Beach Boys = Fun, fun, fun!

St. Augustine, Florida, March 2024

It’s true. I don’t often sit around and listen to The Beach Boys these days. Let’s face it as you get a little older and go to a concert for a group like this you expect that there will only be a few surviving members and you will end up with more of a tribute show. 

On the other hand, free tickets in primo seats with a great friend proved to be fun, fun, fun, yes, I said it. Spoiler alert. This review might contain other cliches.  

The weather threatened to be less than perfect but held out nicely for the Beach Boys at The Amp in St. Augustine on the first Saturday night in March of 24.  

There were no boys on that stage. Mike Love the current leader and his old sidekick Bruce Johnston are well into their eighties. With his son Christian by his side, I thought oh how nice that he has his boy next to him. But he is in his fifties!  

Other members of the band, Tim Bonhomme, John Wedemeyer, Jon Bolton, Randy Leago, Brian Eichenberger and Keith Hubacher seemed comfortable surfing through the first hour going from one adventure in California to another without taking a breath. I soon realized these guys were up for the task and had the whole house ready to hit the waves and surf the USA!  

Not once did I think, wouldn’t it be nice if the old band members were still here. The vocals were all spot on. Eichenberger easily kept up with what would have been Brian Wilson’s unforgettable falsettos joined by the mellow sound of Christian, Mike and Bruce. Wedemeyer on lead guitar was a nice addition and felt good on the older songs like they belonged together. Leago walking out front on the sax was memorable. Bonhomme accompanied Johnston on keyboard and kept up with those good vibrations and other sounds that the Boys are known for.  

Hey drummers, you know you drive the band and are always in sync with the bass player. Hubacher on bass amazingly bit into the driving force of this drummer, Bolton. So help me Rhonda, that guy can bang a drum while also banging his head and smiling while doing it. I’m thinking, because I am old, what would Dennis say about this very “Keith Moonish” act. I noticed the lightning bolt on the front of his drum stand and thought at first, we had an Elvis fan. After the show I learned they call him Bolt and with good reason. Spontaneous combustion had to be a fear of band members as they doused him with water after a particularly crazy performance. 

The set list was perfect and even included a song from Christian’s album along with a few covers from those good old days. I wondered how it felt to an audience full of Floridians to hear so much about California girls when suddenly and in the middle of thin, bikini clad, surfing girls, the video playing flashed a University of Florida cheerleader, only for a second but the crowd went wild resulting in a few gator chomps.  

This show was kid friendly, and it was great to see young and old being schooled in that old time rock and roll with the band’s tribute to Chuck Berry.  

The Beach Boys tonight and the Beach Boys of yesterday converged on the stage at The Amp very skillfully by the videos playing in the background featuring the band playing how it would feel when they grew up to be men. I wonder if they met their expectations. I think Mike Love can answer that as he has kept them all together even if some members were there in spirit only. There were plenty of clips featuring Mike’s famous cousins Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson along with their friend Al Jardine in their matching stripped shirts marching us all down memory lane. At times, the band on stage seemed to be playing with the original band. We saw them clean cut, surfing, sailing, driving fast cars and even hanging out with another famous band from that era, The Beatles.   

Saving the best for last, that great dance tune, Barbara Ann had everyone up and dancing as a beach ball was tossed around. Yes, they had given me everything I needed including a short trip to Kokomo! 

I had forgotten how much I had always loved the Beach Boys listening to that shiny vinyl album on my record player when I was a young girl spending time in my room and happy that Love and company can still bring it to both young and old.  

Did Maximo See His Shadow?

Yes, Indeed he did!

Does that mean Spring is just around the corner? It was, on this particular visit to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. But it wasn’t Spring yet because the cashier told us there would be no performance today because of the weather. I am not sure if that means it was too cold for the fellows to eat or they might take a chomp out of one of the zookeepers.  They were not simply laying around but instead were eyeing us as though we might have a chicken in our pocket.

Especially Maximo.  

Maximo is a 15 foot 3 inch, 1,250-pound salt-water crocodile also known as a Saltie from Australia. He is 53 years old and doesn’t look a day over 29. He and his wife, Sydney live in a giant underground tank where they can be seen just hanging out.  

But today Maximo gave me and my grandgirls a spin around the old tank.  

We have a season pass to St. Augustine Alligator Farm because we love all the exotic critters like the lemurs and sloths and crocodiles from all over the world.  

We could just take a ride down the road to the St. Johns River at dusk to watch the alligators. Their eyes glow you know. But we feel a little safer seeing them contained laying around in the soon to be Spring sunshine.

