Our Urban Odyssey
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Rolling with the tide

This is a non-conventional blog entry, when Nova spirals into a literary piece (though blogging nevertheless because my stories require multiple edits, while blog entries are raw). I try to balance these entires with urban odyssey shots to even things out.

Let’s time travel a bit, to a sunny beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. Nova is about twelve in her urban odyssey. She has parents who feel she must be exiled to a sunny, southern state with immigrant war-scarred grandparents every summer. It’s part of a city kid’s odyssey: everyone tells you how horrible it is that you grew up in one, and your soul gets saved by sending you to foreign states just when finally think you’re free because you’ve just been released from school for the summer.

This entry speaks to rolling with things that sometimes present themselves as obstacles and hardships in our journey back home to Ithaca.

Nova loves the beach. She was fortunate to be taken to one on a scorching hot August day. She splished and splashed in the emerald waves of Madeira beach. She wondered if she might magically transform into a mermaid, or if the magic fish from her favorite book, “The Fisherman and his Wife”, might emerge from the depths to speak with her. She paid no attention to the little red flecks floating around her in which she bathed.

When she got out of the water, her skin was covered in red bumps that itched with an inferno no amount of scratching could put out. Her grandparents packed up the beach stuff and Nova put on her ripped jean shorts held together with punk-style safety pins that made her grandmother cringe. They made their way back to the car to head home.

“Curses!” Nova thought as she climbed into the 1970 brown Cadillac. “My beach day is ruined and who knows when they’ll ever take me back here again.” So Nova sulked in the back seat, lamenting how her odyssey was ruined by a beach infestation of red tide. Her legs were aflame. She couldn’t stop scratching.

Whether it was the senility of grandpa, the length of the Cadillac with the still-functioning 8-track, or the carelessness of the parents, the Cadillac, backing up very, very slowly, bumped into a kid that had wandered right behind it. He was okay, he was okay… I’ll spare you and I that trauma, but Nova suddenly found herself with a hysterical grandmother who acted like the Wehrmacht had come to reclaim her when the police arrived, a passive grandfather who was pressed against the roof of his car by his throat by a father whose kid was just bumped by a car, and, the inquisitive glare of a police officer who eyed her from outside.

The police officer asked her grandparents questions. Nova stayed in the car. The police officer kept looking back at her.

“Step outside, please,” he asked her, though it wasn’t really a question.

Nova always thinks the worst and assumed she’d be escorted to jail, if not for what happened, then because she didn’t have a driver’s license and maybe passengers in Florida needed them. Be mindful, Nova was a child too, so I don’t quite understand how the following is justified.

The Floridian cop (though I prefer calling him a sheriff or patroller, because the look is so very different than the city) asked Nova to step into his car for “questions”.

Nova obeyed. She was alert and cautious, unsure about why this was needed. Nobody else was taken to his car. She sat in the back with the police officer, who, instead of initiating those questions he said he had, just stared at her.

Nova curled into a corner, holding her breath—why?—because her legs were on fire from the algae, she thought she might be going to jail or get a police record, and on some budding level of maturing womanhood, she began to sense an unfamiliar danger that this male police officer presented.

He asked questions like where she lived, how old she was, but she’s not sure he wrote the answers down. That’s when a definitive moment of lessons learned occurred to her, which she wouldn’t gauge fully until much older.

She saw the police officer’s clipboard.

She saw his finger wrapped around his pencil.

She saw his spiky hair the color of the sand she just played in, she saw his ocean blue eyes that seemed…how could Nova describe this at her age…? Hungry?

One doesn’t need to have an honorary or well earned PhD in the birds and the bees to know what’s up. The police officer eyed her up and down, occasionally looking back at his blank clipboard. Nova had enough (but enough of the wrong thing) and erupted inside, “Damn it, my freakin legs itch!”, and proceeded to scratch away at her legs like a rake. This highlighted the algae infestation of little red bumps adorning her legs to the officer’s eyes. Nova saw a light in his eyes dim. He paused, looked at his clipboard one more time, then told her that she could go.

Boom! Out she went, and crawled into the back of her grandfather’s Cadillac. She was still sour from her ruined swim at the beach, humiliated at walking around like a pox infected leper, not quite understanding how her day really played out. Or at least not wanting to deal with it.

We have to think that Yemaja was looking out for little Nova that day and sent a red tide to protect her.

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