As Florida As It Gets

In the opening of this book, my son notices a bear a few feet behind me and says, “That’s cool.”

I would have preferred a more comprehensive briefing.

The bear provides a situation. My son’s choice of words gives me a story. His calm assessment, my complete lack of useful information, the ordinary task of locking the front door: those details put you there. You can understand both of us immediately, even if your own school mornings have involved considerably less bear.

That is the work of turning real life into humor. You pay attention to the exact moment a sensible person becomes unreasonable, or an unreasonable situation starts to feel routine. You remember the phrase someone used. You notice what you were worried about five seconds before a much larger concern arrived.

Then you write it for someone who was not standing beside you.

At dinner, I can use my voice, a pause, a look across the table. On the page, the sentence has to do that work. A long explanation can flatten a good moment. One well-placed detail can bring it back. I read for rhythm, move a sentence, cut the part I included mostly because I enjoyed writing it, and try to leave the reader room to get there.

It also helps to tell the truth about my own contribution. I have very little interest in writing a book in which I am the only sensible person in Florida. First, there are witnesses. Second, being wrong is often where the story starts getting good.

Being the joke is part of the job.

The man who believes he understands pool ownership because he understands science has already supplied the pool store with an afternoon’s entertainment. The father who thinks experience has prepared him for a baby is about to receive a performance review from someone who cannot hold up his own head.

Those moments matter because the confidence is familiar. We have all approached something with an impressive amount of certainty and discovered, shortly afterward, that we should have brought a towel, asked another question, or listened to the person standing next to us.

I want the stories to keep the warmth of telling them to friends. There is room for exaggeration, memory, affection, and an occasional attempt to defend myself. The book acknowledges that some identifying details, dialogue, and chronology have been changed, combined, or reconstructed for the telling. The people and feelings deserve care even when the narrator has made himself look like an idiot.

You do not need a Florida address to recognize an unsolicited opinion about your grill. Or the panic of discovering that every other parent knew about the school activity. Or the person you love bringing home something that requires space, maintenance, and a conversation you were hoping to avoid.

The details change from house to house. The feelings travel well.

That recognition is what I hope for when I write. You start with my story, and somewhere along the way you remember your dad, your neighbor, your own child, or the friend whose involvement should have made you reconsider the entire afternoon.

Maybe you laugh because you have done the same thing. Maybe you laugh because you are relieved someone has finally admitted it. A shared laugh can do a surprising amount of work between people who have never met.

There is tenderness in that, too. Raising a child, starting over, building a family, and figuring out where you belong are substantial things to live through. They happen alongside grocery runs, broken air conditioning, and arguments about whose turn it is to deal with the thing in the yard. In memory, the funny little details often give us a way back to the people who mattered.

I wanted to make room for those people in this book. The laughter belongs to the life around it.

If you live in Florida, you may recognize the habits before I finish explaining them. If you used to live here, you may find yourself remembering a particular road, a particular meal, or a particular person you would never have met anywhere else.

If you love visiting, consider this a look at what happens after the vacation photos. We still have to raise children, fix things, buy groceries, and get home before the sky makes a decision. We just do it with a few additional species involved.

And if you simply like observational humor and personal stories, there is plenty here that requires no local knowledge. Embarrassment is widely available. So are affection, stubbornness, and the belief that a job will take twenty minutes.

The short pieces make room for a chapter over coffee or several more when you meant to go to bed. It is also a book you can hand to the person who keeps saying, “You should write that down.” I did. There were more pages than expected.