Hard Candy

Going Away

2011-08-20T11:25:00.002-04:00

Since the Gabber now has my columns online, I no longer need to keep a separate blog for these. Starting today, if you want to read my column, I encourage you to do one of two things: read it on the Gabber's web site or on my main blog, Just Keep Swimming.

Thanks for hanging in.

A Hand Up or A Hand Out?

2011-08-03T11:15:00.001-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

So a man walks into the Gabber office (no, this is not a joke) yesterday and asks for walking directions to Bay Pines. Mary, one of the last few genuinely nice people in the world, listens to his story and decides that this man cannot possibly walk – after all, by his own admission he’d already walked to Gulfport from Bayfront – and gives him four bucks for bus fare. Except the bus costs $4.50, so I, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, chip in fifty cents. Mary gave him a cold bottle of water and wished him well.

We then watch this man walk to the bus shelter – and I have to admit, I am shocked – and sip the water.

For about three seconds. Then he leaves the bus shelter and walks behind the Laundromat.

A lively conversation ensued as we waited to see if he would return. Some of the office girls suggested I might be a cynic; I suggested I might be realistic.

“I don’t care,” Mary said. “I’ve done worse things with four dollars.”

She, of course, has a point. If this man was truly a veteran who needed to get to the doctor, then, yes, we absolutely did the right thing. If he was scamming us for money, well, then, we didn’t give him a hand up so much as a handout.

That’s the problem with helping people in need: it’s a fine line between a hand up and a hand out.
Even if you start out helping someone who has the best intentions, sometimes, I’ve found, that help becomes a crutch. That’s why unemployment and welfare come with conditions and time limits.
This is an argument my editor and I have quite often. Not about welfare or panhandlers, but about the fine line between supporting your community and becoming a crutch for organizations. I believe that Gulfport has many fine organizations that have developed a nasty habit of approaching the city with their palms open.

I watched the city council make some tough but long overdue choices last week in the final budget workshop. You will pay more taxes next year. Local police dispatch may get eliminated. You may pay more for drinking water. Hey, things are tough all over.

Unless, of course, you’re a business or nonprofit group in the city. That party has turned into quite the rager, unchecked for many years now. The Lions Club gets a waterfront building for dollar a year, a lease voted into effect while two of five councilmembers belonged to the Lions Club. The city pays $12.50 a month for 33 meters that provide power to the ArtWalk vendors who in turn pay... the Merchant’s Association.

The problem, as I see it, is that the city helps out any organization that asks, and for years now it’s been absorbing the costs. But what started as a way to help bring people into a floundering city and give these organizations a hand up has become something akin to organizational welfare: the money that should go to help draw new people to Gulfport now goes to maintain the status quo. A little help here and there has turned into expected income factored in to these groups’ operating budget.

My editor will tell you, as he has me, loudly, that cities (just like newspapers) need to support communities. I do not disagree. Where he and I diverge is with this public assistance mentality that’s overtaken virtually every organization that feels like Gulfport should pay their way. The argument goes that these groups do good in the city and help the economy. This has somehow turned into “we should roll over and give them anything they want.”

At the budget workshop last week, councilwoman Jennifer Salmon had the courage to ask the tough questions. Dr. Salmon and I are not, by anyone’s definition, chums. There’s a lot about the way she goes about getting things done I do not endorse. I will say that the woman deserves a metric ton of credit for questioning the city’s partnerships and what the city paid as opposed to what the groups do not. That couldn’t have been easy; no one speaks out against the groups that, as many have tried to explain to me with obvious patience, keep the economy vibrant.

But speak out she did, and I applaud her loud and long. She asked the city manager if no one had come up with a better idea for using city money than paying for the power for Art Walks. Before he could answer, councilwoman Barbara Banno, who has a business downtown, said that there were better ideas. Why isn’t the city using its earmarked downtown money for those better ideas? Well, because it’s using it to pay overtime for police officers working the Chamber of Commerce events. It’s using it to pay for the power along the street.
Take a look at the numbers: Gulfport’s Leisure Services spent over $114,000 for events last year, including many Chamber of Commerce, Merchant’s Association, and other business-bolstering events. (Click here to see the numbers) This number does not include overtime for the police department. By comparison, the city’s looking at eliminating police dispatch to save about $200,000. There are no such plans to cut the special events budget.

I am not saying these groups don’t provide a worthwhile service. I’m not even suggesting the city shouldn’t help out. I go to the Art Walks and Fresh Markets; I don’t want these things to go away. I am saying it’s time for the city to reign in its spending. When we can’t afford our own dispatch department but we can afford twinkly lights in the trees, it’s time to end the party. It’s time for last call at the cash bar.

Perhaps this is just the push these groups need to spread their wings. I know they may kick and scream – I’d be astounded if they weren’t actively seeking a candidate to run against Councilwoman Salmon in January and threatening to pull their (mostly free) ads from the Gabber – but I believe it will serve the city better if these groups have to pay their own way.

Oh, and that man who so desperately needed bus fare? He never came back to catch his bus. Which means the money we gave him didn’t really help him. But then, he wasn’t asking because he wanted our help.

I’ve found that people asking for a handout usually don’t.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

The Giving Tree, Skink, and the Lifted Lorax

2011-07-27T11:29:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

There’s this part of the The Giving Tree that always makes me cry. It’s at the end, when the child is an old man, and all the tree can offer him is a place to rest. That final image of a tree stump has done more for making my generation environmentally aware than any other kids book I know, unless it’s the lifted Lorax, speaking for the disappearing Truffula trees.

We all have a short list of books that shaped us. For me, it’s The Giving Tree, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Lorax, Wuthering Heights, Walden, Cross Creek, and pretty much everything Carl Hiaasen’s ever written.

I know, Hiaasen doesn’t seem to fit with Bronte and Thoreau, and yet there he is, insisting we pay attention to how we’re letting politicians muck up Florida. Turns out he serves me well as I watch local government make a perfect mess out of paradise. My favorite character from his novels, Skink, is a former Florida governor who violently avenges anyone who tries to hurt his state. Skink fights for the Everglades, the panther, and the trees. He’ll kill a person before he’ll kill a tree, especially if that person was about to kill a tree. He’s just about perfect.

At Gulfport’s city council meeting last week, two of our council members – the two I would ordinarily call the “greenest” – said “OK by me” to moving an oak tree to make room for a new sign in Clymer Park.

As much as I would like to do so, I’m not about to debate with councilmembers Sam Henderson and Jennifer Salmon why this is a blazingly stupid idea or why an arborist who makes money by moving trees will say whatever his client wants him to say. They can go buy their own copies of The Giving Tree. But instead of cutting down the tree, let’s think about using Clymer Park’s natural assets to the city’s advantage.

I’m not a fan of Clymer Park. First we have the debacle in city hall with the sign in Clymer Park, next we want to rip out a perfectly good oak tree because it blocks the view of the sign, and all the while, we aren’t really using the park as a park at all. It’s more of a green area that sucks money from the city budget. Cut the grass, edge the grass, chemically manipulate the grass. Any Florida gardener will tell you that grass is the least economically sound decision you can make for your landscape. In fact, if we’re talking about removing a living green thing from Clymer Park, let’s start there.

What if, instead of a big strip of grass that the city has to mow on a regular basis, the city turned Clymer Park’s weedy strip of grass into a lush subtropical landscape? What if Gulfport opted to honor the Clymer family name with a mini-botanical garden?

Picture it with me for a minute: fan palms and sturdy oaks lining either side of the park, ringed by spurts of fragrant white jasmine climbing the trunks of the oaks. Alongside the trees pink bouganvillea explode into color alongside clusters of purple crepe myrtles.

Clymer Gardens wouldn’t just have trees and flowers. It could have a bike path and a live tree (just like towns used to have) for the city’s Christmas decorations. People could walk along meandering, shaded pathways, pausing to sketch on a bench. Instead of the money pit with little aesthetic value you see today, you’d see a park – a real one, with all kinds of local flora and fauna – that invited people to stop and check it out. Painting classes could meet there, as could yoga classes and councilwoman Salmon’s organic landscaping classes. The city, with the help of volunteers, could plant a second community garden here. The city could even plant edible landscaping and create habitat for birds and other wildlife. On Halloween, picture a haunted walk through the park, which would be free for residents but cost for nonresidents, so instead of dumping money into the park (after, of course, the initial expense of buying and planting the greenery), the city could make money on it.

I guess I’m picturing a park that everyone could use – and would want to. Sound a little idealistic? Perhaps. But I have a financial motivation, too: while the city pays to mow and maintain the grass that stretches from Gulfport Boulevard to the Catherine Hickman theatre, what I’m describing doesn’t need mowing, fertilizing or irrigation. Even the groundcovers could survive on rainfall.

While we’re all living my verdant fantasy, let’s go to the beach. At last week’s cleanup, the city manager said that if the city didn’t rake the beach every day, the greenery would overtake the sand. While I love a day at the beach, let’s think about that for a minute: what if we removed the grass and added in buff colored sand dunes sprouting saffron and malachite sea oats, purple railroad vines and yellow beach sunflowers? Add in a few more pine trees and we’ve created two things: a spectacular view from across the street and a return to how the waterfront may have looked before we trashed it. Maybe the city could even find the money for a beach walk through the trees.

Of course, it won’t happen. Gulfport city hall has this odd attachment to grass: it’s care is budgeted every year, even when we have to cut other programs and raise taxes. But think about what we could do if we capitalized on all the sunshine, warm temperatures, and rain. Think of what we could do if we took advantage of living in paradise instead of destroying it.

But no, I’m not going to debate with the city council the merits of moving a tree that probably would live another couple of centuries.

I figure we’ve got some real live Skinks out there somewhere, and maybe a few Loraxes. I’ll let them have that argument. After all, someone’s got to speak for the trees.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

For Better and For Worse

2011-07-12T16:03:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

The Universe has a sneaky way of doing things. Believe it or not, I’d already intended to write a column about marriage – well, mostly – when my friend Amanda called yesterday and told me her boyfriend proposed and she accepted.

Amanda’s one of the loveliest people I know. (I’m not just saying that because she makes this squash and cheese pasta thing that’s brought better women than me to their knees. Honest.) Everyone loves Amanda, and while I don’t believe marriage can work for me, I am thrilled for her and wish her all the happiness in the world.

Nevertheless, at some point in their union, there will come a time when her husband – also a wonderful human being, by the way – will want to strangle her. That is not a reflection on Amanda’s character, or his. It’s more a statement about what happens when two people spend a lot of time together in close quarters.

Of course, he won’t really want to kill her; I’m exaggerating. It also doesn’t mean that they will have stopped loving each other, or that they want out of the marriage. But making relationships work isn’t always pretty.

The best relationships have conflict. So, in fact, do some pretty great cities. That doesn’t bother me – think it’s healthy. No, what I find disturbing are the folks who insist, no matter what, that everything is just ducky. These people think that as long as you focus only on the positive, everything will work out in the end.

These people, too, would have you think that the people who choose not to ignore the bad bits and, in fact, want to see them brought to light and discussed and worked through, are somehow bad people themselves. They might even go so far as to suggest those who complain don’t love their partner or their town and want to undermine the whole thing. They might say those who bring issues to light are just plain wrong or looking for trouble because everything is just fine, dammit.

But here’s the thing: pretty relationships don’t last. We all know (or knew) a couple that never fought or looked at each other sideways. She never packed a bag and spent a week at her mother’s house; he never stormed out in anger and headed to the local bar. Their friends thought they had the perfect marriage – until he moved out one day, or she ran off with a Grateful Dead tour.

It’s the same with a city. We can go along, pretending everything’s fine, throwing some mighty fine parties and patting each other on the back, but underneath it all, what’s wrong will still be wrong. The more we don’t talk about it, just like in a marriage, the more it festers. On the outside, everything is perfect – although usually because people are petrified to admit otherwise.

When one of those “perfect” marriages where no one fights and everyone’s happy all the blessed time finally reaches critical mass, one partner finds out the other one’s actually been unhappy for a long time but was afraid to speak out. By the time they did, things had gotten too big to fix, so they just walked away.

Why would someone be afraid to speak out? Well, sometimes people who have issues just don’t want to deal with confrontation. Other times, people are scared that what they love won’t hold up to the questioning. They may worry that if they start to question, the pretty bits will fall apart and there won’t be anything left underneath to hold it all together. They fear that the relationship isn’t strong enough to stand up to real conflict or trial.

That, my friends, is almost always a mistake, because if the pretty things are all that’s holding something together, it isn’t being held together at all. Even the Mona Lisa, without a canvas, is just paint. There is no doubt that every small town, be it Gulfport or St. Pete Beach or Buffalo Soapstone, has both types of folks – the people who aren’t afraid to belly up to the bar and order a shot of “What the hell were you thinking, buying those flowery towels when we can’t afford groceries this week?” and the “Why, honey, those decorative soaps are lovely. We can eat Ramen for a week; don’t worry about the expense.” I am certain, too, we all know people in either type of marriage.

I will tell you this: Amanda’s relationship will stand up to questioning, of that I have no doubt. I will also tell you this: so will your city. I look across the bay and on either side I see cities with problems, but also with strong foundations. Gulfport, St. Pete Beach, and every little town across America is built on the backs of people who loved their life enough to fight for it, to remedy the tough issues. The best relationships are built on love, yes, but tears and conflict, too.

I know everyone reading this loves their city.

The question is, who among you is strong enough to face the problems?

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Save The Beach Theatre

2011-07-12T16:02:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

Save the Beach Theatre.

I love a feel-good movie, a bag of popcorn with fake butter and a glass of wine.

The wine part is weird, I admit, but blame my misguided youth: for a brief while in college I fancied myself a film student, which meant going to see a lot of art films at the Enzian theatre, where they served Gardenburgers and cheap wine. I love Gardenburgers but hate art films as much as I cannot abide the patchouli-scented men who make them, so I failed at the whole film student endeavor, traded my black cords in for some sundresses, and happened upon this cool beach community. With only two “art houses” in the area I could catch Tom Hanks films without ever bumping up against a serious young man in black jeans and wire-rimmed glasses who wanted to show me his claymation documentary. Despite its artsy films I preferred the Beach Theatre to others, because when it did show popular movies instead of brooding subtitled affairs, I’d get popcorn and a cheap mini-bottle of red wine and pretend I was in college again, only this time I could watch a movie I actually enjoyed.

But then something changed: movies started to suck. Computer-generated explosions replaced plot, and the dark, Quentin-Tarantino-on-barbituate, brooding characters replaced George Clooney and Harrison Ford as on-screen idols. When I realized that Pulp Fiction wasn’t a fluke, I took to watching my Goonies and As Good As It Gets DVDs.

The critics promised me Super 8 was different. I walked over to the Beach Theatre, which, as it fell on hard times, started (much to my relief) pandering to the lowest common denominator of the moviegoing public: me. I bought my beloved artery-clogging buttery popcorn and requested my cheap mini-bottle of wine.

Save the Beach Theatre, which was out of wine. In fact, their cooler’s kind of bare. The registers don’t have receipt tape. The seat arms wobble in what I choose not to view as an allegory for the entire place.

Save the Beach Theatre, owned by St. Pete Beach resident Michael France. He’s made public his struggles with the classic movie house, and he says he’s trying to convert the theatre to a non-profit to keep it going. After last night, I do not know if he can hold on that long. Rumor has it he’s going through a wicked divorce, and I can’t imagine he’s got a lot of energy left in him to keep fighting this fight.

Save the Beach Theatre, a grand palace once. To me, it still is. But its glory days have passed and those of us who still love it are probably more in love with what it stands for than what it has become.

Save the Beach Theatre, where you can go see Super 8. I loved that, as the critics promise, it’s a Goonies-meets-Stand-By-Me movie not outpaced by special effects. It’s set in the summer of 1979, complete with My Sharona on the soundtrack. Glittery, polished effects and computer-generated images would have ruined this movie.

Save the Beach Theatre, because it occurred to me as I watched the film in my seen-better-days seat and tried not to resent the flat Pepsi that, even though the theatre may be fading, it’s a lot like Super 8: proof that the simple things are grander than the glitzy.

How do you save the Beach Theatre? I have no clue. I do know this: people always tell me that had they known that this restaurant or this business was having trouble, they would have done their part and patronized them more. Well, I’m telling you: the Beach Theatre needs you. Until the theatre gets its nonprofit status, you can’t donate money, but you can buy a ticket. Don’t want to see a movie right today? I’m not suggesting you see a movie: I’m suggesting you buy a ticket.

Save the Beach Theatre because if it goes under we’ll have to head over to the vacuum that is
the Baywalk Muvico. We will buy tickets online, listen to a nifty sound system, and probably order popcorn shrimp.

Save the Beach Theatre because you can’t buy tickets online, and no one’s accusing them of deafening you with their massive sound system, and other than the old-fashioned fake butter on the popcorn, your food choices are limited.

Save the Beach Theatre and keep your money local when you buy your cheap wine, popcorn buttered all the way down to the bottom of the bag, and tickets to a movie that reminds us that you can find the amazing in the unsophisticated.

Save the Beach Theatre, because, like Super 8, some things, including our communities, do better without the glitz.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com, or leave your comments here.

Advice to the Class of 2011

2011-06-17T19:06:00.000-04:00

I don’t want kids. My biological clock never kicked in, and I see babies as random masses of cells and diapers.

Now, my friends’ kids? They’re a different story. I love them madly. Some of them - OK, most of them – call me Crazy Aunt Cathy, probably because I don’t recite puffy platitudes about living when ask me real questions. (“Cathy, why did my best friend make fun of me?” “Because she’s a little jerk, Randi Sue. Drop her.”)

That’s why I got so enraged at the drivel that passed for advice at my friend’s daughter’s high school graduation last week. Granted, I was in Clearwater at 8 a.m. with precious little coffee or food in my system, but even still... The valedictorian promised that the world was a bright and shiny place where you could do anything because fortune smiles on all of us equally.

Had he told his classmates that leprechauns would bring them pots of gold and unicorns would wash their feet with their soft unicorn tongues, this young man could not have described more of a fantasy world. He had no business giving life advice - at 18, you know nothing, despite what you believe.

Here’s some practical advice for the class of 2011, courtesy of my mistakes and successes:

10. Learn to make yourself happy. You cannot depend on anyone else - lovers, parents, children, or friends – for happiness. If you don’t know how to make yourself happy, you’re screwed. Likewise...

9. Don’t waste time trying to make other people happy. You either will or you won’t. If you chase other people’s happiness you’re going to make yourself crazy.

8. Life isn’t fair. Get that idea out of your idealistic young head right now, because fortune doesn’t smile on us all equally. You’ll get passed over for a richly-deserved promotion. Your soulmate will shatter your heart. Accept it and move on. Don’t expect fair, because it won’t happen. You can’t change that. Speaking of which...

7. You will not change the world. I know you just got 57 cash-filled cards expressing exactly the opposite sentiment. Nevertheless, better than 99% of you probably won’t invent an alternative to fossil fuel. But you do have a tremendous power - to change your world, the one you see when you wake up every day. Think small. You are small. In fact...

6. You are not as great as you think. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Mr. “Every Kid’s a Winner” generation. Welcome to the real world, kids, where, at some point, most of you will not be good, smart or pretty enough. I’m not saying you’re dumb and ugly; I’m saying that the Universe is balanced by the truly grand and the supremely hideous. Everyone doesn’t get to be awesome. I know you’ve heard about your greatness since birth, but it’s time you found out...

5. Everybody lies. Ask any cop, priest or reporter and they will tell you I am absolutely correct. This includes you, which is OK as long as you don’t lie to yourself. Everyone else? The trick is figuring out if they lie about whether your dress looks pretty or why there’s a shovel and bag of lime in their trunk. Speaking of lies...

4. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is crap. Trust me on this. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. I love to write. Because it is how I feed myself, I also hate it. No matter how much you love something, when your choices are doing it every damn day or starving, it’s work. Some days I hate writing so much it makes me throw up a little in my mouth to look at my computer. I keep doing it, though, because...

3. Do what you love and the money will follow. I know this sounds counter-intuitive. For me, writing – even those “throwing-up-a-little-in-my-mouth-if-I-have-to-write-about-local-sewer-issues-one-more-time” days – still beats putting on pantyhose and selling term life insurance. So find your own thing that you love, but don’t stress over it too much, because...

2. Only AIDS and children are forever. Nothing lasts, which is a good thing. When I was your age, I had plans. I plotted and dreamed and schemed and got where I wanted to be– and hated it. So I took a do-over, and so can you. All you have to do on any given day is suck breath in and push it out again, so try not to take life too seriously. There’s no prize at the end...

