Since last leaving there in January, I noticed that the gas bill seemed unusually high, considering no one was staying at the place. It had also seemed then like the oven was unusually warm for just having the pilot light going. I contacted the gas company in Miami, TECO, and they shut it off as a precaution and arranged to send someone over on the morning I arrived. Well-me-now, it seems that there was indeed something wrong with the oven, which wouldn't shut off completely, and there was also a leak in the system.
This unusual combination would have led, eventually, to an explosion in the enclosed, sealed, and unoccupied space. Thus was my spring break not much of a break. I spent the first day trying to figure out whether to repair the gas system, or to just switch to electrical appliances. A real four-burner range with oven would have required a 220-volt outlet, which the place didn't have. I took the bus up to Aventura Mall, had a look at appliances at Sears, and bought a new bicycle to replace the stolen one from January. Having arrived on a red-eye flight that morning, I was a bit wobbly during the ride back to Miami Beach on the new bike, and crashed out (figuratively) utterly exhausted shortly after.
By Wednesday, my second full day there, I'd decided to go with a couple of Oster appliances from the Target in North Miami, a double-burner hotplate and a convection oven large enough to cook a whole chicken or a 12-inch pizza. The two of them together cost less than $100, fit easily onto the back of the bike with its new rack and saddlebag baskets, and could be plugged into the existing kitchen outlets.
I pulled out some unattractive cabinetry next to the space for the gas stove, figured out how to disconnect the fittings to the stove, wrestled it out the back door, arranged for Salvation Army to pick it up, took some measurements, and found an inexpensive way to mount the appliances with some plastic shelving from Home Depot. This required cutting the poles to obtain the right height for cooking, but when it was done it looked surprisingly professional and I'm quite happy with it.
Just the same... not much of a vacation.
Since returning, I've alternated two 12-hour days per week at the college with a lot of idleness, which really isn't much different from my usual routine. Gave and graded midterm exams, among other things. I'm also maintaining the facebook page and doing general publicity for a state conference coming up in the fall. This is not as busy a life as it sounds.
A couple of years ago, I picked up an anthology of I Love Lucy at the swap meet. It's just a thick coffee table type book full of illustrations and synopses of every episode. Have come to learn that the sequence of episodes where they move to Los Angeles for several months ran right around the time I was born; the famous scene of Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethyl singing "California Here I Come" first aired when I was a few weeks old. I was born in the middle of the show's original run, and watched re-runs of it sometimes on weekday mornings when I didn't have to go to school.
It's The Lucy Show that I better remember as an evolving series, though. It ran from 1962 to 1968, and since my folks were fans of it we watched it every Monday night for most of those years. Gale Gordon as Mr. Mooney was one of my favorite characters from it, with his frequent explosions of temper and exagerrated mannerisms. Thinking of watching that show's original run, and of some of our other family rituals of the early to late 1960s, fills me with a melancholy feeling for a long ago and far away place that I know I can never return to.
Nonetheless, I picked up a used DVD of several episodes from the series the other day, and watched it last night after a long day of teaching classes, grading papers, and generally taking care of obligations. Then today I read a little online about the characters, about their real lives outside of the series. I made some coffee, then sat there in my underpants in my comfortable little place, thinking that it's really very similar to my place in Miami Beach, full of little things that please me and remind of all that made me happy when I was an easily entertained kid in the 1960s.
Gale Gordon lived in Borrego Springs. He commuted to Burbank to film the series during its run. It's funny to think that his "Mr. Mooney" character was not the real he, that he lived a real life as a real person not far from where I grew up. Desi Arnaz had a place in Rancho Santa Fe, also not far inland from the beaches I've walked along and the surf I've played in off-and-on for more than half a century... half a century!. Come to think about it, Lucy herself was a nodding acquaintance of my parents, as she was a regular visitor to the La Jolla Playhouse like they were. When you're a kid, the people on TV seem to have a separate reality. Now you see them as folks not so different from your grown-up self, and it's odd to do the math and figure out that Gale Gordon was my age during the 1967 season of the show, while Lucy was about five years younger. In fact, she looks quite "do-able" now that I'm an older man... and it's weird to think of that because she was about a decade older than my parents!
Thinking of such things puts me in a sweet-sad mood, and today I'm glad I have the kind of lifestyle that allows me just to shut down for a day at mid-week and think about things that are gone forever that meant much to me as a kid. It's just a very thin string now that connects my 61 year old self to the child of the 1960s who knew he was growing up in a very special era. I get a kick out of having an adult's understanding now of things that seemed so intriguing and mysterious then. Once in awhile it brings tears to my eyes, though I keep in mind that it's unseemly and a bit silly to cry over such things.
My gal in Miami will be 62 tomorrow. I wonder what the heck I'm doing involved with someone so old, and then I realize that I'm only 8 months behind. It doesn't seem like I should be that old. It doesn't seem that long since I was a Cub Scout, a kid in elementary school who thought the coolest thing in the world was to come home from a pack meeting and sit up on a Monday night enjoying The Lucy Show with my parents, then talking to the kids at school the next day about the funny things we saw. I wish everyone in the world had a chance to feel that way at some time in their lives.
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