St. Augustine, Florida USA   https://www.alligatorfarm.com

Palatka, Florida

16th Annual River Blessing

January 27, 2024

This morning, I am listening to the dove’s coo from my porch while the wind blows and brings the clean scent of the ocean. I remember when I first moved here 30 some years ago loving that salty breeze and now, I take it for granted. The Atlantic Ocean as well as the St. Johns that connects to it and its waters are a part of me. I am situated between the two. What a great place! 

Yesterday I attended the 16^th Annual River Blessing held at the riverfront in Palatka hosted by Ayolane of Earth Kinship and Harold Locke, our St. Augustine Native American guide along with the Riverkeepers from St. Johns, St. Mary’s and the Matanzas River. 

It was a small gathering of folks dedicated to many various aspects of keeping our rivers in good shape. However, as Ayolane explained, this day was not to include anything about politics, money or religion. We came today simply to pay tribute and honor the river as Basil Braveheart, a Lakota elder did in 2008 at this same location.  

This location is known to have a Native American settlement on the banks of the river. William Bartram, the first naturalist, explored and recorded information about the St. Johns River in 1774 and even lived on the river for a short while.  

Today each riverkeeper brought a bowl of water from the three locations. Harold cleansed each participant with sage and offered tobacco as a gift to the spiritual elders of the four directions of our earth. Then we each blessed the water in our own way. 

To the beat and songs of Native Americans from the area the procession ended on the pier with the ceremonial bowl being emptied back into the river.  

The ceremony was lovely and left me with a feeling of peace and hopefulness for our planet earth and a strong sense of connection to water. 

New Year Cleanse

Inspired by Beth Kempton – Winter Writing Sanctuary

The baby ate dirt. She also liked fire, not just the contained kind that sat in her family’s woodstove or beyond the beautiful hearth of her granny’s fireplace but big roaring campfires that her Daddy built. He took her away to his neck of the woods back in the higher ten acres that he told her would someday be hers, a small part of a huge family farm with too many descendants to make such a promise. When he dressed her in boots and put her in a warm jacket, her mother knew what was happening. “Don’t let her eat dirt,” she would yell out as he crossed the threshold of the old shotgun house holding her tiny two-year old hand. Not, “don’t light her on fire.” If only she knew. 

I was always told my Daddy wanted a boy from the time I was first conceived. I was going to be a junior in his mind, and he made my mother buy everything in blue. It was a thing back then and something that is still a holdover today but way more serious in the 50s. My mother told me when I arrived into an array of blue baby blankets, and tiny overalls, the entire matriarchy of my mother’s clan rushed in to make sure this baby was swaddled in pink. 

It was a constant battle, retold through the years by my mother, but verified by the many pictures my Daddy took with his Kodak brownie camera. Even easier to understand because my very own name is a derivative of his with the same middle name, only missing the word junior on the end. 

One day my daddy said, “come on, we have something to do.” It wasn’t unusual because I was his shadow and went everywhere with him, even to work driving a big cola delivery truck. This day he had something else in mind. There I sat on a big board to elevate my head to a place where the barber could reach me in a barber chair. The barber smelled funny and whisked the hairs away with a big puffy brush as he cut. When we arrived back home, my mother screamed, then cried, then stomped off into the bedroom. The barber had cut off my long wavy hair and fashioned the style to look something similar to an Elvis or Fonzie do. The very next day my mother, who didn’t drive, had one of the ladies pick us up to go shopping. From then on, I wore dresses full of lace and ruffles. That worked to an extent. Let’s say it was a compromise. I have a picture of myself in a ruffled dress, cowboy boots and hat along with a toy pistol strapped around my hip. Through the years my family has laughed about this snapshot of me riding what appears to be a homemade stick horse and never let me live it down. 

There are no pictures of the fires or the walks we took in the woods, often carefully making our way over the barbed wire fence through the big red bull’s pen to the place where we would spend an afternoon. There is no proof like the 180-proof wild cherry wine my PawPaw pulled out of his cellar on one occasion when he walked with us. My mother never knew why I slept the entire afternoon returning from one of these adventures, but I knew all about the wild cherry trees on the farm. 

Until he passed when I was almost eleven, my daddy took me to the farm that his mother and father built. They raised six children, hosted many family get-togethers, and even died in the home many years later. The last to host was my MawMaw as her own casket sat in the drawing room preceded in death by her husband and two sons. My mother was never invited nor attended anything except my Daddy’s funeral and wake also held in the same home. But that is another story. 