1. The reward is the journey. Honest. It’s hard, and you’ll probably fail at a lot of it, but it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve found. I leave you with this quote from pop culture:

“We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”

Have a lovely ride.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com

Wasting Time

2011-06-08T17:27:00.001-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I like to think of myself as a patient soul who is slow to anger. I come from a long line of people who think the best way to make your point in an argument is to state your opinions with volume and anger. I do not subscribe to that school of thought.

Except when I’m faced with those Orwellian, automated, geared-for-discouragement, voice-response phone systems like the one at Bright House. I call to find out why I can’t get online and within moments I find myself screaming at the phone, “PERSON! I WANT TO SPEAK TO A DAMN PERSON! PERSON! PERSONPERSONPERSON!!”

“Did I understand you correctly? You want to speak to a person? If you want to speak to a person, say ‘representative’.”

I answer with a colorful adjective preceding the term “representative,” and the system gets me through to a person who soon reconnects me to the wonderful world of the Internet, including the latest draft of this column, the Gabber web site, and, of course, Facebook and Twitter.

The Internet is a horrible, wonderful, necessary place. I can get lost there for hours. I’ve wasted days of my life looking at funny or horrible videos I won’t remember in a week. When it comes to wasting time, I am the master.

Which is why I don’t need any help from local government. Two weeks ago I had the privilege of sitting through a St. Pete Beach city commission meeting while our beach reporter took a much-needed vacation. I say “much-needed” because I am spoiled by the entertaining yet brief Gulfport city hall meetings, while she regularly attends meetings that run so long that the CIA isn’t allowed to make suspected terrorists sit through them.

On the table last Tuesday night? Well, commissioners spent almost a half hour debating flower colors for Gulf Boulevard. Don’t get me wrong: Gulf Boulevard is dangerously close to looking like an inner-city throroughfare. The city would be well-served to make it look more like Blind Pass, with its majestic palms and subtle lighting. But is the color of the flowers something that needs discussion in a public meeting? Honest, I think you can discuss that with the contractor without residents suing you. Or, you know, maybe not. This is St. Pete Beach, after all, where one commissioner sneezes, another says “bless you”, and a local attorney slaps a lawsuit on the city for discussing the sneeze in private.

But I digress. The meeting also included – without a trace of irony – a protracted discussion on how to shorten the meetings. One commissioner sensibly suggested putting fewer items on the agenda. Crazy talk, apparently, because the commission ultimately decided instead to limit the meetings to five hours and, hey, whatever doesn’t get done moves to the next meeting. They ended the meeting four hours after it started and commissioners walked away feeling pretty good about themselves.

Which is utter nonsense. I’ve, sadly, attended city and county meetings on a quasi-regular basis for 12 years now, and I can tell you there is nothing going on in any small town that requires 300 minutes of discussion every other week. That’s enough time to watch the movie “Office Space” more than three times. Unless you’re discussing building a high rise on the beach, violent crime, or people murdering baby turtles and dolphins, nothing needs that much explaining and detail. To quote Senator Kevin Keeley in the Birdcage, “People in this country aren’t interested in details. They don’t even trust details.”

And yet details abounded in this meeting; what was missing was the real stuff, the meat. And I notice it’s missing a lot from these meetings. St. Pete Beach is great for talking about the color of the blossoms along the road but not so much for talking about height and density. At least, it doesn’t seem to get a lot of discussion in public, except for the citizens fighting about it. St. Pete Beach’s commission perplexes me. As a resident I generally read about the meetings after the fact or hear about them from my colleague. But on that night I watched commissioners snicker at each other while another commissioner read a prepared statement about red light cameras. I noticed glances exchanged that made me feel I was watching some sort of secret alliance. I heard elected officials start to bicker with residents.

As a reporter, I was fascinated. As a beach resident, I was sickened.

As a person? Give me Facebook and YouTube any day. At least it’s not costing taxpayer dollars for me to waste time there.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or comment on her Hard Candy Facebook page.

State of Emergency (Or, How To Make An Arts Community)

2011-05-18T17:44:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

We are not an artist community.

Hold on to your torches while I explain why that’s a good thing.

A lot of people move here or visit and extol the virtues of living in an arts colony. I hear a lot about how Gulfport’s like Key West, or at least how it used to be before the cruise ships and Dunkin’ Donuts came to town. Seems like everyone suggests that Gulfport has something in common with the Conch Republic. Even if you’ve never been to Key West, I’d wager you picture it at least a little like Gulfport, but with jugglers.

Last week I spent a day in Key West, which, truth be told, is about as long as I can take it. Give me Sugarloaf or Big Pine any day; there’s too many t-shirt shops in Key West for my taste.

I have a 1939 travel guide about Florida – A Guide to the Southernmost State – and it has a section on Key West. While listening to Rich Little pretend to be Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Conch Train Tour, I started reading a 70-year-old version of Key West history, and what I read changed my opinion of the Conch Republic forever.

The book calls Key West “one of the Nation’s most interesting experiments in community planning.” It seems the arts colony everyone compares us to was one of the largest welfare experiments in Florida.

In the mid-30s, Key West went belly up. The town wasn’t just “gosh, we might have to contract out the grass cutting” broke: city employees went for weeks without pay and 80% of the residents received federal aid. The city council asked the governor to declare a state of emergency and the feds responded by shipping in artists and having them paint murals, write operas and train locals to make ashtrays and buttons from coconut shell.

That’s right, artists didn’t come to Key West because it was the next happening arts hot spot.
The Federal government invented the arts community as a way to get the city in the black. After all, the tourists needed something to see when they came to visit, which was the other part of the federal plan to fix Key West: tourists. Lots and lots of them. Residents volunteered two million hours of their time to clean up litter, renovate houses, and create beaches, all in the name of tourism. All that was left was a marketing campaign and the “arts community” made a name for itself.

We are not, thank god, Key West. There's no state of emergency in Gulfport; city workers go without raises but not pay, and most of our residents don’t get government relief.

However, I would suggest that those who want the city to have more of an arts presence think long and hard about depression-era Key West. Be careful what you wish for, and never forget that the ultimate goal of what the federal government instituted in 1934 Key West was the Key West of today. Art was never the goal; it was a means to an end, and tourism was the end.

Back to the Gateway to the Gulf. If we don’t have a community of artists, what do we have? I’d go with a creative community, certainly. Look around town and you’ll see a bevy of full-time artists, and I’d bet they far outnumber the ones at Art Walk and hanging in the Hickman.

Some of my most talented friends are working artists. They make web sites or television or brochures, not clay pots or canvases. Is it “fine” art? No. Is it creative? No question. The guy sitting on the corner making cedar scraps into jewelry boxes? No, we don’t have many of him anymore. But we have graphic designers, writers, interior designers, television, radio, and print creators. I’d love to see the numbers on how many of those types of artists we have in town; I’m just guessing, but I’d wager we outnumber a lot of other Pinellas cities.

Still not convinced? Think about this: Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, making him a precursor to the modern-day graphic designer. Most Renaissance artists we know today received money to produce art, with what they produced secondary. Shakespeare was the Harlequin novelist of his day, and if he were alive today odds are he’d be green with envy over True Blood.

The artists starving in a hovel may have had tremendous talent, but ultimately the art that survives is the art that’s remembered.

And you don’t need a state of emergency to get it.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com, or tell her what you think on the Hard Candy Facebook page.

On the Waterfront

2011-05-05T09:58:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

Ah, the sweet smell of diesel mingled with the unique aroma of low tide.

Yep, you guessed it, I’m talking about the Gulfport waterfront.

I am a fan of water. In it, on it, near it – I don’t care. Kayak, sailboat, power boat – it’s really all the same to me, because as long as there’s salt water, nothing else matters.

As a third grader brand-new to this salty, sandy, sunny spit of limestone, my dad would get me up at the crack of dawn and take me down to the beach to search for shells. As an adult, I head to the shoreline to think things over. I have filled my home with shells, shark’s teeth, and shoreline memories. I surround myself with water; I wrap myself in its salty blanket every chance I get.

Odd, then, that I used to scream when water swirled around my ankles. That’s right, me, the former swim instructor, lifeguard and advocate for all things marine, would scream and cry as soon as the saltwater lapped at my stubby seven-year-old legs.

It’s understandable, really. Before living here we lived about a half-hour outside Manhattan. If you’ve ever seen the East River, perhaps you can understand my terror. In my mind I didn’t see the Gulf’s placid teal waters but a churning angry cold black beast. With the patience of an aunt/swim instructor I ultimately learned to jump into the water, feet first, and just start swimming. I’ve never looked back. Throughout my life as men, friends, and jobs all disappointed, the salt water never let me down. I just kept swimming.

Gulfport would be well served to take a page out of that book. Around town, I hear a lot of chatter about how to fix Gulfport’s economy, as though she’s a derelict boat or crumbling sea wall. Some wonder why some restaurants can’t stay afloat while others wrinkle their noses at the boats anchored offshore. Everyone, it seems, has a plan, from creating a “Main Street” project to tightening the noose on code enforcement.

While I don’t mean to dismiss these ideas as without merit, I don’t understand why we, as a city, ignore our maritime heritage. We like to brand ourselves as “weird” and an “art village,” but rarely do I hear anyone make reference to our rich aquatic history.

Civilizations historically spring up around the water, and Gulfport made no exception. We started as a fishing community, but good luck finding a fish house in town. A few restaurants, like O’Maddy’s, offer excellent seafood specials, and others, like Neptune, have regular seafood items on the grill, but we don’t have a crab house or a dedicated seafood restaurant. Am I the only one who finds that irregular?

The water works in Gulfport; it always has. Businesses operate with apparent success out of our marina; we have kayak tours and stand up paddleboard companies leading tours out of Clam Bayou. These people, certainly, feel the economic pinch, but I don’t see them shuttering their business in the same way so many restaurants and art galleries have over the past few years. They’re culling a living from the one thing they know will not fail them: the water.

The water remains the one constant in Gulfport. We have dredged it, filled it, poisoned it, and reshaped it, and still, the water works. In the 1950s scientists predicted that Boca Ciega Bay would never have sea grass on its bottom again; today, it is there. The water offers itself up to us again and again, and still Gulfport ignores it. There are no water taxis to and from the beach, no seafood restaurants capitalizing on Gulfport’s fishing heritage. We have no memorial to local ships and families; even our centennial celebrations gave the fisherman and boat houses no more than a passing nod. We could be Anywhere, USA, for all anyone knows when they come to visit. We may be one of the only waterfront towns in Florida that fails to capitalize on the state’s most prized asset.

Perhaps some folks have some apprehension about the water. I can understand your fear; I remember it well. But, although we have a slight problem with boating waste (which we’re about to fix with the mooring field), this is not the East River. This is Florida, a coastal paradise. Gulfport beach isn’t exactly Fort DeSoto, but we could use it better, keep it in better shape. We could see our water as an asset rather than something to be managed and regulated. We could view the pattern of the sun on the water, the masts of the sailboats, and the salt on the mangroves as art in its own right, and the fishermen who bring their haul through Gulfport’s marina as an integral part of who we are and how we got here instead of relics of a bygone era.

Gulfport’s worked so hard to carve out a unique arts niche that it forgot about the niche it already had. We have no art galleries left. We have working artists, sure, and people come here looking for art, of course. However, an artist can sell their wares in any number of small art colonies in Florida, but Gulfport’s maritime history is our true gift to visitors; it’s ours and ours alone.

No other city had the Aylesworth fish house, the Mary Disston, or the blockade runners from Key West. Forget Gasparilla; we had real pirates. Did you not know that? That’s exactly my point. We are a waterfront town, something I feel like we should mention every now and again. The city owns a building on the edge of Clam Bayou. Why not open a maritime museum or history center? Why aren’t we giving walking history tours extolling the men who built the city on fishnets and saltwater? Why do we refuse to acknowledge the one thing that has never failed Gulfport?

In my house I have a picture that includes a quote from Christopher Columbus:

“And the sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home.”

Those who don’t know their past, they say, are doomed to repeat it. Looking around town and out on the water, I say that repeating our history is the best thing that could happen to us.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or on her Hard Candy Facebook page.

Moving Day

2011-04-27T18:32:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

As I write this I’m surrounded by boxes. That’s right, the patina of living by the world’s worst karaoke bar finally wore down to a gunmetal grey, and I moved to a quieter area of the beach. I calculate that, including college dorms, I’ve moved 23 times. Since my parents parked themselves in one place and stayed there in 1980, most of these moves are on my whim.
And I’ve gotten good at it. I mean, I can throw things in boxes with Olympic skill and precision. I know the numbers for Bright House and Progress Energy by heart. Everyone needs a skill, right?
Except I hate it. It’s not so much the move – there’s some weird ancient nomadic memory in my brain that swoons at the sight of bare walls and barren rooms – it’s the boxes. It’s the chaos. I can’t really function very well until I unpack the boxes and get everything situated.
Which is a problem. This year, I missed the deadline for paying my taxes, neglected to RSVP for a friend’s wedding, and ran out of cat food. Those of you with pets know that of the three, that last item has the most dire consequences. This says nothing of the money I’ve lost by not writing because I’ve been trying desperately to figure out where to set up the coffeemaker.
In the end, what happens every time I move is that I run around trying to put out fires wrought by the disruption of a move. I may save money or gain peace of mind over the year, but weighed against the expense and entropy of moving, I think I end the year at a net loss.
Which brings me to my two favorite cities in Pinellas county and the chaos wrought when a city gets a new set of councilmembers or commissioners every year.
St. Pete Beach has a new mayor and Gulfport has a new councilwoman, and whether or not you endorse them or oppose them, you have to admit they have a daunting task ahead of them. I’ve got boxes of books and pictures to unpack; elected officials have a different load of cartons to get off the u-Haul. They’re like college freshman moving on campus- not a lot of boxes, but a lot of important stuff in the boxes.
They start with a couple boxes of constituents, who might hate them or love them or not care at all. If they have 10,000 constituents, they have 10,000 sets of interests they must represent. These constituents need a functioning and up-to-speed representative today, not tomorrow, so now our college freshman must stop unpacking that box and open up another labeled “training.” This box – and it’s a big one – has Sunshine laws, training, tours, and other “Welcome to Government Service!” gifts from their dorm mother.
Some of the stuff in the box deals with city meetings while other stuff focuses on city-to-city or outside agencies, which leads the official to a box labeled “committees and agencies.” This box might seem unimportant and the councilmember or commissioner may push it aside, but they’ll find soon enough that if they want to make the Dean’s List they need to unpack and organize that box as well.
Elected officials have to do all this unpacking while assuming the role of a functional representative, going to their day job, and attending to their families. I don’t envy them.
I envy the cities themselves less. Think of each elected body as a college dorm (albeit one without the keg parties and blacklights, and the roommates can only talk to each other when the entire university can listen in). The dorm has five roommates, but no one gets to stay very long. The dorm always has boxes stacked in the corner, there’s constant chaos, and just when everyone learns to get along and work together, someone moves out and someone new moves in.
If new officials get sworn in during March (or, in the event of a run-off, April) and the next cycle starts in December, at least seven months of every year have these “roommates” worried more about the move than their schoolwork. Of that time, the newer members spend a month or two coming up to speed, so figure that for five months–less than half the year–the city council’s living with boxes strewn about their living room and trying to figure out where to put the new guy’s papasan chair.
I took time off from work to get the boxes out of my living room, because I was going a little nuts with the weight of the chaos. Cities can’t take time off; people need government every day. I’m not proposing we shut down the city while new officials learn the ropes and city hall adjusts to its newest member and I’m certainly not saying we should keep bad politicians just because it’s easier.
I only know that right now, my head isn’t really where it ought to be. It’s going to take me a while to get comfortable and be productive working. I have that luxury; I’m not leading a city.
It’s one thing to muck up a column or send in the wrong name with a photo. It’s quite another to be so busy unpacking boxes and straightening shelves that you make the wrong decision about something that affects the quality of life of 13,000 people.
Think of it as the difference between missing one class and getting kicked out of school.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or follow her column on the Hard Candy Facebook page.

Dachshunds and Nitrogen

2011-04-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

Calypso may be one of the few dachshunds in the world who not only has her own life jacket, but has one because she thinks nothing of jumping off my kayak or paddleboard if something in the water strikes her fancy. She’s gotten pretty adept at hoisting herself up on a paddleboard, too–no small feat for a dog with two-inch legs.

We’ve been spending more than our fair share of time out on the water lately (thank you, Florida spring time!) and Calypso’s become something of a paddleboard pro. She knows to crouch down when a wave (such that they are this side of the state) comes towards us on the board, and she has learned the hard way to stay very, very still when I’m getting into the kayak.

Of course, there are some places where I expressly forbid Calypso to go. Despite the look of heartbreak she gives me, Calypso can’t paddle out to Shell Key anymore because the laws changed. I won’t bring her to the Hillsborough River because the idea of her going snout-to-snout with one of the Hillsborough’s Jurassic-sized gators opens up giant holes in my stomach.

Oh, and Tampa Bay. My dog isn’t allowed to swim in upper Tampa Bay. The other day we went to Simmons park by the TECO power plant. Calypso and I meandered down to the water, but when she started to go in the water, I stopped her. I didn’t want my dog in that water.

See, I know that the only reason that body of water “complies” with current nitrogen standards is because cities like Gulfport bring down the average level of nitrogen by participating in the Nitrogen Management Consortium. By using Gulfport and other cities to help bring down the average amount of nitrogen in area waters, the consortium’s cheating. Perhaps it’s legal, but that doesn’t make it moral. After all, it used to be legal to own another person, but that didn’t make it right.

Gulfport’s runoff drains into Boca Ciega Bay and Clam Bayou, not Tampa Bay. Those are two different watersheds. Think of a watershed as a large bowl with your neighborhood in it. When it rains, the rain goes into the bowl. It can run around the houses and over parking lots and into lakes, bays and rivers, but it doesn’t leave the bowl.

Gulfport is in the Boca Ciega Bay bowl. Water from the TECO power plant and other industries in that area of Hillsborough goes into the Tampa Bay bowl. They’re separate bowls, but for some reason the government allows the lower nitrogen in the Boca Ciega Bay bowl to average out the higher nitrogen in the Tampa Bay bowl.

Sound like shaky science? It does to me, too. Here’s the kicker: Gulfport paid $6000 last year to stay in the consortium that uses this Voldemort-like wizardry to arrive at these numbers. That’s right, the city used your tax dollars to allow industry to continue to dump nitrogen in the water. Council woman Jennifer Salmon objected at the time, but the rest of council essentially patted her on the head and told her “the grown ups are talking now.” Two weeks ago councilman Sam Henderson expressed concerns as well; hopefully, these two voices will force the rest of council to address about how questionable this move appears to the rest of us.

I can’t find any real danger in letting Calypso swim in water that has too much nitrogen, not really. From what I’ve read, nitrogen damages plant life and smaller organisms in the water because it causes algae blooms. It’s not like Calypso’s going to get splashed by the water and grow a ninth nipple or something.

So why won’t I let a dog who, when left to her own devices attempts to treat the cat box as her personal refrigerator, swim in Tampa Bay? Well, this whole consortium thing started me wondering: if the government allows that kind of fact gerrymandering with one contaminant, how do I know they don’t allow it with other more direct threats to our health and well-being?

Then I realized: I don’t.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com, or become a fan of Hard Candy on Facebook.

Get Off My Lawn!

2011-04-13T12:49:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I have a buddy at the St. Pete Beach Police Department: Jeff. Oh, he doesn’t know who I am. No, I’m fairly certain he knows me only as “cranky complainer lady” because I exclusively speak to him when a certain local tavern wakes me up with the worst karaoke (and that’s saying something) on the planet at 2:30 in the morning. I tend to be an early riser and do not receive these talentless serenades with the humor one might expect.

Now, I can’t name the bar, because I don’t want to get my publisher sued. For the purposes of this column we’ll just call it the Left Bar, because after all the decent establishments fill up with customers or close down, this place gets what’s left.

I’m not protesting the presence of a local dive bar, because I applaud local success. I’m protesting their success waking me up in the middle of the night.

I know, I know: How old am I, anyway? What’s next, me yelling, “Hey, you kids–get off my lawn”? I’ve heard the jokes and I don’t care. I want them to turn it down.

For those of you saying, “Well, what did she expect? She lives one street off Gulf Boulevard,” let me tell you:

I expect businesses to follow the law that says you can’t have undergrads, drunk on cheap whiskey and hoping to get lucky with the way-past-her-prime exotic dancer having a slug of Jager after her shift, belting out “Brown-Eyed Girl” on the karaoke machine at 2:21 in the morning so loudly that it wakes me up. OK, I’m paraphrasing, but the beach has a noise ordinance that, according to Jeff, starts at 10. 2 a.m. isn’t just an “Oops, we forgot to turn it down,” it’s a blatant “Up yours, St. Pete Beach cops!”

