I began nearly every morning of our weeklong vacation in St. Pete by running in the vicinity of gators.
Each day before dawn, I jogged a couple miles through the marshy trails at Sawgrass Lake Park on the blind faith that a ravenous monster wasn’t looming in the semi-darkness. I wasn’t eaten, obviously, and my survivability was rewarded when I reached the observation deck and peered out over the calm lake right as the sun began pulling steam off the water. It was bucolic and wonderful, even with the nearby din of rush-hour traffic.
One morning, I watched a heron glide from shore-to-shore, mere inches off the water. I didn’t encounter any gators, for better or worse, but those early morning runs solidified a feeling that has been pinging around in my soul for years now: that Florida, in many ways, is becoming a second home.
My wife, Caitlin, was born in St. Pete, to restaurant-owning parents (who I’ll refer to as “Mama” and “Papa,” for the sake of simplicity). The restaurant, Corned Beef Corner, went belly-up before Caitlin’s fifth birthday, and her parents moved the family to Virginia, in an ultimately successful attempt to reimagine their lives in closer proximity to family.
We’ve visited the Sunshine State pretty much every year since 2018, in either March or October, to avoid the intense and ceaseless Floridian heat. Many family members and friends still live down there, including the Sanchezes: Bobby, who grew up with Caitlin, his wife, Elayna, and their 7-year-old daughter, Sydney. Bobby’s mother, Patty, was Mama’s best friend, their relationship predating even Mama’s marriage to Papa.
Mama died last April after a brutal five-year battle with multiple systems atrophy. When we asked Papa if he wanted to come to Florida with us this year, he said yes, even though he knew it’d be emotionally draining. He lived there for almost 20 years. It’s where he met Mama and started a family, and this would be his first time in St. Pete without her by his side.
Patty recently lost her husband, too. A couple of days after he died, she called Papa: “Looks like it’s just the two of us now,” she said, in a New York accent that has hung on despite decades of living in Florida. Though it was relatively warm and sunny the entire week we were there, it felt like a hungry gator of hard memories was lurking around in the shadows, just out of sight.
***
St. Pete’s climate during the changing seasons feels Mediterranean: there’s no humidity, and if you catch the right stretch of days, like we did, it’ll be sunny and in the 70s or 80s more often than not, crisp in the mornings and comfortable in the afternoons. The suffocating mugginess of summer is not far off, of course, lasting as it will until September or October, but by perpetually visiting in spring and fall, we easily fool ourselves into believing that this part of the world is a temperate Eden year-round.
The city of St. Pete, too, is great: not the flat, brutal inland sprawl of chain restaurants and pawn shops endemic to virtually every Florida city of a certain size, but the waterfront, down by the stunningly immersive pier, and the shaded cobblestone streets of the Old Northeast neighborhood, just a lizard’s sprint away from the water, where my in-laws lived before the restaurants went belly-up.
Driving through that neighborhood is like a breath of fresh air after being held underwater by the harsh gray malaise of strip malls, smoke shops and storage units.
The Old Northeast neighborhood is close to downtown, which has undergone significant modernization since Papa lived there. Condominium skyscrapers rise out of the saturated ground like glass-and-metal storks. The pier, which juts 3,000 feet out into Tampa Bay, was revitalized in 2020, and the result is a gleaming 26-acre Pier District complete with restaurants and condos and all the bells and whistles associated with urban revitalization.
It’s beautiful and vibrant, and by most measures a success, though this isn’t the quaint St. Pete that Papa called home for nearly two decades. One of the few things that has remained constant amidst the recent capitalistic/opportunistic maelstrom is Mastry’s, the dive bar where my in-laws met. It’s located inside a small brick building on Central Avenue, and it happened to be celebrating its 90th anniversary the day we flew back to Virginia.
Poor timing: I know Papa would’ve loved to have been there for the festivities, to relive his personal history along with the history of the bar.
***
After spending a warm, sunny morning stuffing our faces with seafood in the Pier District, and watching my son, Conley, and Sydney, play on the pier’s highly complex playground, Papa decided to walk 10 minutes to Mastry’s, for a beer. I agreed to go with him, but when I turned to join, I lost sight of him in a mass of people.
I jogged onto the sidewalk and squinted, finally spotting him, gangly and red-skinned, as he crossed over Bayshore Drive a block-and-a-half away, moving with purpose towards the spot where it all began. It felt like he needed to be alone for this, so I trailed leisurely from a distance, just close enough to ensure he didn’t get lost or make a wrong turn.
The story of how my in-laws met is family lore at this point. Papa, a loose native Kentuckian, asked Mama, a stern Floridian, if she wanted to play one of the arcade games in the corner of the bar. She replied: “I don’t play games.” Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe Mama asked Papa that question.
Things can get swampy when familial history is concerned.
Nevertheless, that interaction, whatever its actual nature, led to a marriage, which led to two children (plus a son from Mama’s first marriage), one of whom I would marry and have a child with. That child and I sat on the patio outside of Mastry’s as Papa went inside for a single beer, alone. I waved a bubble wand for Sydney and Conley, who chased the translucent orbs up and down Central Avenue, causing passersby to shuffle out of the way and grin at their innocent whimsy.
Papa stumbled out of the bar several minutes later, beet-cheeked and watery-eyed, looking like he’d just emerged from a cave.
“Got dang it,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve renovated that place since I was last there. Or cleaned it.”
Minutes later, we drove to his former house in Old Northeast. The sky was blindingly blue, and palm trees shaded the sidewalk. A car that wasn’t his was parked in the driveway. He asked me, the informal chauffeur, to stop the rental van out front. He exited the vehicle and walked around the neighborhood like he was floating through a lucid dream.
