Life in Paradise

Ah, motherhood. For a long time it felt like my children would be young forever. And then they were suddenly almost-grownups. I always thought I would enjoy it all a lot more if I could time travel between ages—a few days of babyhood, a week of teenagers, then a couple of days of toddlers and then a week of tweens. Scattered in between should be a good number of travels back to being childless and forward to the time they are on their own. It seems like I would appreciate it all so much more if it weren’t so constant.

But of course it doesn’t work that way, and I’m always in the here and now, knowing that the sweet little golden heads holding my hands are not coming back, and one of them is heading out to college next year. Knowing all that, I still manage to be annoyed that they need me so much. Still can’t get in the shower or go to the bathroom without someone calling “Mo-om?” outside my door. Why would that bother me now, when I can plainly see that it will be short-lived? But that is the weird tension that we live in when life passes so quickly and is yet still so real.

So, yeah, they still require mothering, at least when mother is readily available. If I’m not around they do just fine!

Today we met someone else who needs a lot of attention. Really, someTHING else. A manatee by the name of Snooty. Snooty lives at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, in an aquarium dedicated to Snooty and other more transient manatees.

Some of us really wanted to see some manatees, and it didn’t seem likely that we would encounter one in the wild in our short visit. The museum seemed like a good alternative. I have to admit, I was expecting to find a sad little water cave with an equally sad manatee paddling around in it. Instead I found an only sort-of sad, medium-sized water cave with three manatees. And they didn’t seem so sad.

Snooty is a 67 year old manatee, born in captivity. An aquarium farther south got licensed to get one manatee in the late 1940s, so they picked the biggest one they could find. Turned out she was pregnant, and one day they found two manatees in their tank. At 11 months old he was transferred to Bradenton. Visitors fed Snooty a bunch of sugary crap, and he became accustomed to being hand-fed. Eventually they changed him to a diet of vegetables, but he won’t feed himself. So this 1100-pound manatee has to be fed about 100 pounds of food by hand every day. Mostly romaine lettuce.

I couldn’t help but think of my dog Sophie, waiting for me back home. She goes through periods of time when she refuses to eat from her bowl. Manatees are not highly intelligent, they don’t have much body fat, and they can’t really fend for themselves much. Just like my dog. Snooty knows 2 tricks, but he refused to perform one of them, even for some sweet potato that he loves. Sophie is not terribly interested in performing for us either; she mostly tolerates our presence. But Sophie will beg for what she really wants, and Snooty is a master beggar.

The other two manatees are there as part of a rehabilitation program—they had each suffered the manatee version of frostbite, and this is sort of the halfway house. They’ll be back in the wild next year.

Also at the museum are a lot of fossil displays (I have to confess my mind goes a little numb other than “wow, that’s big” at the replica of a megalodon’s jawbones), a replica of DeSoto’s birthplace (the Spanish were short people back in the day), and a planetarium with a show on what stars are really like.

Those of us who went to the aquarium went back to greet the ones who stayed in bed and had a leisurely brunch instead. Next on the agenda: Paradise Boat Tours for a dolphin-seeking cruise in the Sarasota Bay.

After looking for parking on Anna Maria Island, a job not to be underestimated, we boarded what looked like a really big pontoon boat that holds 28 passengers, about 22 of whom were from Michigan. We saw a number of dolphins, a lot of spring-breakers cruising in their boats, and the guide, Roxanne, told us about the island.

Anna Maria Island is 7 miles long, and it has 3 distinct cities on it. They all have their own fire departments, police departments, and city halls. And they don’t really get along. She said the people of the city of Bradenton Beach don’t even get along with each other. But they all agreed together that the island needed to hold on to its character, so they outlawed anything taller than three stories.

We also moved past Longboat Key, where the very wealthy have extremely expensive second (or third, or fourth) homes that they do not rent out—Roxanne says “they don’t want anyone else sitting on their couch”—and that they do not stay in most of the year. That makes it hard for any restaurants or other businesses to survive. It’s fascinating to me that an island full of homes owned by some of the richest people around cannot support many businesses.

At the same time, our church back in Grand Rapids is currently exploring how to help support the businesses in its older, lower income neighborhood that was plunged into poverty when it was all but abandoned, partly by some who feared people different than themselves. If I sound like I’m pointing fingers, I’m not—I live in a pretty dang homogenous neighborhood myself. But there is a fine balance of population, income, and community support that makes a healthy economic system possible. It seems like it takes a lot of people working in the same direction rather than a lot of people protecting their own territory.

Back to the territory of the day. The waterway is lovely, quite shallow in most places, filled with elegant herons and cranes, fish, and yes, dolphins. It was a glorious afternoon.

We had dinner in Bradenton Beach, and of course the kids managed to find a fellow Christian High student at the restaurant.

Then back to the house, where the older three are currently doing their best impression of the old MTV show, “Cribs.” They are in the hot tub, watching a Batman movie on my iPad (not quite a “Cribs”-sized screen) with the sound streaming through the hot tub blutooth sound system, holding plastic goblets of sparkling grape juice in their hands.

Somehow it seems like there is a connection between a mom who wants to be needed, but not too much, a manatee who wants to do what he wants but still wants to be hand-fed, a neighborhood that wants to be so exclusive that businesses can’t afford to exist there, and kids who like to pretend they are high rollers with a bunch of stuff they don’t actually own. We want things to be the way we like them. We want to pretend we are the only ones who matter, or that we are possibly a bit more important than anyone else.

Traveling can sometimes be the cure for that. You start to see how big the world is and how small you are in it. Even if half your city has come to the same island for spring break. And you can’t help but realize that even the “paradise” we come seeking doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it takes effort and teamwork. So after we take this little break, we go back to the real work of being part of a community. My hometown is a community I love, and I feel blessed to be part of that challenge.