I expect the police to get out there and handle it, which they do. But if they have to go back several times a week–which they do–I expect them to ticket the bar. Jeff, my new BFF, is great, and as much as I enjoy our late-night chats I’d be happy never to speak to him again. I’m quite certain I’m not exactly the high point of his day, either.

Look, it’s not like I moved to an airport and then complained about the noise. This bar breaks the law. Regularly. And, as far as I can tell all they get is a slap on the wrist every damn night.

At some point one would hope that either the Left Bar would work out that a police officer IS going to come by and MAYBE they should keep it down, or the police would say, hey, we have better things to do than tell you to turn it down every night, so how about we just issue you a massive ticket for violating current noise violations?

But that, to my knowledge, doesn’t happen. I hope that at some point the police will consider that perhaps they should consider my numerous calls to Jeff not some weird way of flirting with police dispatch but a frustrated citizen begging police to do something to protect my quality of life.

It’s the same comment residents behind the Gabber offices have about crime and litter and the same thing people downtown hear about the bands at night. What did they expect, right? Move by 49th Street and you’re going to see crime and litter. Move by a bar and you’re going to hear music.

I don’t discount that point but would like to suggest that it is within our rights to expect our neighbors to follow the law. When they don’t, we expect the police to punish them. It’s the deal we make with liberty: we all follow an agreed-upon set of rules and, within those parameters, we’re free to do what we want. Since we know that’s not always going to happen, we have penalties in place – removals of those liberties – for those who can’t operate within those rules.

So I guess I can’t fault the owners of the Left Bar, or the people throwing trash on 49th Street. They’re just fulfilling what our founding fathers said would happen: acting out the lowest common denominator of freedom. Nightly. At our expense. I fault the legal system for not taking these seemingly minor irritations seriously, for not realizing that quality of life matters just as much as sanctity of life.

The state has laws preventing felons from owning guns or pedophiles from volunteering at a daycare, the rationale being that if they committed a crime once, why give them the tools to do so again? We can’t stop people from re-offending, but why make it easier for them to do so?

But there are no penalties for those who chronically attack our quality of life. There is nothing for us to do but grouse to one another or develop as meaningful a relationship as one can have with a night dispatcher at the local police station. Of course, there are plenty of things our elected officials can do.

I suggest we start by taking away their license to serve Boone’s Farm and making it illegal to own a karaoke machine.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or on her Facebook page, accessible through the Gabber’s Facebook page or on our web site, TheGabber.com. Unless, of course, you’re Jeff with the St. Pete Beach Police. Then you can just wait for her nightly call.

Campaign Promises

2011-03-31T09:11:00.001-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I would like to take this column to announce my candidacy for the next Gulfport municipal election.

Here’s what I promise:

I will open the Gulfport Casino as a bar during special events and Art Walks to help with budget woes. I will also not rest until the city gets a liquor license for city hall. After all, who here at council hasn’t though that things would go better with a little bourbon? In addition, it will stop some of the name calling. Why? Who can get mad at someone who just bought you a drink? In the interest of keeping the meetings short, I will insist that council play a version of the old college drinking game “Hi, Bob!” whereby everyone had to drink whenever someone said “Hi, Bob!” on the Bob Newhart show. If I am elected, the entire council will have to drink a shot of their choosing every time someone used the phrase “government in the sunshine” or “code enforcement.”

During council’s reports, any council member who uses more than the same three minutes allotted to citizens who speak will have to put their week’s salary back into the city’s coffers.

While we’re talking about what I’d do at council, I plan to give registered voters who voted in the last election double the time to speak at meetings then those who don't vote.
Employees not getting raises? Not under my rule. Forget the “rollback rate” - I’m doing away with our property taxes completely and implementing a 20% city-wide sales tax. That should give us plenty of money to not only allow our support staff to make a living wage, but to get a second code enforcement officer to deal with those junk properties behind O’Maddy’s and litter left along the streets of Ward Four.

How about our marina? I say let’s make it even more profitable. First step: I think our harbormaster does a fantastic job. So much so I think we should build him a new ship’s store - complete with a Tiki bar on top. It will serve fish and burgers, and the Worthingtons will supply the fish (because, really, they have more people at any given Worthington fish fry than any small Tiki bar could ever hope to serve in one night). It will close 30 minutes after sundown, but don’t worry that the marina feels abandoned at night– I’m going to open it up to heavily regulated liveaboard vessels. That’s right, priority slips will go to people who can prove their ship’s seaworthiness, agree to regular Coast Guard inspections, and pay our new exorbitant slip rent for liveaboards (I think $20 a foot is fair, don’t you?)

Now, about Clam Bayou. Gosh, this one’s a toughie. Since the city’s going to make all this money under my new plan, we’re going to truly restore Clam Bayou– to the 1926 shoreline. We will buy back all the land between Boca Ciega Bay and, oh, 30th Street. On the other side of Clam Bayou we’re going to buy back all the homes between Miriam and the bayou and let the water run back through there. Now, I know that some of those homes were on the Tour of Homes and sure we’re going to displace some folks, but I’m tired of this Clam Bayou thing being an issue, so here’s what we’ll do:

We’ll pay whatever the homeowner paid for the home when they bought it with a 4% cost-of-living increase for every year they’ve lived there. If they’ve made major improvements, well, of course we’ll pay more. We will also pay their moving expenses if they agree to move into a vacant and financially distressed Gulfport property and renovate it.
Of course, this also means marina will have to move, but I think behind the Recreation Center is the perfect place for it, don’t you?

Also, I’m going to make sure the city of Gulfport sues the city of St. Petersburg for its discharge into the Bayou. I will not seek fiscal recompense but instead the city, under my fair and just leadership, will sue for a legislative mandate – enforced by Gulfport’s newly hired “Environmental Enforcement Officers” – that vehicles on any roads with stormwater systems that drain into our bayou must be electric, not gas powered.

Lest you think I’m forgetting my pals in the Arts District, fear not. I'm turning Beach and Shore Boulevards into a combustion motor exclusion zone, which probably isn’t the right word for such a zone on land. All it means is that golf cars, pediacabs, bicycles and pedestrians are all that’s allowed on those two streets.

As long as I’m thinking green, I want to see more environmentally aware businesses in the city. So here’s the deal: anyone who can offer a service that reduces Gulfport’s carbon footprint only has to charge half of that 20% sales tax I mentioned. Along those lines, I’m also planning on outlawing individual bottles of water and making it illegal for restaurants to put a glass of water in front of you unless you request it.
I’m also going to open up our beaches to dogs. Now, I know the arguments against, but here’s how we’re going to deal with anyone who doesn’t pick up after their dog: we get to take their dog. Guaranteed that will stop the problem dead in its tracks.

Under my regime, we will also rip out every blade of grass and Xeriscape all public areas. In addition water customers will pay a $50 monthly fee if they don’t have a Xeriscaped landscape. I will ask the Pinellas County Cooperative Extension to send in their Master Gardeners to help accomplish this in a cost-effective manner.

Finally, I’m planning to sue St. Petersburg for the way they’ve compromised the quality of life for residents along the 49th Street corridor and demand they staff their police force accordingly. The lawsuit will also demand that they devote a portion of their budget to improving the quality of life for those residents in the south side, as that crime touches our borders and impacts our quality of life, too. What portion, you ask? I will demand a percentage in line with residents, not voters. So if the south side has ⅓ of the St. Petersburg’s residents, ⅓ of the city’s monies must get spent in the south side. That should help beef up their force and make things sweeter along our borders.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, yes. Free city-wide wireless internet access. Legalized marijuana (as far as I can tell it’s damn near the city flower anyway), legalized gay marriages, and “councilman for a day” events where citizens get to sit in my seat on council and vote my vote.
So there you have it: my campaign promises for the 2012 Gulfport election. Call me crazy, but I think it just might work. Of course, I live outside city limits, but I think I might change that rule, too.

Happy April Fool’s Day.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or through her Hard Candy Facebook page.

Gus

2011-03-15T15:27:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I had to get permission to take his class. I was that student. You all knew one - the one who chronically brought home report cards that read, “Cathy could do so well if only she would apply herself.”

I was a slacker. But I wanted to call him Gus.

You see, that was the deal. You took Mr. Haynes’ Advanced Placement American History class as a junior, and if you passed the national exam and received college credit, when you came back the next fall as a senior, you could call him Gus. As I mentioned, I was a slacker, but I keenly wanted not to be a slacker, although I suspected it took more energy than I was willing to exert. If I passed this one test (and really, I thought, how hard could that be?) I, like the academically elite, could call him Gus. I begged him to let me take that class. I pleaded. He finally acquiesced, but even my 15-year-old brain could tell he was skeptical.

I’m not sure where, exactly, we went wrong with Florida’s education system. Something happened: I’ve met more than one otherwise bright college student who can’t punctuate a sentence properly or tell me about the Berlin Wall if they had communists pointing guns at their head.

Whatever is wrong now was not wrong in that history class. Mr. Haynes made it crystal clear on the first day of school that he had no use for us, that we were collectively little more than lumps of hormones and giggles that ran a very real danger of not amounting to anything more, ever. We did not walk in to a warm and fuzzy classroom where a teacher told us we could all be whatever we wanted to be when we grew up. We walked into a classroom where this towering grizzly bear of a man demanded our mental presence and didn’t tolerate adolescent nonsense. We learned that we didn’t know much of anything, least of all how to think and defend our ideas. It didn’t matter if we were right in our assertions; if we couldn’t defend what we wrote, it was wrong.

As the test got closer, I got the sense that maybe I wasn’t as useless a person as I was when the school year started. Oh, don’t misunderstand - I still slacked in most areas of my life. I cared more about writing what I now recognize as not only exceptionally sappy poetry, but bad poetry at that, than I cared about learning algebra. In that history class, though, something changed - for that hour every day, I didn’t want to write poetry. I didn’t want to be a slacker. I wanted to hear more about Boss Tweed and Teapot Dome. Mr. Haynes taught us about that, but he also taught us how to think on paper. I had one other exceptionally hard-ass teacher, Mr. Black, who taught me how to write a thesis statement, and between these two men I was learning how to defend my ideas and, more importantly, think them through and decide which ones were worth defending.

No disrespect to any teachers, but your students need you to be more like Gus. You need to scare students into wanting your respect.

That’s right. I can call him Gus. I passed my AP exam that May. 20-plus years later, and that still feels pretty damn good.

Seems like a lot of teachers hate Rick Scott. I get that. The medicare fraud, the arrogance, the people who went to jail under his rule in the private sector - none of these things really recommend the man. I also think maybe our governor should have higher ethics than a common back alley drug dealer, or at least come close.

How would the governor’s idea of privatizing education and cutting funding have impacted me? Well, I don’t think my parents would have sent me to private school, even with a voucher, so I still would have had a slot at good ol’ Clearwater High. Would Gus have been there? I don’t know, but I do know this:

Every teacher should be a Gus, regardless of where or what they teach. I am the person I am today in no small part because of this man. I owe him the way I think about a lot of things, but especially politics and history.

He’s ill now, as I understand it. My high school friend Joe’s mom teaches with him, and through her we found out Gus has lymphoma and is undergoing chemotherapy. When Joe passed this information along to a group of Gus alums (through, of course, the magic of Facebook), we all started talking about how tough he was - and how great. We all echoed one sentiment: Gus Haynes changed our lives.

I think he knew we all dangled on the edge of a precariously balanced educational system and that every moment mattered. He took his hour a day and made it work. We worked hard in his class: some of my friends did so because they were good students; others, like me, did it because he didn’t really give us a choice. Plus, I wanted to prove that skeptical man wrong: I COULD pass that exam. I deserved a spot in his class.

So my advice to teachers today is this: screw the governor and what he does. Be like Gus and no matter what metric the state uses, you will pass with flying colors.

After all, every student deserves a Gus.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Planning Like A Mother

2011-03-10T10:22:00.000-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

My mother is a master planner. I don’t have hard proof but I’m almost entirely certain 3M invented the Post-It with her in mind. Every now and then I’ll find one of her notes when I’m at their house: “Dog to groomer. Wal-Mart. Ask Cathy to brush her hair.” I wish I were joking. She even has to-do lists of separate to-do lists she needs to make. She makes her budget in a green ledger book and, trust me, if you’re moving, this is the woman you want unpacking and organizing your spices. Stephen Covey and his seven habits have nothing on my mom; she’s so efficient she only needs two habits: planning and Post-Its.

Me? Well, I have no hard proof but I’m fairly certain I’m adopted. Oh, I try. Honest. I have a Google calendar; I even use G-mail’s “Tasks” with limited success. Planning just isn’t my thing; I’ve always had a spur-of-the-moment approach to life and, honestly, other than not being a travel writer for National Geographic yet, my strategy (such that it is, or is not) has served me well. I live on the beach, I spend more than my fair share of time on the water, and I make my living writing. My seat-of-my-swimsuit approach does all right by me. I am a fan of the Kierkegaard quote “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Or, as Mater said in the movie Cars, “Ain't no need to watch where I'm goin'; just need to know where I've been.”

While that’s working out great for me, I think it’s a lousy way to run a city. And right now, I’m looking at not one but two cities - Gulfport and St. Pete Beach - that could use a few Post-it Notes here and there.

Credit Gulfport councilwoman Jennifer Salmon for this line of thought. At last week’s council meeting she told everyone Gulfport couldn’t choose what type of businesses came into the city; in effect, she said, Gulfport must take what it can get.

I’m not so sure about that. The city has laws preventing bars in our downtown area; we have codes that keep adult bookstores out of other areas. We have laws that don’t allow nightclubs, pawn shops or gun dealers. In fact, we, as a city, talk a lot about what we don’t want. It seems to me we can pick and choose.

Let’s not leave out our sandy sister to the west. St. Pete Beach doesn’t want tall buildings (unless, of course, you’ve accepted campaign contributions from Save Our Little Village, as Melissa Lattman’s reporting revealed last week) and it doesn’t want rehab housing. Apparently the $13 prostitutes are also a no-go. St. Pete Beach knows so much what it doesn’t want that a few attorneys may retire on the legal fees. While some say those lawsuits resulted from trying to plan, I’m not entirely certain that’s the whole story and, quite honestly, I suspect the city’s using it as an excuse to do nothing.

See, neither city talks about what they do want. All I hear is that we don’t want tall buildings or box stores. Fine. Do you want a walking district? Why not talk about how you want things to look? Maybe write up a little plan, run it by a few residents, perhaps talk to the ones who are vocal about what they think won’t work. You know, sometimes people who aren’t elected officials, lifelong bureaucrats, or arrogant weekly newspaper columnists have good ideas, too.

Look, I’d love to see Gulf Boulevard with a golf cart/taxi/scooter/bike lane and less traffic and palm trees down the median. I think Gulfport should put in a small daytime restaurant at the marina. Of course, no one’s asking me. I bet other residents have ideas, too, but no one’s asking them, either. So the only choice you leave your residents, and I mean the ONLY choice, is to wait until someone presents a plan--any plan at all--and then they can voice their opinion on that plan. I can relate, because that’s totally my style, which works great for writers but for cities? Well, if I were a city using this strategy I’d be homeless and living under the 275 overpass, clutching a can of Mad Dog 20/20 in a brown paper bag.

Why not instead try thinking about what we would have if we could have it all? Can we have it all? Probably not. Can we make Gulfport into Key West? Doubtful, but I’d wager we can make the shelters in front of O’Maddy’s not look for all the world like they were about to collapse. Can we turn St. Pete Beach into St. Armand’s Circle? I don’t think so, but we can vet desirable types of businesses. We can force business owners to maintain property standards.

Of course, we’re too busy with rules and lawsuits to do this. You‘re very busy, I suppose, making sure we follow the rules and don’t get sued. But if that was all we needed from our leaders, we’d elect kindergarten teachers and set out a tub of paste, safety scissors and some crayons at each city meeting. You guys are supposed to lead. Do it. Make a plan. Trust your staff to make sure you don’t break the laws and start earning your poverty-level politician’s wages.

If you need some help, I know someone who’s a whiz with Post-Its.
Contact Cathy Salustri at ">CathySalustri@theGabber.com or tell her what you think on Cathy Salustri’s Hard Candy Facebook page, accessible through TheGabber.com.

Nutbar Guide to Government: A Primer

2011-02-23T18:39:00.001-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

Last December I wrote a column called “Cherry Crusted Nutbars” about some of the folks who speak at Gulfport council meetings. At the very next city council meeting I was accused of (I’m paraphrasing) disappointing Edward R. Murrow, favoring the elimination of free speech, and generally being an idiot. I’m also pretty sure some folks suggested I might be a direct descendant of Mussolini, but I can’t be sure.

Now, the masses of folks who took issue with the column didn’t really surprise me. As I’m fond of saying, I anger people on a regular basis and have for decades, so seeing a room full of people less than thrilled at my words was more of a “Well, at least they aren’t burning me in effigy” than a “What the-? Upset? At me? I simply fail to understand!”

There were a few things about the whole incident - we’ll call it the Cherry Crusted Situation - that I want to set straight. See, everyone thought I was calling them a Nutbar. People who I never even considered remotely Nutbar-y or even slightly cherry-crusted transformed into oodles of nutty goodness before my eyes. It was some sort of Nutbar event horizon.

Then there’s the Gulfport Seven, a moniker stemming from another one of my columns. I honestly can’t tell anymore if people are upset by the designation or honored. A group of folks even made buttons, and so far, they’ve handed out way more than seven. It seems like everyone either thinks they’re one of the Seven or desperately wants to be part of this grassroots take on the cool table in the lunchroom.

Odds are, though, you’re probably just a garden variety concerned citizen. Don’t take offense; we can’t all be Nutbars. Still not convinced? Well, indulge me, and take a few moments to familiarize yourself with the Official Nutbar Guide to Government. Today, we’ll start with a few definitions, intended to separate the Nutbars from the Seven and the rest of the world from them both. Consider this a primer for everyone, from Nutbar to concerned citizen.

Cherry-Crusted Nutbar: Honestly, the name kind of says it all. It’s someone who makes a regular practice of standing before council solely to make accusations grounded in faulty logic, lies, and deliberate misinterpretations. They have only the loosest connection with reality, eschew facts, and refuse to listen to the opposing side. They serve their comments up with a hearty side of either nastiness or passive aggression because, as we all know, that’s what works in crazyland. A Cherry-Crusted Nutbar has no real interest in making their community a better place; he or she doesn’t speak so much as they do act out, either for attention, self-gratification, or to further a hidden agenda. Are you a Cherry-Crusted Nutbar? Take this simple test: if you have the presence of mind to think you might be a Nutbar, well, then, you probably aren’t. However, if you immediately thought, “Oh, she couldn’t possibly mean me!” well, then, you might be a Nutbar. Get help, I beg you. Some cases are acute, not chronic, and I’m certain there’s a 12-step program out there for you somewhere.

Magnificent Seven: A group of seven folks who faithfully attend Gulfport city council meetings. Described in a March 2010 column as “seven magnificent men and women,” an (albeit somewhat snarky) homage to the 1960 film, in which a village hires seven gunfighters to fight oppression. I did, indeed, have seven specific men and women in mind when the phrase sprung forth from my pen, but if you think I’m giving up those names now, you’re crazier than a Cherry-Crusted Nutbar. The Magnificent Seven are a vocal group that employ several different means to get their point across, often means with which I loudly disagree. Nevertheless, they serve an important function: they are the self-appointed overseers of a participative government. Every city has such a group, although, in my experience, few cities have groups boasting the - let’s call it “flair” - of Gulfport’s Mag7. They may not respect the elected officials, but they, unlike Nutbars, respect the process.

Derivative of the term: Gulfport Seven, a less respectful term often bandied about in a disparaging manner.

Concerned Citizen: Anyone else who attends council for specific issues or entertainment, pays attention and is not running for office. Most of you will never be Nutbars, and you can’t be one of the original Mag7, so you fall in this category if you speak at a council meeting or write your council person.

How do these factions work together? Here it is, in a nutshell: concerned citizens should be the primary focus of the elected body. Groups like the Magnificent Seven help keep the elected body honest. Cherry-Crusted Nutbars?

Well, they keep the ratings up.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com, or tell her what you think at her Cathy Salustri’s Hard Candy page, accessible through theGabber.com.

The Greatest is Love

2011-02-09T17:59:00.000-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

I don’t have TV. I have a television, but I don’t get broadcast or cable, which, aside from a few episodes of Deadliest Catch and Bones, I really don’t miss. After all, I have Facebook and 476 other web-based diversions to keep me from being a productive member of society.

It was just dumb luck, then, that I was housesitting for my friend Kelli when that hideous woman killed her children last month. Kelli, you see, has many television sets, including one in her laundry room. I’m not a TV freak- I spent my non-working hours largely in Kelli’s hot tub- but by Friday afternoon the ubiquitous black boxes had taunted me sufficiently that I decided to see what was on.

