Street had been home to Mack's Gulfside Galley, the closest thing to a hot spot in these parts. "The Galley" (as it was universally known) was more than a bar and restaurant; it was a gathering place for the whole community. And Mack himself, a gregarious hard-living former Navy man, was one of the most popular characters in town. But one crisp autumn evening, ol' Mack had cruised off for a night of fishing and was never seen again.

The disappearance of Mack and the subsequent closing of The Galley tore a big hole in Meredith Key's social fabric. It hadn't seemed possible, but there was even less to do. So when we saw the sign in the dusty window, my friends and I actually whooped. (Yes, teenage boys excited about the promise of a coffee shop. Like I said, it's a boring place.)

News travels quickly in a small town. It wasn't long before everyone knew that the proprietor of the new business was none other than Mack's long-lost daughter, Sylvia.

I'd heard Mack tell lots of stories about his military days and his fishing exploits, yet I'd never known he had a family. He'd always been an crusty but friendly old sailor, seemingly content with a solitary life filled with his restaurant and his fishing. But after that sign appeared in the window of his old establishment, everyone was abuzz with whispers about this prodigal daughter.

Eavesdropping on the chatty old ladies in the grocery store was usually the best source of local news. I hung around the meat counter long enough to discover that Mack had once been married, and that his wife and daughter (Sylvia) had suddenly departed without explanation about 15 years previously, leaving the big man alone with his bar and grill. The old ladies shared a few outlandish theories on why they'd left, but Mack had never seen fit to explain things to anyone, and nobody in town seemed to know what really happened. It was all very mysterious; why had the family suddenly split apart?

Somebody covered the inside of the big front window of the former Galley with newspaper a few days after The Sign appeared. I rode my bike past the storefront often, trying to catch a glimpse of Sylvia or at least get a peek inside. I couldn't see anything, but sometimes heard some alternative-sounding music in there along with the pounding of a hammer.

My surveillance finally paid off on a Friday afternoon after school. I'd been hanging out by the small town marina and was cruising away from the water when I noticed a woman lifting a big old stepladder from the back of a big old pickup truck a couple blocks away. I watched as she staggered a bit under the weight, turned, and tried to maneuver ladder through the back door of one of the business on Main Street. Pedaling closer, I realized that she was going into the soon-to-be coffee shop. I'd finally encountered the mysterious Sylvia.

It felt like I'd found Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Fortunately, Sylvia was a lot better looking. She wasn't exactly young, but not old, either; I guessed about 30. I've found that while some women start to lose their beauty as soon as the bloom of early youth is gone, a few actually grow more attractive as they move through their 20s and beyond. Sylvia was one of the latter. She was neither tall nor short, tan nor pale, chubby nor skinny. She was fit, tho, and her medium-length dark hair looked nice pinned up in an improvised bun away from her neck.

What really caught my eye were her face and her outfit. Even in profile, her face struck me as very pretty – even beautiful – and her skin was fresh enough for an Oil of Olay commercial even though she was a little sweaty and dirty. She looked predominantly anglo-saxon, yet something about her features held a hint of somewhere more exotic.

And you may think me a redneck for admitting this, but the denim overalls and t-shirt combo she was wearing really did it for me. The overalls were snug, cut off just below her knees, and obviously well-worn with different color paint splotches here and there. Her plain white short sleeve t-shirt was slightly damp with exertion. I was smitten on first sight.