I had to do the math. Just to see if it could be true. Because it didn’t seem possible. Didn’t seem like I’ve been here that long.
“… borrow the one … 11 minus 3 … take the square root of 15 … if a train is leaving Austin at 5 o’clock …”
And I came up with this: 18 years vs. 20.
Eighteen years vs. 20?!?
Eighteen years I lived in Tampa, before moving here to St. Augustine for college.
Twenty years I’ve lived in St. Augustine … because like bad fungus, I never left.
This fall made two decades. Two St. Augustinian decades!
I have lived here longer than I lived in my own hometown. My birthplace. A city that my family called home for three generations — from a shotgun shack in Ybor City to a double-barrel shotgun shack near Hyde Park.
But now I’m a stranger there and a local here.
Datil pepper soufflé if I’m not a local?!?
All these years I’ve thought of myself as a newcomer, and in some circles I still am. Like the families who were here to valet park Ponce de Leon’s ship when he pulled up looking for fried shrimp.
I always thought of myself as a townie-in-training. A junior local. Close to, but not quite ready for one of those bumper stickers that reads: “St. Augustine: A quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.”
Now I feel somewhat required to get one. And I don’t even fish! Shoot, I’ve never even been to a bait shop! I’VE GOT TO START GOING TO BAIT SHOPS!!!
I’ve never lived anywhere else longer than I’ve lived here. Which just goes to prove my old adage that St. Augustine is the Bermuda Triangle of Florida: Once you get in, you can’t get out.
Not that any of us are trying. We’re all happily stranded here.
I was thinking about that the other day when I saw my colleague, Catherine Norwood, write something on Facebook: “St. Augustine is a way to live not just a place to live.”
Oh crap … I even buy into that kind of stuff!
I’ve amassed stories and gossip and flip-flops. If you’re going to be a townie, you need at least 18 pairs of flip-flops — casual ones, dress ones, ones with chunks missing from the time a snapper turtle chased you. And you also have to name them and remember important occasions in them, like the time you caught your foot on fire while at the Chowder Debate.
Can I possibly be a local? I thought locals were the types who wore hats with parts of dead fish stuck to the brim. Who rode bikes with barnacles on the frame. Who owned shirts so bright that they caused car accidents. Locals say things like, “So when the moonshine still blew, my collection of antique car bumpers turned green.”
Jeez, and here I was just telling someone at the pub that I’m thinking about taking up beer making.
Is there any fixing it? Is there any hope for me? Should I move to Seattle or start drinking chai lattes to counteract the urges to kayak and wax poetically about palmettos? Already I can differentiate the sounds of amorous raccoons in the trees, ospreys and a drunk man falling of his bike on King Street.
Do I need to go to New York? Do I need to reduce my flip-flop-to-normal-shoe ratio? Do I need to get rid of my chickens? Do I need to stop walking my daughter to school — like I’m living in Mayberry — and start driving her 45 minutes across counties like regular Americans? Do I need to stop living in a house that looks like a barn … with a shed that looks like a barn … so people will stop asking, “So, do you live in the barn or in the barn?”
Or maybe I should just go with it. Accept my fate — my future as a townie. That I have 20 good years in and that this isn’t such a bad place to live — or a way to live. It’s St. Augustine. I’m a local now. And it’s time to learn how to fish and make beer while wearing my fanciest flip flops.