It was a tough choice between Judge Judy, a less-than-wholesome collection of adult films about young girls and the pizza delivery guy, and the news, but I chose the news just in time to see the Tampa police walk Julie Scheneker to the squad car.

There’s an Anne Murray song called A Little Good News, and when I’m feeling sappy I liken that song to the Gabber. We report on our share of the ugly, but I like to think our readers get a little good news, too, when they flip open the paper on Thursday morning. Our management operates on the precept that, despite the hideous world events swirling around us, we are a community. A good community.

I watched the cops walk this monster of a woman to the squad car and heard that song in my head.

Of course, because we are human and have an apparent endless capacity for evil, the story doesn’t end there. The Westboro Baptist Church out of Topeka, Kansas- a lovely group of self-declared “primitive baptists” - issued a press release last week announcing their intent to picket the funeral because Colonel Scheneker was “off playing bloody war games, fighting for same sex marriage.” The “church” further insinuates that the children deserved to die, saying that “God sent the shooter to Tampa.”

Not my god.

We don't need to get theological here. In my world, my higher power doesn't send people to hurt other people; I like to think that the Universe is more based in love. My sort of god sends the other type of folk- folks like the Florida West Coast Riders, who put out a call to go shield the mourning teens and family from these hate-filled freaks by surrounding the mourners with a human shield and curtain of American flags.

In the end, all the craziness made me think about Gulfport and St. Pete Beach and, well, my own life. It puts our problems in perspective, and we all need a perspective adjustment now and then. I know that in the dead of winter when it feels like it’s been months since I’ve been out on the water, I start to lose perspective. Little things become big things. I get worked up over things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I start to feel like every council meeting attend has UN-level importance.

Then I get out on the water and clear my head. That's when I remember that the PACE program, height restrictions on St. Pete Beach, and, yes, even Clam Bayou are, in the grand scheme of the Universe, little things. I promise. I’m not saying they aren’t important, I’m not saying they aren’t worthy of strong convictions and strong actions. I’m saying that what it really comes down to it, there are only a couple things that matter. You need air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and a roof over your head.

And love. You need love. It’s Valentines’ Day, or at least it will be Monday. I’m not talking about love like you see in the movies. I’m talking about a love that's far simpler; I'm talking about the undercurrent of love that lies beneath us all, connecting us in a communal web.

You see, we have our problems. We'll put high rises wherever we can get away with it, and we'll pick at each other in a city meeting until blood runs freely from the dais to the back door. We will insult one another and be hideous to each other and make each other crazy. We will leave city hall meetings cursing each other. We will make snarky remarks about one another; we will insult each other.

But we love each other.

Go ahead, laugh if you must. But we do. No, it's not a romantic love. It's not the type of love they make movies about; at least, not the happy Jennifer Aniston/Ben Stiller romantic comedies. Our love can be a little more, shall we say, Quentin Tarantino.

Let me put it this way: I make a lot of you angry. I've called some of you nut bars. I've called your protests empty. I've poked at you. I've mocked you. You've slammed me, railed against me, derided me. We all make each other angry sometimes; I've seen arguments after council and on the street. I've heard of nasty phone calls and threats. But I believe this:

At the end of the day, no matter what, we love each other. Definitely not romantically. No, our love is more like an old couple, bickering over the price of beef. We argue. We call each other names. We may even make obscene gestures at one another.

But I believe that when it really mattered - say, if the hate group was showing its face around the edges of our community - that every one of us would do exactly what the West Coast Riders did last week. We would shield any one of us from that level of hatred and protect them. The bitterest enemies would join hands to protect their community.

I know you would. It's what keeps us strong. It's what separates us from the larger communities. We believe, like that group of bikers, that hate should never be the largest thing in the Universe. It's what makes us, us.

If you’re a Christian, good for you. It's adamantly not my thing. But the greatest words I know of love come from the Bible and if you, like me, don't really go in for all that, I beg your indulgence. If you're a believer, well, you probably know what's coming next.

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

Rather than go on about what that means, I'll leave you with that. I've always said the point of this column is for you to think. Think. Because that, to me, speaks of our community. We bear, believe, hope and endure all things. We love.

It's who we are.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or join her on her Facebook page, Cathy Salustri’s Hard Candy.

Small Town Marriage

2011-01-26T15:54:00.000-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

I would like to first and foremost express my condolences for the families of Thomas Baitinger and Jeffrey Yaslowitz, the two St. Petersburg officers killed earlier this week while trying to serve a warrant on a fugitive. I appreciate their commitment to making our lives and our communities safer.

I was married once, in another life. To the rest of the world we had a good life. But we would have these disturbances: a fight where words went too far, threats to leave over seemingly minor things. Every time seemed to me like the end of the world. In time, of course, I would push the incident aside and go back to telling myself how great we had it. It was easy to do, really. My family, his family, all of our friends- they all wanted to believe we were happy. But it turns out marriage isn’t all public relations: when things go wrong, you have to dive into the marl and muck and somehow drag out the good to save it. Turns out, those disturbances were cracks.

A small town is a lot like a marriage. It wants to put its best foot forward to outsiders and keep its problems its own. It wants to keep all the bad stuff to itself, because if anyone else finds out the bad stuff, maybe they won’t love our small town like we do.

Gulfport has one hell of a cheering squad, between the chamber, the merchants, and the mayor himself. I think it’s great that so many people love Gulfport- I do, too; this community has been very good to and for me. However, the city can’t continue to stick its head in the sand about material threats to its survival. No one who’s paying attention can tell me that the city doesn’t seem to have a certain level of divisiveness at its core. Over the past few years I’ve watched the city divide itself into two camps. It’s evident at council meetings, informal discussions, and on the web. There seems to be a lot of cracks in this small town’s happy facade, but no one’s willing to admit it.

What’s causing the cracks? A lot of people have a lot of different answers, but I think it all boils down to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Remember that from school? It says that humans must meet our basic needs like food, shelter, and safety before we can worry about falling in love or being creative.

Gulfport has oodles of creativity and plenty of opportunities for spiritual enrichment, but at the root of our divisiveness is a fundamental lack of safety. Oh, Gulfport’s got a great police force, don’t misunderstand. All the same, we have a crime problem. It comes from the next town over.

Monday’s shooting was a prime example. How many of you saw the helicopters? Who heard the shots? I know people in the Stetson area who could hear gunfire. Does it really matter what legal boundaries the shooting fell inside? That’s just a line, and an imaginary one at that.

St. Petersburg is a much larger city, and it has much larger problems. Gulfport has some trouble spots, whereas St. Pete has multiple troubled neighborhoods. We want to insulate our small town from it, but it doesn’t work that way. We drive behind the kid smoking crack on 22nd Avenue South. We buy our seafood from clerks who live with drug deals around the corner from their Child’s Park home. St. Petersburg’s road runoff slides into Clam Bayou; the children of the drug dealers share a classroom with our kindergarteners. We are not insulated.

We want everyone to think that we’re happy, that it’s all good, but in doing that we’re glossing over some big problems that aren’t going away. We can be as artsy and loving and creative as we want, but until we have a safe community - note that I didn’t say city- we’re going to be trying, on some level, to get back to that, but we’re not going to admit it.

Perhaps you can think of a time in your own relationship when something was bothering you, but you couldn’t admit it. Perhaps you felt as though it was a big deal, and if you admitted to it, it could jeopardize your relationship. So when your loved one asked, “What’s wrong?” you answered “Nothing.”

Except it wasn’t nothing. It was something, and it wouldn’t go away. You ignored it; it festered. Soon you found yourself picking, and turning every small thing into a big thing. That’s how I’m seeing our community operate right now- we’re picking at the little things because we’re afraid to address the real issue, the big one.

My marriage didn’t just end. It collapsed. Spectacularly. All those little cracks? They were trying to warn me that there was this gigantic fault line running under our core, but I was too busy convincing myself and the world around me that I was happy to pay attention.

Gulfport has cracks. And we keep covering them up instead of talking about them. It’s scary, I know. But we can’t keep ignoring them.

It’s time to start talking.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com, or become a fan of Cathy Salustri’s Hard Candy on Facebook.

PACE Ourselves

2011-01-20T08:01:00.000-05:00

For the past two week's I've interviewed city staff, councilmembers, residents and business owners about the PACE program. Vice-Mayor Michele King and others tout this as the program that will save 49th Street. She has bristled at the idea of delaying discussion of the project, lost her temper at council when other councilmembers wanted to workshop the program, and insinuated in a letter this paper printed that part of her rationale for choosing not to run again was tied to the idea that certain people in the city would oppose this program because of her ties to it.
  I don't know about any of that, but I do know one thing: PACE doesn't seem like it's going to to a lick of good for the city. I've looked at the program, its fans, and its critics. I applaud the vice-mayor's passion and her fervor to change 49th Street, but I think the largest issues along the 49th Street corridor have less to do with energy efficiency and more to do with crime. I understand that improving the building appearances is simply part of the larger picture and PACE isn't a solution but just one tool. And, from what I can see, if the other tools are all just like it, Gulfport's leaders are in major denial.
  PACE may help the Gulfport side. With loans. We've been told they'll be low interest, but I've yet to see that in writing. Am I the only one who realizes there's a little economic situation happening right now? High, low or no interest, the program still encourages people to borrow money. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the way Americans borrow money what caused an international economic crisis?
  Also, I'm not seeing many 49th Street business owners coming to city council meetings or asking for this program. Two. I've heard from two. I've heard from more residents and business owners who feel that safety - perceived or real - is an issue for them. I don't see how PACE will make anyone feel safer. I don't see how PACE will make St. Petersburg put extra patrol details on their side of 49th Street. I don't see how PACE will stop yesterday's crack babies from dealing today's drugs across the street from the coin laundry. And I don't see how council can, in good conscience, shift the burden of safety and community standards onto a third party program that will encourage people to go further into debt.
  49th Street will never change unless both cities- Gulfport and St. Petersburg- stop the crime. That's all you need to do, and the rest will work itself out, but it's the one thing council dances around, and, honestly, I think that's cowardly and apathetic. How can they do this? I have no idea, but I'll bet that the police have a few ideas. Has anyone even asked the officers who work the streets every day what they think would work?
  Before anyone jumps in and tells me that the 49th Street area of Gulfport has less crime than other areas of the city, let me say three things. First, I would remind you that only one side of 49th Street enjoys the protection of Gulfport police officers- the other side depends on the city of St. Petersburg for protection. Say what you will about our police force, but I've lived in both cities and Gulfport is the superior agency. Second, I would quote the former chief of police, Curt Willocks, who used to tell me, "Crime rate doesn't matter if you're the victim." I know from experience it is cold comfort to hear that crime is more rampant elsewhere. Third, the Gabber has offices on 49th Street, and we see outside our window, so I don't know where anyone gets the idea that it's mostly an image problem, but I don't buy Amway and I'm not buying that, either.
  The problem is a fundamental disconnect between what the council believes and what the rest of the city sees. Council members who don't live in Ward Four likely never see it at night or more than when they're passing through. I wonder how council would prioritize the issues surrounding the 49th Street corridor if city hall was on 49th Street. I'm just guessing here, but I'd wager that we'd see a program that involved more than telling already-successful business owners to take out loans to make their businesses look better to the rest of Gulfport.
  Maybe then they would see what I see when I go to the Gabber office or Sav-On seafood. Maybe they would even see some of what I glimpsed when I rode along with the Gulfport Police Department. Although Officer Pete Horning patrolled every area of the city when I rode with him, he stopped cars mainly in Ward Four only. I think that's pretty telling.
  Perhaps every member of council would be well-suited to do such a ridealong. Maybe that's the sort of thing that should be a requirement of the job. Former governor Bob Graham used to have work days, where he would spend a day working alongside various Floridians. It probably wouldn't hurt and might even help city council if they took the time to see the city from the bottom up instead of the top down.
  And, if they did, maybe they wouldn't be so quick to tell people to borrow money when they're not willing to commit the city's resources to the area themselves.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Sending a Bus to do a Minivan's Job

2011-01-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

Almost two weeks before Christmas a woman ran a red light and sheared off the front end of my Volkswagen. This, as you may imagine, was rather annoying. Even more annoying was her insurance company, AIG, who seems to simply delight in finding new and unusual ways to screw with Americans not only en masse but on a personal basis. To make a long story short, I had a rental car for three weeks while AIG and Bert Smith Collision debated over how to fix my car.

During that time I fantasized about getting rid of a car altogether and relying on my scooter, bicycle, and public transportation. I thought about the environmental bonuses, yes, but to be honest, I thought a lot about the money I would save. Despite my elaborate fantasies and plans the monies saved, I am back in my car with no plans to hang up the keys. Why? Because our county is simply not well-planned enough to make practical, regular use of buses. A person can't blame PSTA for that.

Especially not when there's so much else wrong with the local transit authority. PSTA recently raised their rates, and, while the buses - in my experience - run on time and are clean and comfortable, I can't help but wonder if anyone is using their head over there, because sending out a half-million dollar "smart bus" to haul seven people around seems to make the term Smart Bus somewhat ironic.

Now, we can't deny that a certain portion of the population depends on PSTA for transportation to work, school, and the market, so shutting down the service won't work. Besides, I applaud well-run public transit. Please note the use of the phrase "well-run." Also note that I do not, at any point, use that phrase in conjunction with PSTA. Why not? Because it appears that they're stuck in doing things the same way whether it works or not, and they're doing it on our tax dollar.

In Grand Cayman, they use minivans for public transportation. Now, granted, these vehicles don't have the stadium seating and color-coordinated interiors that PSTA can boast, but they're smaller, and, ostensibly, they work for the small island.

Why aren't we doing this here? Sure, some routes warrant big buses- the Suncoast Beach Trolley operates at capacity during the height of season, and the buses that chug along US19 seem to have their share of people, too. But I see plenty of buses that, while they provide crucial transportation to a number of people every day, don't need to be the size of a semi to get the job done. PSTA could use minivans for lower-capacity times and buses for peak periods, or simply add to the number of minivans on the road during peak times? How much could PSTA reduce its fuel and oil consumption and emissions by scaling down to an eight passenger van or shorter bus?

If they're not concerned about their carbon footprint (and it certainly seems they at the very least, pay attention, according to their press releases about their reduced emissions), how about the money? Let's peek at the numbers: almost 73% of the agency's $55 million budget comes from public funds like property taxes or state and federal grants. That's your money. Over half of it - $29.65 million - comes from Pinellas taxpayers. With less than 500,000 households in the county, that means each household contributes an average of over $70 every year to PSTA. That's more than the schools get, and that's not counting the money PSTA gets from grants or passengers. You know, the people actually using the service.

I'm not suggesting we cut off the funding, mainly because I know it will never happen. I would like to see people demand that PSTA use the public's money more wisely. PSTA has over 205 buses in service, and at half a million bucks a bus, that's over $100-million in buses. Really, PSTA? Is there no better way to do this?

Most of you, like me, probably like the idea of public transportation. I mean, as a state we've voted for high-speed rail more than once. We want to reduce our carbon footprint, and I know I'm not the only one who's ever had a car totaled and fantasized about taking the insurance money and putting it in the bank instead of buying, insuring and fueling another car.

But, half a million dollar buses when minivans would probably do? PSTA, you're making it harder and harder to get on that bus.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com or visit Cathy Salustri's Hard Candy Facebook page.

We've Got Spirit, Yes, We Do! We've Got Spirit... How 'Bout YOU?

2011-01-05T11:22:00.001-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

I'm a Tornado: I graduated from Clearwater High, class of '90. I wasn't a cheerleader, although I did letter on the Academic Team, which, as we all know, is practically the same thing.
Nevertheless, I attended football games. I loved yelling from the stands and cheering on the football players. I especially loved it when we would chant at the other team, "We've got spirit, yes we do... we've got spirit, how about YOU?" and the opposing team would chant it back at us.

Spirit's a funny word. I thought that meant a general feeling or undercurrent, but at the Gulfport council meeting Tuesday I realized that it actually means playing nice with the majority.

Councilman David Hastings suggested Al and Cindy Davis, who recently battled with the EPA over water quality issues, for the Spirit of Gulfport award. The Davis', with the help of their attorney, forced the EPA to admit that it hadn't been doing what it was supposed to in regards to water quality and agree to come up with a national plan to do so.

Yup, Al and Cindy Davis made a federal agency admit its negligence. I'm not sure I understand the ruling enough yet to debate its finer points, but it seems to me that getting the feds to admit a muck up is, at the very least, noteworthy. So did Councilmembers Hastings and Jennifer Salmon. Vice-Mayor Michele King, however, called the Davis' a "disruptive force" and Councilman Sam Henderson said he couldn't support the award, either. The mayor said he didn't want to bestow the award- which, as far as I can tell, is a Microsoft Word certificate in a cheap frame awarded without discretion or criteria - if there wasn't a consensus.

That disgusted me. Whether council likes it or not, The Davis' are some of the most involved members of our community. They pay attention, attend meetings, and speak their mind. They tried to donate an RV to the city. They rescue imperiled rabbits and find them homes. Whether you agree with their tactics or not, you can't deny that they're in the trenches. They visit local restaurants, spend time on the water, and own rental property.

I disagree with them about certain aspects of the Clam Bayou restoration, and I've said here I don't care for the way Mr. Davis speaks to council. Additionally, I don't think Mr. Davis likes me much - he waved me off after the meeting tonight- or believes this paper does an adequate job, but I cannot, in good conscience, discount his value as a Gulfportian because he doesn't like me.

Being on city council means being the bigger person and trying to work with all the people you represent, not just the ones who are nice to you. Is that fair? No. Who said it was supposed to be? If you don't like it, don't run, because despite what we would all like to believe about Gulfport, Al Davis isn't the only one who doesn't smile and make nice at city council. Other people get upset. Other people say mean things. Government meetings aren't intended to be a lovefest where we all hold hands in a circle and sing Kum Ba Yah; they're a place where citizens and government come together to work on issues.

I was a nerd in high school. The cheerleaders made fun of me and the jocks had no clue I existed. But at those football games, when we were all hooting and hollering for our team, we were united. Come Monday morning, yes, I'd be the geeky one on the Academic Team and they were the in crowd, but on Friday nights we were all on the same team. And, really, what good would high school - or anything- be if we were all the beautiful people? We would never learn to be any better than we already are.

Clearly the people offended by Mr. Davis' behavior don't remember their high school experiences, or they were the beautiful ones who never had any social unpleasantness. Not so for most of us, though. And what did we do? We learned to adapt. We tried to see the other person's point of view. We grew up understanding that it isn't personal when people aren't nice to us; it's more about their needs and frustrations than our inadequacies, real or perceived.

Like in high school, everyone in a community doesn't always get along. They can treat each other with indifference and sometimes cruelty. But they're all in it together.

I'm not defending the way people address council; it's no secret I think there needs to be more decorum in the meetings. I see Mr. Davis' bad side, yes. But a bad side doesn't make him a bad person. It makes him human. Emotional, passionate, occasionally ill-tempered, but human no different than any of us. A voting, tax paying, thinking, bunny-rescuing, human who disagrees but supports the city. He just doesn't always agree with the mainstream opinion. And he's a citizen who deserves a council that may not agree with him but understands he, too, is rooting for the same team. He's just doing it in his own way.

Which, actually, is what I thought Gulfport was all about.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com, or comment on this column on Cathy Salustri's Hard Candy Facebook page.

