Sarasota/Longboat Key | Andokides' Porch

I spent my earliest years on the Gulf coast of Florida on and around an enchanted island populated by artists, inventors, and dreamers of all sorts. Perhaps it was the exoticism of the environment--the mangrove islands, banyan trees, roseate spoonbills, and ancient horseshoe crabs--that attracted them, a landscape that reflected their own peculiarities. The mainland had its own color: Sarasota was the winter home of the Ringling Bros, Barnum, and Bailey Circus; Sarasota High School had a circus; my parents went to school with members of the Flying Wallenda Family.

Like all children, I grew up thinking my experience was normal. Everyone had cousins who lived on a beached tug boat; everyone lived in a village where a peg-legged buccaneer with a parrot walked through in the afternoon and talked to the kids about their schoolwork; everyone traveled across the bay by boat to get to swimming lessons on the next island; everyone’s grandma had friends whose houses were filled with tables stacked with cigar boxes of shell, seeds, and fish scales that were turned into hats, necklaces, pendants; everyone played among fiddler crabs colored like Moroccan tiles on legs; everyone had wild parakeets and wild peacocks in the backyard; everyone lived next door to benevolent witches. Only as an adult did I realize the immeasurable blessing of having done some of my growing up in such a magical place.

For my trip to the Florida memorial service for my father, I stayed with my cousin Sheila and her daughter, the best hosts imaginable. The evening after the memorial service, the three of us went into downtown Sarasota. The Ringling Towers were gone, a landmark that, for my childhood, defined the city.

But there was still a charm about the downtown, and we stumbled on some concrete seahorses that had, in our childhood, been on Lido Beach at the Lido Beach Casino where we all took swimming lessons. Even Sheila, who knows Sarasota well, seemed surprised to come upon the relocated seahorses. The Lido Beach Casino was demolished in 1969. Click here for an 8-minute documentary on the Lido Beach Casino.

The next day, Sunday, Sheila and Kathleen took me out to Longboat Key. We toured the “village” at the north end of the island. The village was where my grandmother (and grandfather) ran a store and gas station for many years, where my father lived when he was in high school, where my parents met, and was where I lived in the first years of my life. What was amazing about the village was how much was unchanged. I took photos of two of the houses I lived in as a very young child, still very recognizable.

After touring the village, we headed to the south end of the island where we walked a trail in a new park created as part of a coastal preservation project. It’s a rare concession to environmental protection on an island that has seen overdevelopment on a level painful to see. Yet, even with all the luxury condominiums occupied by BMW-driving members of the 1%, the island remains tenaciously, irremediably primitive. The lizards, and crabs, and insects, and wild tropical flora speak to a prehistoric time too deeply embedded in the DNA of the area to be polished over; no amount of grooming can completely subdue the fundamental wildness of the place. There is a seemingly boundless fertility about the area that is an embarrassment in polite company.

As much as I have moved around, as many places as I have lived, Sarasota-Bradenton and the islands are still very much in my blood, very much a part of who I am, certainly having a claim to being called “home.”

For some photos of our evening in Sarasota and our day on Longboat Key, click here. Photos can be viewed as a slideshow by double-clicking the first photo in the album and then using the arrow buttons at the top of the page to move through the album.