Today as I feed the fallen branches from the canopy of oak trees from my tiny farm into a big roaring fire that my daddy would have been proud of, I wait for my grandchildren to arrive so that we can begin to celebrate a new year. 

These barefooted girls, all five of them, run as fast as they can and fall over almost into the fire. When all is done, the girls are covered in dirt, no one has a coat although the temperature has dropped, and they are hungry for Smores. They roast the marshmallows until they are in flames or covered in dirty ash. Dirt eaters, they get it honestly. All my grandchildren are girls, I figure my mother finally got back at him. 

My fires are built to cleanse all the unfortunate events from the previous year as the flames do a dance taking us into a warm place in yet a sometimes very cold world. Although the fire remains contained, the hopeful feelings it provokes spill out as if moving over the bricks and travels up in smoke as signals to my daddy and our ancestors asking them to join in our earth-bound dance. Fire, dirt, laughter, the chilly night, the horses whinny for more marshmallows as they crane their necks over the fence so the baby of the group can reach them. 

We pledge to do better, to rid ourselves of any troublesome details from the old year, and to start a new year burning toward the future like a bright roaring campfire. 

Bachelor of Science, yes I have one.

A common question from friends and family… what am I going to do when I graduate from college? I mean really they are asking what was your purpose for getting a degree at your age. Obviously, I am not starting a new career when I am already receiving social security! So far, I haven’t come up with a good answer. But here are a few I am thinking about.

First I am going to hang that pretty piece of paper on the wall that I got from channeling my love of learning into dedication to accomplishment.

I am going to read books. Books that are not peer reviewed or have anything to do with academia.

Quit talking to people who live with their parents, use the online class discussion forums to find dates, and think Cardi B has talent.

I am going to tell Alexa to play old obscure 70s songs that I used to love by Cat Stevens, The Moody Blues, and Willis Allan Ramsey. Ok well, that’s not really anything different.

I am never turning down another invitation from any of my friends who want to go do something on the weekend! They are all free now!

I am going to play my guitar. The one I bought that resembles the first one i ever learned to play. The one with the nylon strings that don’t hurt my fingers after not playing for months.

I am going to play with my horses other than scooping their poop, feeding them and feeding them and feeding them.

I am going to write about serious things, nonsensical prose, letters to my people, posts in this blog and whatever else comes to mind.

I am going to photograph everything and I may post 343 pictures of my day at the beach staring at the ocean. I will be going to the beach and the river and the woods and downtown and all the museums and Friday art walk and Thursdays concerts in the plaza and oh, The Trade Winds! Yeah.

Of course the most important thing I am going to do is spend more time with my family. My grand girls all need trips to Buddy Boys to sit on the porch and eat ice cream, to parks and festivals and beach and shopping and lots of Gmom days!

Oh, and I am probably going to take a class!

Pronouns

So, let me start by saying i do not care what pronoun you use or that you feel it necessary to make such a proclamation. Go ahead. But more and more because a small percentage of people want something, it becomes a requirement.

I don’t want to have to report to a future employer than I like having sex with men, always have. But, when I was six years old, I started wearing a hat and boots and jeans similar to what most men wear. Today I still put on a pair of muck boots, shorts and a baseball cap. Tell me, is that cross-dressing or transgender ish?

I think we have more important things to focus on then proclaiming who we want to have sex with. Face it, doesn’t it boil down to that? Ok, so you want to dress differently than opposed to the majority right now. Who cares? Go for it!

Who cares? It’s practical. Besides if you are a man, like you know with all those man parts, and you want to wear a dress, I don’t care.

I hate labels and always have just like I’ve always enjoyed having sex with men but that shouldn’t be anybody’s business.

Searching/St. Augustine’s Unknown Characters

When you enter the former old store, now Jim’s Place, the wooden floor creaks, the smells coming from the open kitchen awaken your senses, and you are immediately drawn to the photo of Rita smiling by her old green truck. You can feel the warmth of her presence leftover from the past here at Jim’s Place.

                                                       Rita Masters just outside her store.                                      

Photo by Cash Register at Jim’s Place Restaurant

                      

Minorcans

Rita was the feisty daughter of Antonia and Mae (Triay) Masters, a farming family in St. Johns County whose roots can be traced back to the small island of Minorca located off the coast of Spain. The Italian, Greek, and Spanish families were indentured servants brought over from their native lands to work on plantations in the New World around the 1700s. The cultures intermingled and today the locals refer to all of their descendants as Minorcans.