The Specials

2010-12-22T09:06:00.002-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

My mother and father don't put up a Christmas tree anymore. Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't. All three of us have December birthdays, and when I was little, the rule was that the tree didn't go up until after the last birthday.
I think this year I'll get a tree, just a small one. One that will fit the Specials. Most families have them: ornaments that have special meaning for us. Our Specials include one we bought on vacation in Rhode Island, a Dixie cup I covered in foil and shaped like a bell in kindergarten, and a laminated piece of newsprint announcing the purchase of my first home. We add to the Specials, but we never subtract.
One year, when we were new to Florida, my father found a rat in the toilet on Christmas Eve. My father, in the spirit of countless New Yorkers who had gone before him, attempted to handle the situation by cursing at the rat, who was, as I recall, nonplussed by the expletives. Next, my father tried to drown the rat (apparently, up north, rats can't swim), which only seemed to anger the rat. Finally, he maced the rat. That's not a typo. It's also not a valid way to kill a rat. If you want to piss it off, well, then, mace away. Finally, a Florida cracker who lived across the street came over and stepped on the rat. That's how you kill a rat. Of course, we had to spend the night at my grandmother's because, well, it was a small house and my dad used a lot of mace. I kind of wish we'd saved the empty Mace can as one of the Specials.
When we lived in New York, my dad made snowy bootprints through the house and left an open box of graham crackers on its side on the kitchen counter. My parents told me Santa liked the cookies I left, but Rudolph had wanted a snack, too. One of our specials, purchased right around that time, is a little pewter reindeer inside a bell.
My mom used to tell me that elves would go through my room while I was asleep and make sure I'd really kept it clean - they'd even check my desk and dresser drawers, under my bed, and in my closet, and if they discovered I'd just shoved stuff inside to make the room look neat, she said, Santa wouldn't leave me any presents. Guess what I've done for the past thirty-some-odd Christmas Eve's since she said that? Every year I look at the 1970s-era fabric elf with a plastic face ornament and get creeped out all over again, but still, he's one of my Specials.
In my family, my father's generation stopped drinking years ago, but if you think for one minute that took the hoo-ha out of the Christmas season, well, let me tell you that just isn't so. See, we're Italian: we don't need booze to get crazy. We're drunk on our own anger. Last year I made an off-the-cuff comment about my cookies not turning out right; joking that maybe my dead grandmother had cursed me. My father didn't speak to me for two weeks. But come Christmas, all was forgiven. I have a copy of my grandmother's biscotti recipe I'll laminate and add to the tree this year.
Christmas time makes me happy, but unwrapping the Specials every year, for some reason, makes me cry. I think it's because the Specials aren't just ornaments; they're loved ones and good times and crystallized moments I can never get back.
The Specials. Every year we added one. They're here in my apartment, waiting for my tree. I started to unwrap them the other night. I found a bluebird made of construction paper my mom made when she was little. I can't picture my mother as a child, but there's the proof, waiting for its rightful place on the tree.
Every Special is a scene from my life, frozen forever in that ornament. They make me happy and they make me sad, too. I'll never be a little girl, laughing at the mess Rudolph made in my kitchen. We have over half a million minutes every year, and not nearly enough of them are worthy of commemorating with a Special. Some moments, nicely put, suck. People die too soon, people we love leave, and life changes around you every second. But every so often, in the middle of the chaos and the ugly, something beautiful and wonderful swirls up out of it all, and it grabs hold of you and won't let go. Those are the Specials, and if you can gather enough of them to you, they can last all year.
Find your Specials. Hang them on your tree. Hold them to you for the whole year. And never, ever forget what makes them the Specials.
Merry Christmas.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Welcome to Paradise

2010-12-12T10:16:00.002-05:00

By Cathy Salustri
Welcome to Paradise. I'll be your tour guide today. As you drive onto our beach, we'd like to remind you that one street over from the empty buildings that used to be a hardware store and restaurant, we've got a delightful collection of shops. What? Oh, that's just Mermaids, a bikini bar. No, we don't allow nudity - we're a family beach, after all. Across the street? Um, well, that's an "adult novelty" shop. The locals just rave about the restaurant next door. Unfortunately, no, you can't park in the vacant lot on the other side. Check out the diner across the street- they make everything from scratch. What's that? No, actually, you can't park in the vacant lot next to the diner, either. But we've got trolleys that go up and down the beach. See, there's a stop over there. Behind the bus stop? It's a seafood restaurant and an ice cream parlor. No, they don't make change for the bus. No, I'm not exactly sure why the bus stop is right in front of their building. Yes, I realize it's hard to see that they're there at all. Fortunately, the city commission has relaxed its sign ordinance, so they - along with every other business - can put a big sign right out at the edge of the road so you know they're there. What's that now? Blight?
You know what, why don't we take you down to our world-famous beach? There's plenty of parking there, and plenty of white sand. Those are sea oats, a beach grass that prevents erosion. Their roots anchor the sand so it doesn't wash out to sea. Pardon me? Oh, those are tee groins, and they, too, keep the sand from eroding. Ugly? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When we first had them installed, they were covered with sand. What's that now? Oh. It eroded.
Let's forget the erosion and rent some scooters. No, past the vacant lot. There's a rental place just down the street; the owner's really made the building look great. What? No, there's no accident. The local power company's replacing some power poles, and they've got the street narrowed to one lane up ahead. Frustrating? Yes, well, I suppose, but it's good practice for when they finally bury the power lines next year. Why didn't they do that at the same time to save money and frustration, you say? Heh. Let's let the locals worry about that. You just enjoy your vacation, OK?
Let's take these scooters to the side street - isn't this better? Oh, watch the pot holes. Those scooter tires are tiny; you'll go right over if you don't watch yourself. These houses? Well, mostly rentals. They started as housing for families of people staying at the veteran's hospital that is now the - pardon me? No, I never noticed that. I suppose you're right- this street could use some attention, but, to be fair, most visitors don't travel this road much, so- What? Why does it look so run down? I guess it's because a lot of landlords don't live in the city, so they don't get a vote, and most of the tenants work at the hotels, restaurants and bars and don't have a chance to keep up with the meetings. Maybe they do kind of fall by the wayside when it comes to the city making improvements. But that's not important - how about some lunch?
That cafe up there? Actually, it's closed. The burger place next to it? It's closed, too. The pizza place? The pub? You're killing me here. No, not everything is closed. Right now's a hard time for local businesses. That's why it's so important people like you come and tell your friends back home what a vibrant beach community we are. Hey, what do you want to do after lunch?
You want to rent a boat? Well, we have a couple of places you can rent kayaks or get a boat tour. A marina? Well, no, we don't have a marina- yet. We're getting there, though. One commissioner asked for a study... what? The empty lot at the end of Corey? It probably would make a great marina, but the city doesn't own it. No, I don't know why the city doesn't make the owner clean up the graffiti.
Look, are you ever going to notice what a great beach community we have here, or are you just going to harp on all these little things? Everyone knows that the important thing is that we have a great beach. What? I resent you saying that. We absolutely do support our businesses, and we care about the residents. We have committees! We have a Sunday market, craft festivals, and concerts. We have a comprehensive plan, for heaven's sake. No, let's not talk about that- we've got a great little community here-
Who's that now? Gulfport? No, that's across the bay. Venice? Hilton Head? Look, people visiting this city don't care about all that- twinkling lights and design guidelines. They're not interested in character. They're interested in beaches and hotels. As long as we have a spit of sand and a place to sleep, people will come.
We've got bigger things to worry about here- we just lost a lawsuit, and we're trying to deal with some issues about our city's comprehensive plan. We don't have time to deal with- what's that?
The lawsuit? Oh, just some planning and zoning type of things. You wouldn't be interested. Now, about those beaches...
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Thanksgiving: That’s Not How We Do Things Down Here

2010-12-03T09:34:00.001-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

I am supposed to be putting a turkey in the oven, and I will, in a minute. It’s the day before Thanksgiving, but my family rarely eats turkey on Thanksgiving. Which is fine, because I don’t like turkey. I like the leftovers, in the middle of the night, with a cold glass of milk and the refrigerator door leaking yellow light into the kitchen. That’s when it’s good; that’s my real Thanksgiving. One year, during that brief period where I made turkey to make others happy, I sent my Thanksgiving guests home with leftovers and slices of bread. That way they could have turkey sandwiches. That’s why I’m making a turkey today: for those lovely sandwiches, with cornbread dressing, gravy, slabs of turkey, and some cranberries on each slice of bread.

So it’s fitting that this column comes the week after Thanksgiving, when the only turkey in sight comes on a sandwich.

You see, the way I see Thanksgiving is the way I see Florida: that’s not how we do it down here. You’ve heard that before, right? “That’s not how we do it up north!” is a popular refrain in our Florida bakeries, pizzerias and grocery stores. Bagels are better in Manhattan, and Chicago and New York both beat Florida hands down in the pizza arena. Wisconsin cheese reigns as the Dairy King, and everyone knows that Philly has better… well, apparently, everything. Some people might try to tell you we’ve got it wrong down here. No matter what “it” is, it’s not how they do things up north.

To these people, I say: damn straight. Things in the Sunshine State are different. And that’s what I’m thankful for, not just today, or tomorrow, but every day that I wake up in this amazing, messed up, hanging-chad, environmentally compromised, criminally creative, wonderful, backwards, glorious state.

I am thankful that we don’t have bagels the size of a dinner plate. I love that finding a pizza that’s any good is only slightly less difficult than finding the Holy Grail. I’m so happy that our cheese steaks and hard rolls don’t compare to what you had up north. Because that clears the way for Cuban bread (invented by Cubans in Tampa, thank you very much), Gulf shrimp, oysters (yeah, those are all us, too) and key lime and sour orange pies.

I love that I’m sweating in November and that it’s been warm enough that I’ve had my kayak out three times this week. I am glad that you can’t stand the heat, because that means that as crowded as Florida gets, you will never live here in July and that is when we get our state back.

I think it’s fantastic that we have the tension between developers and - well, just about everybody else. It means that we understand that we have something of value, a treasure in this state’s natural bounty that some of us are willing to fight for, no matter the cost. Maybe you don’t have that kind of nonsense up north, but you also don’t have white sand beaches, the Everglades, or a thousand other reasons to spend winters here instead of there.

No, that’s not how we do it down here. You have your pilgrims; we have our Spaniards. Your Thanksgiving celebrates the pilgrims and the Indians, but, as Florida historian Michael Gannon says, “At the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.” What’s that now? Yup, St. Augustine predates your northern society by over a century- 1513, to be exact. Turkey and squash? Yeah, that’s not how we do it down here. Our meals with the natives consisted of trout, sheepshead, oyster, heart of palm and shrimp.

We can’t claim Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but we have Ponce de Leon and Jaques LeMoyne. We have no Davey Crockett, but we have Totch Brown, Everglades pioneer and folk hero. We don’t have the founding fathers, but we do have founding mothers: the three Marjories- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Carr, and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. We don’t have Mount Rushmore, the Rockies, or the Appalachian Trail. We do have the Suwannee River, the Florida Keys, and the Everglades.

No, that’s not how you do things up north. You have Thanksgiving with winter coats and Indian corn. We have oyster dressing, cornbread, and, on occasion, deep-fried turkey. It’s Thanksgiving, Florida style, and it’s how we do things down here. Keep your cheese steaks. We can always visit.

Look, I know there’s a lot about Florida that’s messed up. I’m not blind. She’s got her problems - big ones - but I love her. I wouldn’t trade mosquitoes, tiny bagels, and crappy pizza for all the turkey dinners in the world. Because, to me, the way you do things up north is a fancy Thanksgiving dinner, and Florida?

She’s my turkey sandwich.

••
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

City of Bullies

2010-11-18T09:59:00.002-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

When I was in middle school, other girls and more than a few boys liked to make fun of me and intimidate me. I got beat up a few times. It’s not a shock, really: I, uh, developed early but remained physically awkward, preferred books to people, and really liked to write poetry. I think it’s safe to say I was never a threat to the class president or the prom queen. By the time I got to high school, I didn’t care, and in college, I realized that no one else did, either.

The word bully means “a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.” Interesting tidbit about the word bully: it originates from the Dutch “boel,” meaning lover or brother. In the 1530s it meant sweetheart. By the 1680s, a bully was worthy, jolly and admirable, which is where we got the 19th century expression “Bully for you!” Of course, that’s not how we use it today.

Bullies no longer bother me; I realized long ago that no one could make me do anything (my mom will vouch for that) I didn’t want to do. However, I can’t stand to see other people get bullied, whether the bullying is verbal, emotional or physical. And the city known for its sense of community is quickly becoming a bullyfest of epic proportions, at least at Gulfport city council meetings.

Oh, I’m not just talking about certain people who speak during public comment and make accusations about our council members. Perhaps following the lead of a few aggressive citizens who weren’t stopped when they got nasty, our council itself is starting to behave no better. At least two or three councilmembers are guilty of nastiness on occasion.

Worse than any of the ugliness, bullying, or slander we hear from either side of the dais at a council meeting, though, is the person who allows it to continue when it is within their power to stop it.

It pains me to say this, but the Mayor’s behavior over the past few council meetings and workshops is deplorable. He holds some people to their allotted time to speak but not others. He allows one councilperson to speak but cuts another off. Watching him over the past couple months, I get the impression he has some sort of specific problem with both Vice-Mayor King and citizen Al Davis, although not at the same time. He cuts off Ms. King but not other councilmembers, and any time anyone tries to applaud something Mr. Davis says, he says it hurts the clerk’s ears when she tries to transcribe the minutes. When the city gives an award, however, he allows the applause to continue, making me wonder what about the applause for Mr. Davis is so offensive.

He also seems unwilling to stop some people from hurling insults, even though the city attorney has repeatedly stressed that the mayor can remind speakers to refrain from personal attacks and address their remarks to council as a whole. That’s the mayor’s job. When Vice-Mayor King loses her cool or an audience member starts to accuse a councilmember of having an affair, the mayor should step in and stop it. It’s his job, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t believe that the mayor realizes how much he tends to play favorites in these meetings. Instead, I’m going to assume that he feels bullied by certain members of his city. I’m also going to choose to assume that the bullies simply behave that way because no one stops them.

I’m not one to believe the best of people- most people have black bits in their soul - but logic prevails here. Councilmembers and citizens who get socially aggressive simply can’t all be bullies at heart. Bullies are only bullies when people give in to them.

Gulfport is not a city of bullies. This city is filled with passionate, involved, thinking people. But the city needs a leader who will stop the nonsense, who isn’t afraid to shut it down when someone crosses the line, whether it’s someone speaking out of turn on the dais or a citizen making a personal attack on another. The mayor owes it to the city to put a stop to the yelling, the slander, the accusations, and the personal attacks on both sides of the dais. He owes it to the city do this every time, without favoritism. Until that happens, council meetings aren’t about what’s best for Gulfport. They’ll be about who can kick the most sand in the weak kid’s face after school.

Your city is counting on you to remind everyone that that kind of thing has no place in Gulfport, Mayor. It’s dark days ahead for the city if you can’t restore order to council meetings.

But if you can? Well, sir, bully for you.
••
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Veterans Day

2010-11-10T18:22:00.000-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

My grandfather fought in the second World War. He was a crew chief for the Army air force in the Pacific theatre; he flew the Burma hump. I saw him almost every day of my life, but I don’t think I ever thanked him for going to war.

Today is Veterans Day. It’s not a big holiday, as far as Hallmark holidays go. But of all the holidays we have in a given year, it’s probably the most important one to us as a country. Oh, Independence Day is a great day, yes, but that celebrates one day. Veterans Day honors all the men and women who have protected the United States every day since that day.

We have a way of cheapening holidays until their true meaning is so distilled that we don’t even understand it anymore; if you don’t believe me, take a look at the spectacular Christmas displays you see starting to pop up around town. Now look around and tell me how many have a baby Jesus anywhere in the scene. So, today, take a minute to think about what we’re honoring.

The things I am about to say next are, perhaps, unoriginal. That doesn’t make them untrue or unworthy of saying. To the contrary, I would argue that these words are worthy of repeating, if for no other reason to remind us.

Men and women who fight in wars see things the rest of us will only see on newsreels or in movies. They are called upon to do things most of us could never imagine so that the rest of us never have to imagine them. They leave their mothers, fathers, their wives, their husbands, and their children knowing they may never see them again. They do this so we can enjoy our families.

Today, there is no draft in the United States. The men and women fighting overseas are there somewhat willingly, but that doesn’t make it easy. Many of them probably never expected to see battle. I wonder how many of them thought about what it means to be a veteran before they shipped out.

I do not now and never have supported what our country is doing overseas, but that doesn’t matter and it isn’t the same thing as not supporting our troops. It is not a soldier’s job to think about whether or not they should be fighting; it is their job to fight. Say what you will about our “war on terror” but leave our enlisted men and women out of it. They didn’t make the decision to invade. They signed on to protect our country, plain and simple.

After my grandfather died, I met a group of ex-prisoners of war who met monthly, led by St. Pete Beach resident Homer Still. Each man in the group told stories of being captured at war and later liberated. Listening to them speak I first understood what it cost for people to guarantee my freedom. It was the first time I truly appreciated my grandfather’s sacrifice.

Today, seek out one of the men or women who served our country. It probably isn’t enough to say thank you, but, really, what else can you say? If you have time, ask them to tell you about their time in the service. We will never understand what they’ve been through, but we can appreciate it.

To those of you who served, there’s very little I can say, except to offer my gratitude for your willingness to do things I cannot understand to guarantee a way of life for people whom you do not know.

Thank you.
••
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Pregnant Pigs and Amendment Four

2010-10-20T17:12:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I understand if you’re less than thrilled about another amendment to our already-lengthy Florida constitution. Our state constitution- the fifth one we’ve had, by the way- has 27 amendments, one of which deals with the legalities of tethering pregnant pigs. I support pigs’ rights as much as the next person, but I don’t know that it’s the sort of thing that belongs in a constitution. Our national Constitution has amendments abolishing slavery and lowering the voting age to 18, but here in Florida? Well, we’re busy legislating the rights of pigs (again, not that pigs don’t have rights, too). No wonder other states just roll their eyes at us.
Pregnant pigs’ constitutional rights aside, many of those amendments belong in our constitution. Amendments passed with the intention of protecting the Everglades or keeping navigable waters in the hands of the state rather than individuals, for example, carry that weight.
I’m fairly certain Amendment Four does, too. If you’re not sure you understand the amendment- and how could you, with the stilted ballot language we use to punish those responsible enough to vote- you’re not alone. There’s a lot of - I think the technical term is crap- out there about the amendment. For example, if you’ve heard that your city won’t be able to create so much as a four-way stop without a countywide referendum, you’ve heard some of the crap.
Here’s all you need to know to understand Amendment Four: It says that before a local government can change its comprehensive land use plan or create a new one, the voters must agree to the change. So if a plan that says that beachfront property can only have single-family homes on it, the city can’t let Wal-Mart build there unless the majority of the voters agree to it. Currently, it only takes a majority vote of the city commission or town council.
Of course, opponents of Amendment Four say that voting for that sort of environmental nightmare would be political suicide, but take a look around the state: we’re a study in career politicians selling the state out from under us. Florida’s lack of an environmental conscience is legendary.
Consider this: our beaches are so built up that we spend billions of dollars “renourishing” them so that the hotels and a few select homeowners can have a wide expanse of sandy beach. Public dollars spent for the good of private industry whilst employing environmentally questionable practices? Welcome to the Sunshine State.
Drive the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades in March. You’ll see the north side rich and verdant and watery and the south side dying and dry. Why? Well, because we need the water for sugar cane and cattle ranching. Yeah, whatever, “the only one in the world” and all that, but what do panthers and a national treasure matter when we need to divert water to big business?
All that aside, the amendment’s detractors say voters simply don’t care enough to vote on every little change, that it will be too costly to maintain, and that it allows for developers to manipulate every vote. But what they fear is a loss of control, some because they think voters aren’t smart enough to make good decisions and others because, well, they don’t want to give up the control.
Now, no disrespect to the politicians who haven’t buried their consciences in their ass (they’re like unicorns; they do exist, but you really have to believe), but I think that it scares the hell out of Tallahassee to allow the common man a choice in whether or not we continue to sell the state to developers one natural treasure at a time.
If you still aren’t sure, look at where you see those “Vote No” signs. Every hotel along the beach has at least one. So does undeveloped acreage for sale. These are people who don’t want to have to get voter approval before they ask local governments to bend or break the rules for them.
The reality of Florida is this: politicians have bought and sold this state without batting an eye for almost 200 years, bulldozing beyond what infrastructure supports and creating every environmental problem we have along the way. The things that made this state worth calling home and visiting – the beaches, the water, and the wildlife – are threatened by our “sold to the highest bidder” mentality.
So when I hear that someone thinks Amendment Four is too drastic, I get that. But I also get that it’s no more drastic than the dredge and fill operations that destroyed Boca Ciega Bay in the 20th century. No more drastic than the sugar cane and ranching practices that reduced the Everglades from a sweeping swamp of biodiversity spanning from Orlando to Biscayne Bay to the comparative puddle that remains.
I love Florida, especially what’s left of it. I love the gritty fish camps in the state’s interior and the barrier islands that dot our coast. I love knowing there’s a saurian killer waiting for me in every river. I can’t bear to lose any more of the state to people who don’t care that they’re selling our legacy out from under us. They had their chance. They failed. It’s our turn now.
And that is why, despite the costs and inconveniences, I want to see Amendment Four pass. I think it belongs in our constitution just as much as those pregnant pigs.
Maybe even more.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Grandma Mary's Cake