It was the late ‘80s all over again as he watched his family play in the front yard, capturing memories that had escaped his grasp the first time around. This house, this neighborhood, is where I think he wished he could’ve stayed forever. It represented the good times: the happy marriage, the thriving restaurants, the waterfront close by. This is where things were working out, before an unexpected detour redirected his course. Not that things didn’t work out in the end, in a different way. It’s just not the destination he was expecting.
***
On our second-to-last night in Florida, we took a sunset cruise out of John’s Pass, which ran from 7-9 p.m. I was sure Conley would have a meltdown, considering nine o’clock was well past his bedtime, but he had a blast, thanks in part to the dance music blaring from the speakers on all three levels of the boat. He spent much of the night sprinting around the top deck with Sydney (who he repeatedly called “my best friend”) and another random four-year-old girl who joined their feral pack.
Down on the dance floor, on the second level of the boat, Patty picked up Conley, whose late grandmother was her best friend, and looked him in the eyes as they boogied to “YMCA.”
Generational friendships like this are so rare, especially when one family moves over 800 miles away, so to visit each year is a practice in preservation, a meditation on gratitude. To know that Conley and Sydney will have a chance to carry this familial bond into the third generation, if they so choose, feels akin to something approaching the magical.
***
During our third day in Florida, I, the chauffeur, drove Papa and Patty down a strip of beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, places like Indian Rocks and Redington and Pass-A-Grille and Sunset Cove, so the pair of old friends could mentally revisit their old haunts. Several of these places, like a bar called Ricky T’s and a liquor store named Pappy’s, were still there, but many of the spots they’d frequented decades prior had changed names or closed altogether.
A staggering number of buildings had been damaged by the dual hurricanes of Helene and Milton, which tore through this region last September and left many coastal towns flailing under several feet of water. We drove past garages with bent doors that were still full of sand, hotels with operational second floors but boarded up first floors, cement signs that had been cracked from their bases as if snapped between the fingers of Poseidon.
Papa and Patty tried to gaze past the devastation, to ignore the loss of loved ones they’d endured over the past year, choosing to turn their mind-dials back to the late ‘80’s, the good times. Patty the New Yorker, Papa the Kentuckian. She reminisced about going to Jimmy Buffet and Greg Allman shows all over these beach towns, while he, a former hitchhiking hippie, mused about wearing flip-flops and going shirtless year-round. “No shoes, no shirt, no service…that wasn’t really a thing,” he said.
There were many good memories here, but the one bad one that seemed to override everything was Corned Beef Corner, the restaurant he’d co-owned with Mama. In Papa’s telling, they were “riding high…and happy.” Two locations were thriving with a third set to open in Clearwater, plus they had a couple rental properties under their belt. They were moving on up, as it were, seemingly poised to create the sort of lasting wealth that would allow them to ease into retirement, which at the time probably felt far off, but which of course wasn’t, never is.
Things went south when the Clearwater location opened. Though I’ve never gotten the full story, the short version is that their life in Florida essentially incinerated, and they had to high-tail it to Virginia, first to Richmond then eventually Roanoke, where through hard work and an entrepreneurial mindset (i.e. raising goats, owning FedEx routes, managing restaurants, etc), they created a pretty good life for themselves, complete with three children and farm animals and a nice plot of land in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But the demise of the Corned Beef Corner semi-empire sticks in Papa’s mind like a shard of glass; he’s unable to let go of what might have been had it not crumbled so quickly and irreversibly. Caitlin often has to remind him of all the good things that did happen because they moved to Virginia: her half-brother, Josh, met his wife, Emily, and they gave Papa four granddaughters. Caitlin met me and we gave him a grandson. Sometimes the bend of life goes in an unintended direction, but that bend, when given the benefit of time, can lead to unexpected destinations of joy.
***
We didn’t stop at any of the beaches during our mini-road trip along the coast. It was too cold (or Florida cold, at least, in the upper 50s) and windy for that, but we did swing into Nachman’s Seafood Market in the hopes of finding some fresh marine creature to eat for dinner that night.
Papa, ever the talker, asked the owner, a stout man with a bellowing voice, how the hurricanes had affected his sales. They’d lost 50 percent of their clientele, he said. Many of the homes were still unlivable, and the people who had stuck it out weren’t interested in buying pricey local seafood. The only saving grace was that they were selling hundreds of pounds of their famous smoked fish spread to outlets throughout the Tampa Bay region.
We walked out of Nachman’s with two pounds of shrimp and a container of that famous fish spread. Papa steamed the shrimp for dinner that night. “Shrimp can be dang tricky to cook,” he said, but he did it right, and we gobbled them down alongside that smoked fish spread, which we ate with Publix brand crackers. It tasted like Florida in a way nothing else could, and though Papa looked content, I could tell he was wishing one other person was there with us.
***
The next morning, instead of running through gator-laden Sawgrass Lake Park, I drove 15 minutes to the St. Pete waterfront and dragged my old(ish) bones around Vinoy Park and Old Northeast. Gorgeous two-story stucco homes were bathed in soft orange morning light as the sun rose perfectly through a cluster of palm trees at the water’s edge.
I imagined my in-laws walking out here in the late ‘80s to admire the sunrise, their small but lively home just a few blocks away. It occurred to me that they were probably far too busy raising children and owning restaurants to admire any sunrise, ever, though a part of me hoped that, at least once, they’d walked out here and noted the temporal beauty of it all, before moving on with yet another day, swamped by the ceaseless demands of parenthood and a working-class existence.
I sighed and tried to wipe all of that from my mind, snugging up my sneakers and taking off along the gray gator-less strip of cement that embraced the waterline like a hug, the air smelling like salt and decaying fish, and in its own distant way, like another home.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband, and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected].
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