Perhaps Rita inherited her tenacious spirit from her ancestors. We do know that her life plan did not include becoming a farmer’s wife and mother like most of the young Minorcan women around Elkton in those times. Instead, her entrepreneurial spirit led her to do something unheard of. She bought a building and started her own business.

Masters Grocery

Rita’s family owned the land in the heart of Elkton where Ivan Brown built his grocery store, Brown’s Grocery in 1942. Rita bought the establishment in the 60s and opened Masters Grocery.

They called her “Aunt Rita” or “Ms. Rita” and in this close-knit community where most everyone was related, she became somewhat of a legend.

The store soon became the popular place to gather, have a drink, gossip, and listen to Rita play the harp late at night. Locals remember that quite often there was a big pot of lima beans simmering on Aunt Rita’s stove along with other specialties from the Minorcan culture handed down from generations of Spanish cooks. Rita’s cooking was famous, if only in Elkton.

The Food

Fresh gopher stew is illegal these days but used to be a popular and cheap meal for most of the folks in Elkton and surrounding communities. According to locals, Aunt Rita would gut and clean gophers (the tortoises) in the back of her store for anyone who purchased a live one out in the parking lot.

Fresh mullet were often sold in Masters Grocery. Rita wove and sold the mullet nets used to snare the popular fish. The mullet was heavily seasoned and cooked in a smoker. The nature of those seasonings, like recipes of most Minorcan foods, are still kept within families and handed down through generations.  Mullet is legal to eat today but only popular with those who know the correct way to spice them up and smoke them.

Aunt Rita’s Store

A community member who still lives in Elkton recalls that during harvest season, the school bus would stop in front of the store. Many of the kids helped families nearby grade potatoes and take care of farm chores after school.  Aunt Rita supplied the kids with their snacks like ice cream and sodas.

They say Aunt Rita never met a stranger, and the store was a gathering place for all ages. The large farms’ potato and cabbage packing houses were open 24 hours.  During the harvest, she gave the migrant workers a room in the back to eat their meals while on break. Rita gave them discounts on the items they purchased.

Occasionally, the workers would get out of hand or even try to steal a little something, but most of them had a lot of respect for the woman and the sawed-off shotgun that she kept behind the counter.  Aunt Rita was not afraid to use it, according to locals.

What the Locals Say

These were the days when everybody knew everyone’s business in the small community. Most of the gossip started in Masters Grocery and ended at St. Ambrose Catholic Church on Sunday, before Mass. Rita, her male companion, Palmer Beach, and both of their families were all members.

There is little doubt Rita was the subject of some of the gossip because even now some relatives are not comfortable relaying stories. However, they will eagerly share if they can remain anonymous. It’s almost like there is some Minorcan code or something.

Rita drank whiskey, cursed like a sailor, and never married. Rita never traveled very far away. In fact, she worked, went to church, partied, and was born and died all within a few miles-radius of Elkton near her store.  No one can or will say why she and Palmer Beach, never married. They lived together in one of the family homes for many years, and they are buried side by side in St. Ambrose’s cemetery.

Photo taken by Marsha Stone

The Spirit of Rita                                                     

Today Rita’s family admits she was different, but they express a deep admiration of her. The stories they remember reveal her to be a woman well ahead of her time. More importantly, she was a lady who possessed a warm and charitable spirit. A glimpse of that spirit can be experienced in the old photo on display at Jim’s Place where people still gather today.

Conjunction 21 December

Finally, it only took two planets and the shortest day to bring humanity together to celebrate life and each other. No arguments, no alternate conclusions, and nothing necessary but two eyes and a clear sky. People of all faiths, nationalities, the rich, and the poor recognizing the magnificence and the order of the universe used these natural occurrences to clarify our place here on this planet in this galaxy even if only for an hour or two. We were able to come together just like Jupiter and Saturn, lizards and humans.

Something happened?

Matt Drudge put that hat on at the National Press in 98 and transformed from that whimpy nerd typing in his kitchen into a hero of those of us love journalism. He laid it all out for us day after day. He exposed Bill Clinton for taking advantage of the Oval and using it for his own selfish endeavors. Matt gave us a place to easily find the headline of the day good or bad. He brought us through 9/11, recessions, mishandling of foreign affairs and conflicts, Benghazi, North Korea and the fat spoiled dictator. Time and time again he showed us who Hillary Clinton really was. So what happened? He either “sold out”, burned out, or something or someone threatened his family. I will never believe that he simply changed although those of us who care may never find out.

My mom and dad loved me and that I am sure was as legitimate as it comes.