2010-10-14T10:05:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I am not superstitious. Well, not a lot. I mean, black cats don’t bother me, but I tend to avoid cemeteries at night. I look for the logical in the unexplained, even if sometimes I hope not to find it.
My one area of illogicality is dead people. I don’t believe in poltergeists, and I’m not even sure I can say I believe in ghosts. But I do believe that, on some level, people don’t exactly leave earth when they die. I could get into the science of why I think that, or I could wax romantic about souls chained to one another, but I won’t, because I have a better way of explaining this to you: Grandma Mary’s cake.
My favorite thing about food is…well, OK, everything. But one thing I really enjoy is cooking, and baking in particular fascinates me. It’s the simple chemistry of baking I love: I know that, no matter what, the right proportions of water, egg and flour will make macaroni, but if I alter the proportions, use milk instead of water, and throw in a little baking powder, vanilla and sugar, I’ve got cake. It never fails.
At least, it never failed me until about a year ago when my grandmother died. Grandma Rae taught me how to make everything from roast duck to almond crescents. She had a recipe collection that surpassed the page count of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They’re good recipes, too: aside from her family, her recipes are her best legacy.
One of the first things she taught me how to make was her mother’s (Mary, my great-grandmother) cake. It was the go-to cake for birthdays in our family; it was probably the first cake I ever ate. As a teenager and adult I made it regularly. It was a little denser than most cakes, but still spongy and moist. If I do say so myself, it is a feat of cake engineering.
So it only stands to reason that when Leah had a Halloween party last year, I offered to bring Grandma Mary’s cake. My grandmother had died the month before and I thought it would make me feel closer to her. I made the cake, same as always, and brought it to Leah’s house.
It was the most disgusting, dry, heavy cake I’d ever tasted. I still apologize to Leah for gracing her dining room with this atrocity. But, as any cook will tell you, sometimes these things happen. Maybe I got the proportions wrong. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and I wondered if I’d gone off a recipe she’d written down after her mind started to get a little jiggly.
No problem. My dad’s birthday was just around the corner, and since it was his mother, I figured I’d make the cake and make him smile. I double-checked the recipe against the four other copies I had. I double-checked the ingredients as I measured them. I made the cake.
My mother took one bite of it and looked at me sadly.
“Honey, you’re a great cook, you are, but please don’t make that cake ever again,” was her Mom-of-the-year response (I’ve ordered her trophy) as she spit the cake into the garbage. The thing was fruitcake consistency, dry as limestone, and heavy as hell.
Now, this is where it started to get personal. I could do this; I could make a damn cake- especially one I’d made for almost 20 years. I tried to think of what I’d done differently. I asked my baking friends what they thought. Leah asked what was different from the last time I’d made the cake. I thought, then realized nothing. Well, other than my grandmother being alive every other time I’d made it.
But that was ridiculous. Christmastime came, and I was determined to get this right. I tested the baking powder, made sure I wasn’t beating the mix too long, and set my mind toward making the now-subtitled-I-May-Have-a-Breakdown-Over-Grandma-Mary’s-cake one more time. It had nothing to do, I told myself, with anything supernatural. Cake makery is just chemistry, simple chemistry. I aced chemistry in high school. Piece of cake.
I think we can all assume that had the cake turned out with anything other than me crying in frustration, it would not be the subject of this column.
Like I said, I’m not superstitious, and I’m not crazy. I don’t believe for one moment Grandma Rae’s watching over my shoulder, rubbing her hands together with evil intent and casting some beyond-the-veil cake spell on Grandma Mary’s cake. But I simply cannot explain why a perfectly good recipe has consistently failed me over the past year.
So here’s where you come in. I know there are bakers out there. The recipe’s below; tell me what I did wrong. Fix this cake for me, and I’ll bake you a batch of her almond crescents (those are still good; I’ve checked) come Thanksgiving.
And, hey, if you happen to see a handsome gray-haired Italian lady sitting in the corner of your kitchen, wearing a blue apron with red trim and clip-on earrings, tell her I’d trade the cake in a heartbeat to have her cook alongside me again, would you?
Grandma Mary’s Cake
3 c. Swan’s Down cake flour
4 t. baking powder
¾ t. salt
Sift the above ingredients together.
4 eggs, separated
¾ c. butter (1 ½ stick)
1 t. vanilla
2 c. sugar
¾ c. milk
Cream butter and sugar until creamy. Add egg yolks one at a time until well-blended.
Add the teaspoon of vanilla to the milk. Starting with flour, add vanilla and milk, alternating and ending with flour.
Beat egg whites until stiff peaks are formed. Fold into batter making sure no whites are shown.
Pour into waxed, lined 9” baking pans. Bake at 350º for 35 – 45 minutes. Test with toothpick; make sure it comes out clean. Cool about 10 minutes. Turn out on waxed paper.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

How Green Was My City?

2010-10-07T13:31:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I am so tired of lip service about the environment. If I hear one more person tell me Gulfport’s going green, I may slap them with their reusable bags and stuff them in a recycle bin.

Gulfport isn’t green, people. It isn’t even close. Oh, the city’s trying. But it’s overlooking some critical areas that could really use some attention. I applaud the city replacing light bulbs and putting more energy-efficient features in buildings, I do, but that’s just a slice of the pie when it comes to the environment.

Let’s start with grass. Ever ask yourself why so many city landscapes still feature grass as the prominent feature, especially since that grass takes chemicals, staff, and money to keep green? Ever wonder many households worth of taxes the city could use for other things instead if they ripped out the grass and put in ground cover that didn’t require so much money to keep up? Shouldn’t the city be doing that anyway, given the nitrogen issues surrounding fertilizer, the “green” stance at least three councilmembers advocate, and the decreased revenues from tax dollars?

Can anyone sufficiently explain why, when one councilmember is going to school for environmental studies, another one advocates green building regulations, and yet another has “green” landscaping days to show residents how to have environmentally-friendly landscapes, so much of city property is covered with beautiful green grass? Clam Bayou has grass surrounding its perimeter, and every time the city cuts it the clippings blow into the bayou. The marina is edged with grass; has anyone even questioned the result of chemically-treated grass clippings going into Boca Ciega Bay?

Here’s another thought: open the windows. Yes, I know it’s Florida. I know that from April through October this is not practical. But city hall windows don’t open. Yes, I know it’s more convenient to have the temperature regulated by an air conditioner. But wouldn’t a little fresh air be nice, too?

How about the cleaning staff? In all our talk about clean air and water, has anyone put into the cleaning staff’s contract that they should use the least corrosive chemicals to clean city buildings, or are they using hydrochloric acid toilet bowl cleaners to clean the bowls at night?

I’m wondering if anyone at city hall thinks about these things. I know that the city clerk has started encouraging downloading the council meeting agendas rather than printing them out (that’s how the Gabber accesses the agendas), and I know there’s been some talk of turning off computers at night. I think that’s great, I do. Of course, these moves also have solid fiscal gain for the city- less paper and less energy.

It’s not that the city’s doing a horrible job at going green; it’s that there seems to be a disconnect in common sense. We’ll change out all our light bulbs and worry about what type of roof to put on when that happens, but we don’t offer paperless billing for water bills. That’s how many thousands of envelopes and paper bills every month?

I realize it’s easy to get caught up in all the things the city could be doing, but it seems like unless a councilmember pushes for something, it doesn’t happen. There’s no independent thinking going on inside city hall. Now, I’m certain this only applies in this situation, but still- Public Works director Don Sopak had to tell each department to come up with ideas for conserving resources. With the rest of the world already looking for ways on its own, why did this even need to be a directive?

I don’t think that every “save the planet” idea is a good one or necessarily right for Gulfport, and I freely admit I’m rather pragmatic about my own environmental practices- I try to avoid driving wherever I can but come June my air conditioner goes on and stays on through August. But I don’t claim to be an environmentalist. The city’s certainly starting to pat themselves on the back for things they’re doing, and while it’s great, it isn’t enough. They’re where most of us were a long time ago. The IT director came up with a plan to turn off computers at night. Are you kidding me?

Rip out your pretty grass, city hall, and then we’ll talk.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Budget Time: Follow the (Real) Money

2010-09-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

It’s budget time in the city of Gulfport again, and I’d like to ask you a question:

How much do you care? I don’t mean about the Gulfport budget; Gulfport is one miniscule part of the budget puzzle, but it receives the lion’s share of the public’s attention. The folks who religiously attend council meetings are excellent motivators for not only city council but city staff to act responsibly; I wish they brought that passion to the county level.

Granted, the city is the most localized form of government and also the most accessible, so it makes sense that people focus on it. It’s much easier to walk over to city hall after a long day of work than it is to drive to Clearwater and sit through the bureaucratic nightmare that is the county commission or school board. But that’s what the county is counting on; county and state agencies get most of your money with none of the accountability.

You paid the county and state over $34 million in property taxes every year. That’s over three times the amount you paid the city of Gulfport. On every thousand dollars of your home’s taxable value, less than $4 went to Gulfport, while about $15 went to Pinellas county and state agencies.

While Gulfport residents paid the city 3.47 mils (or dollars per thousand of the property’s taxable value) last year, they paid Pinellas County 4.81, a citywide total of roughly $1.7 million.

That’s why I watch the city struggle with what will amount to a penny or two for each resident and wish that Gulfportians would march over to the county and demand the same accountability from them. Commissioners make over $90,000 every year, and while I understand they have hard jobs, I also understand that their combined salary totals over $630,000, which would be more than enough to add a few officers to Gulfport’s police force and keep GEMS going for a while. Imagine if Gulfport residents started making public records requests about how much money the county spent on consultants, or how much money the county spends on pens and giveaways.

The county isn’t the only one who deserves focus. Consider the Southwest Florida Water Management District, or Swiftmud. Not only do you pay taxes to the state-appointed board that oversees the entirety of southwest Florida’s water supplies, you pay a separate tax to its local board, the Pinellas-Anclote Basin Board. Last year, that was a combined total of 71 cents per thousand dollars of your home’s taxable value. Not a lot until you consider that, as a city, you’re paying them $1.6 million, more than Gulfport’s entire emergency services budget.

Don’t think much about the school board? You should; between state and local taxes, the schools get $8.39 for every thousand dollars of your home’s worth, over twice what you’re paying in city taxes. That’s right: Gulfport residents pay, in taxes, twice the city’s entire budget to the schools. That makes me feel a lot better about the pile of desks, chairs and tables the school board threw out when it re-did Boca Ciega High School. We’re really getting our $20 million dollars there.

Then there’s the Pinellas Planning Council, health department, EMS, and the Juvenile Welfare Board. Combined, they get about $1.45 of every thousand bucks your home is worth. Again, not a lot until you consider that it totals about $3.4 million dollars of Gulfport money, which is almost exactly what our police department needs to survive.

Why not show up and raise hell – politely, of course – at some of these other meetings? Here’s a place to start: the county’s cutting staff at an alarming rate, some of whom were weeks away from retirement, closing bathrooms at parks, and dismantling its Environmental Lands department. Why, then, does the county have a $2.2 million public relations budget? The county’s media relations and public outreach department has a larger budget that’s twice as big as Gulfport’s Fire and EMS budget.

I understand we’re one-tenth of the county’s population, but I still don’t think people quite understand how much of their money never gets back to Gulfport. How many of you attended a school board budget meeting and asked them to cut your taxes? Who of you spoke up at a Swiftmud budget meeting? Who here will attend the county budget meeting next week?

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion on how the city can cut taxes. But no one seems to get that Gulfport is a drop in your tax bill budget. I hear people at council saying they had a $20,000 tax bill and they want services. What they may not realize is that of that money, Gulfport gets not quite $4,000 and the county and other agencies get the rest. Do those men and women complain to the School Board? Do they e-mail their commission or demand a meeting?

It’s a different world up there. Commission Chairperson Karen Seel is no Mike Yakes. Your representative, Ken Welch, would never have spent two months on chickens. They’re big city up there, surrounded by old money and old buildings. They are insulated from the public, usually by nicely-appointed reception areas. And because of that, they get away with a lot. It’s harder to navigate their bureaucracy. We’re just a dot on their map, a city that has to send councilmembers and a city manager to fight for every dime it gets.

Pinellas County will have its final budget hearing at 6:30 Tuesday night. While the school board meetings have passed, it’s not too late for the county one. While only part of your $34 million goes to the county, it’s still a lot of money. Don’t you think you deserve something for it?

Get a copy of the county’s budget at PinellasCounty.org/budget. Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Originally published in print September 16, 2010

Exclusivity

2010-09-01T15:05:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

Gulfport’s getting a new gay bar and restaurant. Actually, the ads initially said we’re getting a gay nightclub and gay beach, before the web site changed last week. And from what I can tell, the club owner doesn’t get Gulfport at all.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, Gulfport has a thriving community, many members of which happen to be gay. One of the things I like about Gulfport is that being gay isn’t a big deal. If you’re gay, so what? Join the club. Or not. It’s no big deal to the rest of this small town. I always tell people that Gulfport is the one place in the world where everybody knows your business but nobody really cares.
Maybe a gay bar has its place in towns where gay people can’t walk down the street hand in hand, or where their rights aren’t protected by law. Maybe in those cities, gay people still need that place to gather and find community.
There was a time in history where gay people needed gay bars, because they could find family there. They could kiss their girlfriend or put their arm around their boyfriend without fear of getting beat up. I understand that gay people needed the community of a gay bar. I understand that in many places in America, they still do.
But in Gulfport? I mean, when you think about it, if you’re defining a gay bar as a place where gay people feel welcome and supported, the entire city’s really one big gay bar, at least in that respect. There is no place in this city where two women can’t hold hands without fear; the city passed a human rights ordinance to protect the rights of everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. I’ve heard a councilmember wonder if Gulfport could legalize gay marriage. Intolerance has no place in Gulfport.
So why do Gulfportians need a “gay” bar? It’s a slap in the face to the men and women who pride themselves on the community they already find in this small city. Every bar in Gulfport is a gay bar. Every bar in Gulfport is also a straight bar. I mean, it’s so cool: as a city, we’re past segregating “gay” and “straight” and we just chug along under a pleasant steam of acceptance.
But then here comes this gay bar, and I find its opening insulting. Its very presence insinuates that this community isn’t welcoming enough; it suggests that gay people need their own bar. I’m sure that makes Joe at O’Maddy’s and Tony at Peg’s feel real good. Because by one restaurant or bar downtown labeling itself as a “gay” bar, it kind of makes all the rest look like “straight” bars, doesn’t it? Why this “separate but equal” mentality in a town that’s already “together and equal?” Why this giant step backwards? In my mind, it’s not that different than a group of black people saying they want their own restaurants. Seems to me that does the opposite of advancing equal rights. And don’t tell me that straight people will be welcome there. We’re not going to insult each other by having that discussion, because that’s not the point and you and I both know it.
I have to admit, too, that the other clubs owned by these proprietors concern me. Not because they’re gay clubs but because they have amateur strip contests and sexy underwear contests. While I am a huge fan of naked men, I don’t think things like strip contests of any sort have a place in Gulfport’s downtown. I’m trying to picture that happening on the first Friday in December when the city sets up snow for the kids on the corner by this new bar and grill.
And when the complaints start rolling in- and trust me, they will- I don’t want to hear word one about Gulfport not being a gay-friendly town. We’re a gay-friendly town. We’re a straight-friendly town. We’re a family town, and in Gulfport, family means a group of people who love each other, be they gay, straight or in between.
It’s simple, really. Be gay. Be straight. Be whoever you want to be. What, you’re gay? Good for you. Don’t expect a fight from us. You want to fire up a Gulfportian? Let’s talk about dog beaches. Let’s talk about a mooring field, crime, or the chicken ordinance. But gay people? Honey, that’s old news. We got past that a long time ago in this town.

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Benefits

2010-08-19T08:52:00.003-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

It’s budget time again and local governments are trying to keep from raising taxes. Fine. Good. I understand that need, but it makes me cringe to see governments cut employee benefits.
You see, despite the widely publicized misconception that it’s a walk in the park to work for the government, municipal employees take a tremendous amount of crap and have relatively few benefits. Paid vacation and sick leave? Yes, they get that. Pensions? Maybe, if they contribute. Health insurance? Probably, but just for them, and it isn’t necessarily great coverage. Raises? Not recently. Tuition reimbursement? Don’t make me laugh.
Well, good, you might be saying to yourself right now. I haven’t gotten a raise in three years, so what’s the big deal?
Before I answer that, understand where I’m coming from. As a 1099 employee I buy my own health insurance, save for my own retirement, and pay both the employee and employer portions of my taxes. I have no sick leave, vacation time, pension plan, disability, or, really, job security. I get a paycheck from my clients, but I don’t get raises. So if anyone might feel like city employees have too many perks, it might be me. But I used to work for a local government, and trust me, those perks don’t make it worth while.
Private sector employees have the luxury of choosing their customers. Nowhere in city hall is there a sign that reads “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” although I’ve seen people treat city staff more hideously than they would ever dream of treating their dry cleaner.
Private sector employees can have a bad day and shoot off an e-mail they shouldn’t. Result? They may get disciplined or, in severe cases, fired. Government employees can do the same thing and end up on the front page of the paper.
As a government employee, anyone can find out how much money you make, and citizens will not hesitate to tell you, “I pay your salary. You have to do what I say.” Some taxpayers feel like it is their constitutional right to berate and belittle any government employee. These employees cannot send these people away; they must accept unkindness and outright mean-spiritedness from everyone who walks through their door.
Ask any government employee why they work for the government, and all but a select few will tell you “the benefits” or “job security.” They make less than their private sector counterparts, take more abuse, and are subject to a more public life. The notion that they have job security and can take their babies to the doctor without worrying about how to pay the bills makes these jobs more palatable. But come budget time some commissions- St. Pete Beach is a prime example- think nothing of slashing those benefits or reducing the workforce.
I hear people like St. Pete Beach Commissioner Bev Garnett say “they’re lucky to have a job”- as if that justifies chipping systematically away at the one thing that made them want to take the job instead of a more lucrative one elsewhere. That’s’ when I want to grab her by the ear and drag her into a city department. Let her do any one of city staff’s jobs for a few days, and then let’s hear how “lucky” they are after she’s led the charge calling for layoffs and benefit reductions.
This woman, by the way, is the same commissioner who did not hesitate to speak up for funding Beach Goes Pops, because that helps local businesses, but she’ll say the city should remove a $5,000 line item for tuition reimbursement because “they’re not our kids; we didn’t raise them.”
No, they aren’t, and she may have a point, but it’s weak. That workforce that you’ve reduced by 30% over the past year serves the residents that need city services. Businesses may see government as an interference to be dealt with, but homeowners see government as a necessity. Homeowners need services, like a sewer system that isn’t collapsing or roads not pockmarked with potholes. Yet the commission rushes to cut funding for the people and services that help residents but turns around and gives that money to business-related efforts. While I don’t dispute that a healthy economy is vital to a city’s well-being, just who the hell is this commission serving, anyway?
That staff that suffers while the city hands money over to promotional efforts while cutting their few paltry benefits? Well, they make sure residents have safe drinking water, handle the sewage leaving the homes, keep voters safe, and generally help ensure that the citizens of the beach have their basic needs met.
I’m not saying they’re perfect, and I’m not saying they don’t screw up. But they are the ones who do a million thankless jobs every year, often get yelled at in return, and sacrifice a normal job for the bizarre world of city hall.
For god’s sake, let them have their benefits. They’re devoting their lives to you; shouldn’t your commission at least make sure they can go to a doctor when they’re ill?

Fixing Things

2010-08-04T17:05:00.003-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

In his nonfiction book about endangered species, Last Chance to See, the British satirist Douglas Adams says that “human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
I went down to Clam Bayou the other day and looked around at the construction site. I saw a lot of earth-moving machines, litter, and a young black-crowned night heron. Right or wrong, the restoration is moving forward, hopefully in tandem with the heron and at odds with the litter.
I say right or wrong because I don’t know. Florida history is littered with environmental decisions that forever changed the state, and not necessarily for the better. I do not know that these decisions, like trying to straighten the Kissimmee River or drain the Everglades (we didn’t realize mosquitoes caused malaria; we thought swamps did and hey, we can sell that land if it’s dry, so let’s dredge the hell out of it!) were made with malice. Greed? Well, yes.
Humans screwed up Clam Bayou by dredging up a bunch of land so we could have houses in Gulfport, put a golf course right next to it, and allowed people to try and coexist with an estuary before anyone realized what a really, really ill-conceived idea that was.
And now we want to fix it. As a species, we’re not so good at that sort of thing. Look at any number of environmental projects in this lovely limestone state. Oh, we’re fantastically gifted at mucking up the environment, but the fixing? That’s kind of hit-and-miss for us humans.
I’m not concerned that we’re going to muck up the bayou forever. Eventually all systems right themselves; the earth possesses an amazing capacity to pull itself back into balance. Don’t believe me? Pay attention after the next hurricane, because that’s a classic example.
It’d be nice to see it recover in our lifetime, which probably won’t happen without an assist. It’d also be grand to see the stormwater diverted before it goes into the last remaining bit of estuary on Boca Ciega Bay, but that’s not going to happen. Instead we’re digging a deep pond- deeper than anything in Boca Ciega Bay, by the way- and hope it sorts itself out.
No, I’m scared it isn’t a good idea for other reasons. DDT in the soil from years ago? Dredging it up puts it back into the water and the food supply; that can’t be good for the osprey that fish Clam Bayou. Huge ponds deeper than anything that was there before? Is there a reason they weren’t there before? The arrogance of doing what nature never would have begs for failure and in Florida, ecosystems aren’t small-time. When we fail the environment, we do it in style. People across the world study our environmental failures.
I think the scientists suggested what they believed best for the bayou, but that’s the problem. We’ve created a whole new set of problems and this business of fixing isn’t as much of a science as we’d like to think.
I don’t have answers. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know what to do with all the junk that flows into Clam Bayou. I realize we’re not all going to move away, and I know that this is all part of the process of learning to coexist with nature, but I wonder if we know what we’re doing by creating things that have never existed in that area. How do you un-dig a pond that’s 30 feet deep? How do you get rid of toxins that you’ve unburied?
Scientists make the best decisions they can with the information they have. But what if the scientists are wrong? What will happen when they have to tell the water management district's governing board- comprised of people dedicated to selling the state rather than preserving it- that things didn’t exactly pan out? What decision will that board make?
Half of the Pinellas-Anclote Basin Board members make their living from development. Not one scientist sits on the board. The larger governing board has realtors, ranchers, and farmers on it. As much as I want to believe that the scientists are doing what they think is best, every time I think about those boards, I start to feel a little queasy.
When will we learn that leaving the fate of our world in the hands of developers is just plain stupid? How can they possibly have the best interests of the estuary at heart when they, as individuals, make their livings by buying and selling land and creating huge buildings up and down the Pinellas coastline?
Do you really want the man who designed the Aqualea on Clearwater Beach deciding the fate of Clam Bayou? Do you want cattle ranchers and citrus farmers deciding what’s an acceptable way to keep nitrogen, an essential element in fertilizer, out of Boca Ciega Bay? Do you honestly believe the president of a construction company should have the right to tell scientists how to rebuild an estuary?
Look, if the restoration works, I’ll be thrilled. Believe it or not, I want it to work. I can’t wait to kayak Clam Bayou once the work finishes. Short of ripping out the golf course and stopping cars from driving on local roads, I guess a redesign is as good a choice as any.
Unless it turns out they shouldn’t have tried to redesign it at all. What if things get worse, not better?
What if they’re wrong?
Do you trust the developers with the fate of our bay?

Of Dogs and Beaches

2010-07-07T18:32:00.001-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

The city is entertaining establishing a dog beach, and, for a city that certainly has its share of four-footed residents, the anti-dog-beach outcry on the paper's Facebook page shocked me. Of course, "outcry" might be too strong a word, as only two people have commented at all, but what amazes me is that no pro-doggie beach people have jumped in to defend the honor of dogs and dog owners everywhere. I know, too, that opinions on Facebook certainly don't represent the real world (for those of you somewhat addicted to social networking sites, the "real" world is what's outside your window. No, your other window.)
Those who oppose a dog beach say that the dog poop will contaminate Boca Ciega Bay. Since I work Calypso into this column more regularly than BP comes up with useless solutions to the Gulf oil disaster, I think we all know what side of the fence I'm about to come down. Yup, you guessed it: Gulfport should create a full-time dog beach.
Those of us who live with dogs can tell you how very much it means to them to be able to run down a beach and splash in the water. These aren't creatures with long life spans by human standards, and that hour of joy they'll get from digging in the sand or splashing in the surf means more to them than non-dog lovers could possibly imagine. It's not as though they have other outlets like bowling or going out for tapas with friends. Let's not forget the benefits of dogs who interact regularly with other dogs: they how to behave around other dogs, making them less aggressive members of society. Couple that with a dog's need for exercise and running up and down the beach with fellow pups makes more sense than ever. And don't say they can get that in a dog park; it isn't the same.
I had the pleasure of spending 12 years of my life with a cranky, neurotic, overprotective, wonderful Dalmatian named Madison. She went through a nasty divorce with me and never really recovered: she was mighty protective, got nervous in dog parks and didn't much care for other dogs, but get her to a stretch of beach and she was a puppy again. She was a great friend to me and the best reward I could give her was some time at the beach. When we got in the car and headed to Fort DeSoto, she knew. Once we got over the bridge on the Bayway, she'd start to whine in anticipation. She'd run up and down the beach, blowing bubbles when she stuck her snout in the sand and then chasing those same bubbles, which created more bubbles... it could go on for hours. I had to put sunscreen on her snout and behind her ears, because she'd get sunburned.
My best memories of Madison were at Fort DeSoto, and my best memories of Calypso are on the water as well. I understand and accept that unscooped dog leavings contribute to fecal coliform contamination in waterways. But anyone who thinks that a dog beach will create more unchecked dog poop either doesn't have a dog themselves or doesn't visit dog beaches much. Dog owners at Fort DeSoto are much more effective at policing the poop than any law enforcement officer could ever hope to be. I've seen things get ugly at dog beaches when someone didn't pick up after their pet, and the humiliation I've seen fellow dog owners put others through for not scooping encourages me to always- ALWAYS- have extra bags on hand when I'm at the Fort DeSoto Paws Playground. I am so downright thrilled to have a dog beach that I refuse to do anything to risk having it taken away.
When I hear talk about creating a dog beach, I think about Madison. She loved the beach. On the last day of her life, she couldn't walk anymore, but I lifted her into the back of my Rabbit and drove her down to Fort DeSoto. I inflated a raft and sat in the water with her for quite a while, letting her float. Her nose quivered at the scent of the salt air, but that was all. After about an hour, I dried her off, put her back in the car, and together we drove to the veterinarian one last time.
I still have the collar she wore that day, and if I try real hard, I can still smell the beach on it. I wouldn't trade that last hour or two for anything except to have her back with me.
So, to those naysayers, I ask you for this: please let us have a small stretch of beach for moments like that. They mean so much to us and everything to our dogs. I understand your concerns and am not discounting them, but I will tell you that I, as a dog owner, wouldn't risk not being able to give my dog those moments of pure joy by leaving waste on the beach.
Let's compromise: let's see how it goes for three months, then decide. On behalf of Madison, Calypso, and every dog that's ever yelped with puppy-like abandon when the sand comes into view, please let us have this.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Carbon Footprint

2010-07-04T12:07:00.004-04:00

This is not my regular column.

In relation to the column I wrote last week, one of my readers let me know there was a very active discussion on Facebook about me and my carbon footprint. He contacted me and asked about my carbon footprint. Here is my response to him, and anyone else who wants to know if I'm a hypocrite.

Whenever practical and safe, I drive a scooter that gets roughly 122 miles per gallon. I have a mid-size car that I try to drive no more than two days a week and for longer trips only. I have compact fluorescent bulbs in my home anywhere I can put them. I attempt to buy things that are grown locally whenever possible, although I struggle with spinach and berries, two of my favorite foods.

I do not recycle because I believe it is a net loss for the environment in terms of energy used, but I am fortunate to live in Pinellas County, where the majority of all trash collected goes to the county's waste-to-energy facility (WTE), where it is incinerated (emitting less toxins than the cumulative emissions of all the wood-burning fireplaces in the county) and converted to energy, which the county then sells back to Progress Energy, replacing "dirty" energy with "clean" for at least 110,000 homes and the facility itself. I know all this because I spent five years working as a public relations specialist with the county's utility and I researched the facility for articles I wrote for industry publications, point being there that I know enough to say I researched my choice not to recycle.

My carbon footprint is below that of the average American, according to the Nature Conservancy's highly generalized quiz. Here's how I stack up:

"Your estimated greenhouse gas emissions are 15 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent per year, which is below the U.S. national average."

According to this site, the U.S. National Average is 27 tons, so I felt pretty good about that until I saw that the world average was only 5.5.

I do believe the test has some flaws; the largest one being that it doesn't account for locavorism, solar energy, or community and private gardens. Also, it doesn't seem to account for WTE technology as many communities still use landfills, which may make recycling a better choice for them, but not necessarily for us. Also, I re-took the test and entered the best possible answer for every option (it shows you the impact of each choice as you make it) and the lowest footprint anyone can get (a vegetarian who eats only organic food and has no car, doesn't fly anywhere ever, and unplugs everything unless it's in use) is 7.3.

Am I a hypocrite? I have no idea how to measure that. I never said I was better than anyone I wrote about in that column, so I'm not entirely certain why anyone's using that term at all. I'm clearly not perfect, but then, how boring would that be?

Hands Across a Sham

2010-06-30T22:17:00.002-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I know, I know. I can hear it as I type these words: how dare I call last Saturday’s event a sham. Those who attended will tell you it was a beautiful demonstration of … well, something. I’m not sure what. I know that everyone there seemed pretty passionate about stopping drilling off Florida’s coast. And, hey, I’m all for that. Let’s stop it right now. But the reality is, there’s too much hypocrisy surrounding even events like these for that to happen.
Look, I applaud passion; I am passion’s biggest fan. And I’m not trying to belittle your grand gesture Saturday, but I do hope you understand that Saturday’s event was only that: a gesture.
People drove to the event. The event organizers handed out plastic bottles of water. Someone hired a banner plane to fly up and down the beaches, towing an anti-offshore-drilling banner. All these things require oil by the truckload, which, funny enough, needs oil to ship the oil. As far as I can tell, BP and other oil companies directly benefited financially from this international event.
Let’s put it into one of those math problems we all hated in junior high: If 12,000 Floridians drove an average of two miles to participate in Hands Across the Sand, and each protestor consumed one bottle of water during the event, how many gallons of oil would BP have to pump out of the Gulf to power the protestors’ cars and produce the plastic water bottles?
Don’t bother doing the math.
I wouldn’t have a problem with this if the protest stopped the practice, but I think we’ve gotten confused somewhere along the way. Government can’t even stop tobacco farmers from growing tobacco, and far fewer Americans smoke than drive. What on earth makes you think the government is going to stop oil exploration? There’s too much money changing hands; couple that with the potential for lawsuits for lost revenue and you and I both know that the federal and state governments aren’t about to staunch the flow.
I know my attitude might upset you. Politicians promised us, you may start to say, but before you finish that sentence, stop. Oh, sure, Saturday saw plenty of political posturing and promises. What a down-home opportunity for grandstanding. I believe our city officials when they say they won’t vote for drilling; I even might believe county commissioners. Here’s the thing, though: all the people who spoke to our city Saturday? The school board candidates, county commissioner Barbara Sheen Todd, Gulfport’s own very fine mayor Mike Yakes? They don’t actually get to vote on oil exploration. So, you know, good for them for taking a stand, but it won’t stop the oil from suffocating Apalachicola oysters or painting its carbon footprint over anhinga, dolphin, and mackerel. It won’t keep the panhandle fishermen in business, and it won’t wash the beaches clean.
Right about now I’m sure most of you are calling me a hopeless misanthrope, a hateful cynic who lacks compassion for the human condition. I beg to differ. I used to be like you, ready to march on Washington, sign a petition protesting genetic research on mollusks, or stage a sit-in for dolphin-safe energy. But somewhere along the way I started seeing all these causes as what they were: shams that detracted from the business of, as so many people like to call it, “saving” the planet.
BP acts in the best interest of its bottom line. I won’t address criminal concerns or whether it was morally or ethically right for them to do what they did, because that- unfortunately- doesn’t matter. What matters is economics: supply and demand and profit and loss. The minute oil production becomes something that doesn’t bring a profit, I promise you BP- and every other oil company- will stop drilling. No government agency will revoke permits, no groups will circulate a petition, and no protests occur: they will just pull up stakes and go home. Take away the profit and you take away the problem.
If you want to hit BP where it hurts, don’t bother holding hands on the beach. They’ll just scoff at our ineffective methods as we fuel our cars before heading out to the beach. Instead, stop using their product.
Is it possible? Yes, but not practical. Strive instead to reduce consumption. Eat local. Think about how things are made. Of course, there’s the biggie: drive less. And don’t kid yourself with an electric car: where do you think electricity comes from? Progress Energy has three coal and oil plants in Florida: Crystal River, Anclote, and Suwanee.
So try carpooling, or bicycling, or trading in that SUV for a snappy little Miata. Many scooters get well over 100 miles per gallon. Buy locally grown food, and stop drinking water sold in those convenient little plastic bottles.
Overwhelming, isn’t it? It takes much less work to attend the occasional protest or sign a petition. But you won’t change a damn thing that way. If you want to change things, really change things, forget about government. They won’t help you. Administrations change, and policies shift with the tides. Government should keep us safe from crime, provide strong schools and protect us from foreign invasions. Despite what we’d like to think, our Constitution has no verbiage about marine ecosystems or environmental high grounds. That part’s up to us, and we can’t have it both ways.
Instead, put your money where your heart is. Change the world? Not likely, despite what we’d so dearly love to believe. Change your carbon footprint? That’s the first step. You can’t drive your Ford Explorer to the oil protest and think you’re making a difference, and you can’t enjoy French wine, German cheese, and Iowa steaks and think that your signature on a petition matters.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com. Find more details about determining your carbon footprint at Nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator, or click the link on The Gabber Newspaper’s Facebook Page.

Hard Candy Nominated for 2010 Florida Progressive Coalition Netroots Award

2010-06-28T08:28:00.005-04:00

The Florida Progressive Coalition Blog has opened voting for the 2010 Florida Netroots Awards, and I have been nominated for Best New Blogger. Of all the nominees, this blog is the only one associated with a small paper - the rest are either paid political strategists or part of a larger press.

If you care to vote for this blog, you can do so here. If not, well, that's OK, too. The important thing- the really important thing- is that you're reading and thinking, even when we disagree. Especially when we disagree.

Thanks for reading and responding to this column and blog!
- Cathy Salustri

Hard Candy: The Dogs of Clam Bayou

2010-06-17T18:22:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy: The Dogs of Clam Bayou

The Dogs of Clam Bayou

2010-06-16T18:01:00.001-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

“Come down to Clam Bayou,” Kayak Kurt said, and I groaned. What now? A protest against the restoration? A protest favoring the restoration? A councilperson kayaking at low tide? Did the police find a body under the mud? With my morning coffee as of yet unfinished, I lacked the strength for another Clam Bayou story.
As Kurt spoke, I reconsidered. Animal Services was en route to collect a wild dog trapped in a humane cage. Trapping a wild dog’s good, right?
When I arrived at the Bayou, the Animal Services officer explained the difference between wild (like wolves) and feral (like these dogs.) The dogs of Clam Bayou started their lives as cuddly little fluffballs in somebody’s home, but once they got too large or too much to handle, their owners found them guilty of “not cute enough anymore” and left the pups to fend for themselves, either abandoning them at Clam Bayou or abandoning them, period. Somehow, these not-cute-enough almost-grown dogs found each other and banded together and formed a pack to survive.
While the city’s enjoyed its share of debate about Clam Bayou’s mud, no one’s found Alpo in the tidal flats yet, so the pack must hunt for food. The dogs of Clam Bayou subsist on marsh hare, baby birds, and other wildlife.
People can’t approach these dogs, and the dogs of Clam Bayou will defend the pack, which rumor now says includes puppies, if they feel threatened.
As I write this, Calypso is curled up on the chair next to me, her cold leathery nose huffing dachshund breath on my knee. She just turned three, and on her birthday she had a steak and a bone and some ice cream. Her biggest worry is conning me out of part of my dinner.
Those dogs in Clam Bayou? They want the same things as Calypso: a warm bed, protection from predators, and some of whatever the rest of their pack is eating. The difference that Calypso sleeps on a Tempurpedic mattress dressed in 600-thread count sheets and they sleep in a den of dead leaves and sandspurs in a park that the city closes early because of drug deals and “romantic” interludes.
Calypso’s best friend is Scuppers, a Maine Coon who dwarfs her with his fur. When Calypso and I go for a walk, Scuppers waits in the window and cries for her. When he hears my key in the lock, he runs to the door and brushes up against Calypso, which, as we all know, is cat for “you belong to me.”
When people found the trapped dog Monday morning, another feral dog outside the cage wouldn’t leave her side. Even after Animal Services got the trapped dog in the van, this dog lingered.
Calypso eats fresh meat every morning; the dogs of Clam Bayou subsist on whatever they can catch without getting caught themselves. Calypso is protected by humans and she charms those she meets by fluttering her tiny eyelashes, cocking her ridiculously furry ears, and rolling over on her back and pawing at the air. The world, to Calypso, is just one great big adventure.
The dogs of Clam Bayou rely on each other. The rest of the world has not treated them well. The people who enforce laws to protect Calypso and us humans will also be the ones to kill the dogs of Clam Bayou if they trap them. The dogs of Clam Bayou view the world as a mean, scary, and dangerous place.
I can imagine what happened: the female, hungry, possibly from nursing, wandered into the trap for the food and got caught. Her pack mate probably tried to find a way to tunnel under the cage or get her out, and when he could not, he waited by her side, even as the sun rose and every instinct he had told him to hide himself. Even as humans showed up, he waited. Only when they approached did he retreat and watch from a distance as the officer dragged his packmate to the back of the van.
This captured dog will never roll over on her back to paw at the air to impress a human with her powers of cute. She will not lick a face, not without a lot of patience and love. With so many strays waiting for homes, no agency has space or staff to work with these “unadoptable” dogs. Their loyalty to one another means nothing; that humans created this situation is insignificant. These dogs will die five days after they wander into a trap needing food.
I don’t advocate allowing the dogs of Clam Bayou to remain in the park, but every time I close my eyes, I picture that dog, waiting by his trapped companion. I see him staring at the Animal Services van as I speak with the officer. And I may have imagined it, but somewhere in his dark, sad eyes, I saw a little bit of Calypso in there.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com.

Teachers

2010-05-20T08:39:00.000-04:00

As the school year winds down to a close, I anticipate the onslaught of summer break-- some things eagerly, like the lack of 217 individual school zones along 49th Street, each timed to make the 15 minute trip to the Gabber offices last roughly two and a half days, and others not-so-eagerly, like public pools filled with children who smell like wet puppies, minus the cuteness and any sort of ability to behave. I look forward to the hottest days of the year, summer fireworks, and late sunsets. I view, with eager anticipation, my cousin Michele's annual visit, which invariably involved a close examination of beach bars and swimsuit shops from Clearwater Beach south to Pass-a-Grille.
Michele teaches music in New York, and she shows up every summer looking remarkably pale, seeking sun and something cute to wear under it. Her trips offer me an excuse to act like a tourist: we go looking for dolphin, on deck boats, sailboats, and speedboats. We sample every restaurant that catches our eye, and doesn't matter if it's a tourist trap (say, Shepherd's in Clearwater Beach) or a superb locals spot (think the Sandbar on St. Pete Beach). Of course, I can do any of these things any time I'd like, but she can't. While I typing on this column, sitting in a swimsuit and trying to hurry so I can take Calypso for her mid-day walk along on the beach, Michele has to shape young minds. That much time around kids makes me shudder, but she loves it. Of course, she doesn't get much time for herself, so the least I can do for her when she visits is buy her a burger at a beach bar.
Michele loves teaching. She buys supplies with her own money and spends hours of her own time working on her lessons and (she teaches music) concerts. I wonder how many kids appreciate her effort. How many of her students will one day say, "Remember Ms. Salustri? I loved her class; it made me want to sing all the time." I had a few teachers like that.
Marie Grein taught 5th-grade math, and while nice, she let nothing slide. Aside from certain educational building blocks, she taught us about consequences. She told one of my classmates she wouldn't give her permission to go to a skating party because she performed poorly on a test. Shouldn't she study, instead?
Her counterpart, Ernest Johnson, held us to the same standards. He taught language arts, and this included book reports, research papers, and 50 vocabulary words a week. We had to define each word, identify its part of speech, write it out five times, and use it in a sentence. I had my first vestiges of anxiety in Mr. Johnson's class, but I learned a crapload of words. Crapload, I should note, was not one of them.
Sporadic exposure to a teacher can mold students, too: I decided to be a writer because the elementary school librarian told my class she thought I would. I doubt Ms. Penny Lawrence remembers that comment, but I remember thinking, "Hey, I'll try that!" and, well, it stuck. Feel free to send any complaints about this column to her, care of Belleair Elementary.
Dave Byers and Gus Haynes, a middle school social studies teacher and a high school history teacher, respectively, showed me how to appreciate history. Mr. Byers led our classes in campaign songs from Herbert Hoover's election and war songs from the wars (He once led the entire school in a rousing chorus of "Over There" in assembly.) Mr. Haynes became "Gus" after I passed the Advanced Placement exam and received college credit for his course. Gus taught us how to think about history, and he taught us that sometimes you had to read between the lines of history books.
Of course, not every teacher leaves a positive mark . My sophomore year English teacher, a colleague later joked, scarred me for life. Mrs. Parker did not much care for passive voice, and strictly prohibited the use of "to be" and other helping verbs. Any composition that used any of the following verbs failed instantly: be, being, been, is, am, are, was, were, has, have, and had. Even today, if I use one of these verbs, it hurts. Mrs. Parker and I did not see eye to eye on the craft of writing; she told me I wrote poorly. It gives me great comfort to know that she WAS wrong, although her traumatic grammar lesson made me a better writer.
English class improved with Frank Black, the Unofficial World's Best English Teacher. He taught me how to structure a thesis and topic sentence and taught me more about professional writing than anyone else until my senior year of college. I could not feed myself as a writer without his expertise.
One last teacher made a stirringly profound impact on me: Dr. Jerry Smith, who taught a college class called "Identifying Florida Biota." I took it to get out of dissecting things, but I left his class with an enduring appreciation for the the Sunshine State. Dr. Smith, a biologist who also taught, had real-world experience in Florida, and every class involved a field trip. Along with the rest of our class, I made my first pilgrimage to the Florida Keys with Dr. Smith. In this class I learned how, despite of or in spite of civilization, Florida's muggy wildness exists in tandem with people, sometimes as close as the overgrown lot next to the Wendy's. I became a writer because of my grade school librarian; I became a Florida writer in love with the state because of Dr. Smith.
These men and women shaped my life as much as my parents. They did so for remarkably little money, and they certainly did so by giving of themselves relentlessly to students who, myself included, did not (at least at the time) appreciate or understand their efforts. It will not try to contact them each and thank them; I am one student of thousands. They do not remember me, and that's OK. I can pay it forward in my own way, however minute, and honor them every summer when I buy my cousin a burger as I show her the life teachers like her gave me under the hot Florida sun.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com. Comment on this article on the Hard Candy blog, accessible through TheGabber.com, the Gabber Newspaper's Facebook page, or at HardCandyOnline.Blogspot.com.

Going to Church

2010-05-13T07:59:00.000-04:00

By Cathy Salustri

I am not religious in the conventional sense. I was raised Catholic but it didn’t take. I was always looking above the altar at the statue of Jesus on the cross, wondering what was under his loin cloth, comparing his outfit to Tarzan’s, and feeling a general sense of unease about praying to a tableau that looked like something out of a Wes Craven movie. To make matters worse, I married a protestant. Of course, I later divorced him, so I’m not sure if I go to hell twice or if the second sin cancels out the first. In all, I found Catholicism not to my liking.
If someone tried to label my beliefs, they might say I endorse ideology that’s part pantheism (the idea that you can find god in nature) and part Buddhism (I think Nirvana is a nifty idea). It’s much easier for me to find proof of a higher power while I’m paddling my kayak through a mangrove tunnel than it is in a climate controlled building where everyone’s dressed up to impress each other, and I get a glimpse of nirvana every time the sun sets. There is no hypocrisy in nature; it transcends humanity.
When I start to lose my way, I find my way down to the water. The smell of the beach at low tide brings me peace. When the things that fill my days threaten to overwhelm me, I sit by the sand dunes and watch the sun go down. It reminds me that there are grander notions in the world than my set of problems.
If I believed in church, Fort DeSoto would be mine. A walk on the east beach clears my head; hiking the trails north of the Arrowhead picnic area refreshes my soul. It is the place where I go to, as Buffett said, to count all my blessings and remember my dreams. I’ve walked countless miles on its beaches, mending a broken heart or meditating on a life change. I brought my Dalmatian, Madison, there on the last day of her life and held her in the water. We went there so many days of her life it seemed the best place to say goodbye.
These are all reasons I wholeheartedly applaud the idea of charging admission to the park. The Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners considered it last year, but ultimately discarded the idea. Commissioners say it’s a budgetary issue. I don’t know; I haven’t looked at the budget. I favor it because I think it would keep some of the idiots at bay.
I love Fort DeSoto on Tuesday mornings the most. Nobody’s there. The beaches are clean and the wind is the loudest thing I hear. The hush over the park is not unlike the quiet I remember from church as a little girl.
Still, there are four times a year when Fort DeSoto is off limits for me: weekends, Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. I went down there once after Memorial Day and I wept at what I saw: crows picking through garbage on the beach, plastic bags blowing into the water, and starfish and crabs brought up on shore and left to die. Partiers broke into my church, peed on the altar, and covered stained glass windows with graffiti.
On these days it’s a different park entirely. To follow through with the church-type sentiments, it’s a den of iniquity, a boozefest with sand. No one there has any respect for the sanctum of the park. Loud music drowns out the sound of black snakes over the leaves or the swish of an owl’s wings at twilight. You can barely see the grass for the trash around the picnic areas; dirty diapers and empty beer cans litter the park and beaches.
The park staff does an amazing job cleaning up, but when some people don’t even attempt to put their trash in the garbage, they’ve got an insurmountable task. After the weekend warriors climb into their RVs and old Buicks and drunkenly swerve their way home, these templars of the park move about with trash bags, trucks, and gloves, undoing the ravages of the day.
I don’t expect the proposed admission fee-- $8 a car—will keep folks from throwing their beer bottles and paper plates on the ground, but it will do two other things: reduce the amount of people entering the park and funding the positions to keep it clean.
Like many others who frequent Fort DeSoto, I think of it as “my” park. I have my own private places there, off the beaten path, where I can be the only one in the world. Seeing my places desecrated after Memorial Day makes me alternately angry and sad.
It’s like this: I’m there more than three times a year. Some days I’m there four days a week, sometimes it’s just once a month. But the people who come once a year to throw a party? They’re Christmas Catholics who come to church once a year; they don’t know the congregation and they don’t get what church is all about.
I know my church. I know the birds and the hare and the raccoons and the snakes; I know where to find baby horseshoe crabs and where to see manatee. What’s more, I feel responsible for them. The pigs who come and trash their home? They don’t know the park. They don’t want to know it.
Admittedly, an admission fee won’t keep the pigs out or make them care. It will, however, slow them down. Because until I reach Nirvana, Fort DeSoto’s the closest I can get. To me, that’s worth the price of admission.

Spin, Baby, Spin.

2010-05-06T08:49:00.000-04:00

Turn off your television. Right now. I mean it, turn it off. There’s nothing of value there for you, at least not news-wise.
I usually don’t get this irate at the local news stations until June 1, when hurricane season opens and the weather terrorists masquerading as news people turn every gusty day into a dark windy omen of the next apocalypse. With the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, though, Christmas came early for the media this year. Tourists are canceling their trips and the coastal economy, still pasty and malnourished from an excessively bitter winter, is steeling itself for an even more barren summer.
If I were to point fingers, I’d point first at the “Drill, Baby, Drill” morons who bought the line that drilling was safe with very little risk. Next, I’d love to blame British Petroleum, I really would. More than that, I think we should tar and feather the politicians who allowed drilling with oil from the spill and feathers from any bird affected by it.
But the biggest criminal of all is the media. Even though not one drop of oil has hit Florida shores—or, at press time, any coastal shore—people are canceling reservations and changing plans and refusing to eat seafood. That’s because the fourth estate, charged with the complex goal of reporting news and events accurately and fairly, apparently sees that goal as an opinion to be ignored if there’s money to be made.
Look, I don’t think we should drill; the risks outweigh the benefits. I understand how very strong the compulsion must be to point out every negative possibility so that no one will dare utter support of drilling.
But I also understand that there’s a difference between talking about what could happen which, by the way, isn’t actually news but speculation, and reporting on actual events. The media, in our own twisted, passionate attempt to remind the world why drilling is a bad idea, has sensationalized the disaster, and in doing so is about to decimate the tourist trade along the beaches. Beaches that, by the way, are still white and beautiful.
If you want to know what’s going on with the oil in the Gulf, please don’t rely on your television set. For that matter, don’t rely on any type of news media, and that includes the Gabber. We are not scientists. I don’t know about the folks at Fox, but my degree is in broadcast journalism, not marine biology or minerals management. I’m about as qualified to predict the oil’s path as the guy drinking at On The Rocks at 8 in the morning.
Wait just a minute, I can hear you say. Are you telling us not to believe what’s on television and in the paper? Absolutely. Don’t believe one single word. News is a business, and don’t you forget it. Oil that doesn’t hurt cute little birds and kill the fish that those adorable dolphin love to eat? Well, that doesn’t sell airtime. Oily birds and black beaches, now, that sells advertising.
I’m not saying don’t prepare for the worst, and if the oil reaches our shores I will certainly go wash birds or drop off gallons of Dawn dishwashing detergent or whatever the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary asks of me. But I’ve looked at the science, and while I’m no scientist, even I can tell that, as an industry, we’re making stuff up to keep you watching and reading.
I guess you can’t blame us, really. We haven’t had a decent disaster since Katrina. It gets boring, reporting on run-of-the-mill murders and carjacking. This oil thing certainly spices up our days.
WTVT, the local affiliate news station of the ever-respected Fox, ran a story about how the spill was affecting fishermen. They interviewed one captain who said the spill hadn’t impacted his business but all the media coverage was scaring it away. That story segued into another about the oil and how it might hit our beaches. While the news anchors didn’t actually say this, I turned off the set also expecting a plague of locusts and death of our firstborns.
I don’t expect you to believe me when I say we’re not to be trusted. My entire point is that you shouldn’t believe me. I implore you instead to check things out for yourselves. There are two web sites with projections and advisories from scientists whose qualifications surpass that of “looks good on camera”: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP).
NOAA’s Incident News and main web sites have valuable information and the FDEP has a section on the Deepwater Horizon, the vessel at the center of this debacle. On that page you can download the oil’s projected trajectory. These links, listed at the end of the column and on the Gabber’s Facebook page, are the same ones the media goes to for information.
What’s that? You say you can’t really see much of Florida on the maps showing where the oil might go? Well, don’t take it as sign that you shouldn’t prepare.
Take it as a sign to turn off your television.

IncidentNews.gov/incident/8220
NOAA.gov
www.dep.state.fl/deepwaterhorizon

Community

2010-04-15T22:52:00.000-04:00

I just got off the phone with of the first friends I made in Gulfport. For him, life is about community. He’s so exuberant about the idea that it made think about the Gulfport community. When I first moved to Gulfport, I wasn’t looking for community, but it was there all the same, and it impressed me.
Now, though, I wonder if Gulfport may be losing its sense of community, and it makes me sad. For those of you who don’t follow local politics, let me back up.
Last week Margarete Tober appealed to council. This is not news; she attends almost every council meeting and clearly puts a lot of effort into understanding the issues. More so, it seems, than certain council members at certain times. At Tuesday night’s meeting, she asked council to please “bring to a close the matter of the city attorney position.” This, too, is not news: anyone paying attention and aware of how volatile council meetings can get probably wants an attorney permanently ensconced on the dais, if for no other reason than to protect their property taxes from skyrocketing due to lawsuits.
No residents are suing Gulfport. Yet. But it could happen any time, as self-proclaimed “common citizen” Al Davis intimated at Tuesday’s meeting. Actually, I think he suggested that his attorney might sue individual council members Michele King and Sam Henderson for slander. After having his address to council, Mr. Davis and his wife left the meeting.
Which comes back to community. Because something has gone horribly wrong when members of the community have so much anger that they threaten lawsuits, or when council members won’t respond to those people because they are so leery of an attack. When council meetings get so charged with hate, it’s hard to remember that Gulfport fancies itself a “waterfront Mayberry” with “small town charm” or any number of positive things.
I’m not saying Michele King and Sam Henderson are right and I’m not saying that Al Davis wrong. Ms. King hasn’t displayed generosity of spirit with the Davis’, but I can quote Mr. Davis’ allegations about her just as quickly. That’s my point: if someone were to judge this city by the way people behave at council meetings lately, they’d dismiss the idea of a community in this town as crap and move to Sanibel instead. If we used council meetings as a metric, our idea of a community is a place where nobody trusts anybody or listens to one another; where people always have their guard up.
Is that how you want the world to see your community?
I moved to Gulfport by chance; I wanted to live by the water and had a large dog. I found an apartment two blocks from the bay that allowed large dogs, and it happened to be in Gulfport. Total coincidence.
One Thursday my downstairs neighbor brought me a copy of The Gabber, a paper I had, in my former life, bought advertising in but never actually read. I sneered at weekly community papers and the idea of community. I didn’t need community. I needed food on the table and a way to pay the power bill.
And still The Gabber sat around for a week, as I think you all know, it tends to do, and I started flipping through it. I saw a notice that the Gulfport Community Players needed help. I volunteered. And I met Frank, Ron, Jovanna, Judy, Miki, Carol, and a whole host of other people who welcomed me into their community without question.
Seven years later, that’s still how I see Gulfport: a welcome without question. It’s a place where anyone can come for a safe haven or new beginning. It’s a town where people disagree but, when it matters most, people look out for each other.
But not at council. It seems that elected officials are so bogged down by conflict that they don’t govern anymore. Important city business –like hiring an attorney—gets ignored. Certain segments of the populace feel like it’s their job to attack council, and while I believe that council must withstand more scrutiny than those they serve, it saddens me to see such hateful undercurrents in a city prides itself on community.
I won’t deny that I empathize with city staff and elected officials, but I also empathize with folks like Ms. Tober, who speak intelligently without denigration or accusation and often get ignored anyway.
I cannot, however, muster any empathy for those who tear at this city with threats and bullying, no matter what side of the dais they sit or stand. When they treat council meetings like battles, they slaughter the foundations of this community. I’m not saying people shouldn’t speak out. The right to participative government is one of America’s capstones. But there’s no need for this level of discord.
So I beg both sides, before it gets any worse, before the city hires an attorney because it must and not because it should, take the first step. Be the bigger person. I’m not asking you to give up your ideals. I do ask this: who of you will be first to call the other and say, “I don’t want to fight anymore. I disagree with you, but I respect your position in this city. How can we work together? How can we end this war?”
I know both sides feel attacked and both sides believe they’re right. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t matter; your community is watching you. Community matters. Gulfport matters. Your town is not against you and you are not against it, yet look at the legacy you’re leaving- one of bitter hatred and threats.
How great for Gulfport if instead you left a legacy of understanding. Oh, I’m not suggesting we all sit in a circle and hold hands. I’m suggesting that your love for this community will allow you to do the hardest thing of all: set down your anger and righteousness and forge ahead… together.

I've Got Nothing

2010-03-31T22:47:00.001-04:00

I’ve got nothing.
Nothing.
I’ve mentioned my friend Shelly here and there in this column: she’s the one who scooted off to Denmark, leaving me with a neighborhood stray cat (Scuppers!) who now rules my apartment and refuses to acknowledge his low-class beginnings. She’s the one who used to write for The Gabber, and she’s the sort of friend everyone wants—the kind who loves you with neither expectation nor requirement.
Shelly is, in many ways, an alternate reality version of myself. We both write for a living, we both have a marked affinity for mediocre Mexican beer, we both procrastinate about writing (usually while drinking aforementioned mediocre Mexican beer), and we both have hair that triples in size at the first droplet of moisture in the air, but that’s where our similarities end.
While I maintain that sharks suffer from bad PR, Shelly screams at the very glimpse of a manatee. When she wrote her column, Distractions, people loved it, but The Gabber readers won’t nominate me for Miss Congeniality anytime soon. Shelly likes people—she could find the good in a serial killer—and they tend to like her in return. I do not exactly espouse the Dale Carnegie school of personality. Shelly is friendly, effusive, and tactful. I am standoffish, abrasive, and blunt.
Despite our differences, we’ve forged a lovely friendship over the past seven years. She is a loyal, true, and faithful friend, but more than that, she possesses one of the few good souls who walk the earth, and her goodness inspires me. If this sounds gushy and too good to be true, well, ask anyone who knows Shelly and they’ll tell you yes, she really is that person. She has her faults, of course, but all in all, the earth is a better place for her being here.

Her little brother died last week. And I’ve got nothing. I adore Shelly, her father, and her family, but I feel so empty and powerless right now.
Of course, I’m sad for her, but what can I say? As an only child I cannot begin to imagine the bond between brother and sister, much less the horror of my little brother dying unexpectedly. My heart breaks for her father, but I have no children and do not possess maternal instincts; how can I possibly offer him anything that will ease the pain of burying his son?
Certainly, I have lost people I love. I know that pain; I recognize that while sometimes death may be a blessing for the deceased, it sucks for the rest of us. I understand, too, that the flowers and prayers—despite the sender’s intentions—mean painfully little when held up against the closets of clothes destined for Goodwill and the financial matters that must get settled. All the prayers to all the gods of the world will not return Shelly’s brother to her; no funeral flower arrangements will, ten years from now, help her remember his new baby smell when their mom brought him home from the hospital.
This week one of the best people I know will bury her brother and try to come to grips to the world without him, and I can do nothing to help her. This makes me feel slightly ill, as though I have some lingering malaise I can neither define nor defeat. I offer her my car while she’s staying stateside; I attend the funeral. Every gesture seems trite. I call her to see what else I can do. There is, expectedly, not a thing. Unless, of course, I can bring back her brother, and that one thing—the thing I cannot do—is all she really wants.
I know my sadness is nothing compared to that of hers and her family. Their grief is concrete; they pine for a living, breathing wonderful young man whom they loved and who loved them.
My keening is more abstract; I am confused by the way the Universe works, if not surprised by it. If people must suffer so unfair a pain, how can we still expect to find the people Anne Frank claimed were “basically good at heart?” How much can we run a person through before they chuck it all back and decide that a good life and a pure soul gets them nothing better than it does the jerk down the street who beats his wife and kicks his kid’s pet beagle?
I wonder, though, if maybe that’s the key for people like Shelly: knowing that their lives are their only rewards and remaining the people they are anyway. Perhaps she, like Buddha, believes “the only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”
Her brother’s untimely death will not embitter Shelly. It will not make her a better person; it will not make her a worse one. Her character was formed, as was yours and mine and the jerk down the street, so long ago, and one tragedy—or many—will not change our natures. It is, as the seas and the sun, immutable.
I have nothing for Shelly, except this: In your life, I wish everything you have given your friends, one hundred fold. We mourn for your loss, and by knowing and loving you, we lose it, too.
For the rest of us?
I wish us all many Shellys.

A Letter to City Council

2010-03-17T19:07:00.003-04:00

Well, elections are over and I, for one, feel like celebrating. When campaign season opened (yes, it’s a season, much like deer or tourist), I had a front-row view of the gritty nastiness that, more and more, epitomizes Gulfport politics. Things always get a tad intense come elections, and this year proved no exception. Those of us who attend or watch council meetings on a regular basis know that, during elections, many folks campaigning see the public session of the meetings as their chance to grab some free airtime. Some use it to express ideas while others used it to play dirty, but they all used it mercilessly.
Thankfully, stolen signs and nasty allegations are fading to a distant, chilly memory, and the new council can now get on with the business of running the city. I don’t envy their task; a new council member must quickly learn about laws, policies, and a host of other information. Add to that the firing-squad approach some folks embrace when addressing council at meetings and a new official can get overwhelmed rather easily. They go from having all the answers on the campaign trail to realizing how little they really know on the dais in a matter of weeks.
I’m not certain what this new council is going to look like. I heard some pretty interesting things from the candidates over the last few months and I wonder how those fresh ideas will stand up once the people behind them sit on the other side of the dais for a while. Ideas and allegiances have a curious way of changing once the supervisor of elections tallies the votes and the city clerk swears or affirms the new members into office. I do believe that most, if not all, of the council members believe that they want to do what is best for Gulfport.
A word of caution to those council members, though: while most people could get overwhelmed by the enormity of what they do not know and need to learn, a few of you might make the mistake of thinking you have achieved a godlike status and know what you need to know. You might start to think that since the voters chose you, you must be special in some way.
That could not be farther from the truth.
Sometimes, council member, what you think is best for Gulfport simply isn’t what the people who voted you in want. It may be tempting to do what you think is best, but never, ever forget that it is not your place to assume you know what your constituents want. It is your place to represent them, not parent them. You are not up there, acting alone, and you are not a better person today than you were before you took the oath of office.
Do not forget who put you in office: the voters. If they were smart enough to vote for you, they are smart enough to know what they want. I implore you never to second-guess them or condescend to them, and I beseech you to remember that just because that dais sits higher than the voters who watch you, you are not above them.
The same holds true for city employees. The moment you think you know better than your city manager or chief of police or head of the marina, please remember this: these people devote their lives to this city. You are giving two years, and you’re only a few days in at this point. Your staff went to school for this; they spend a minimum of 40 hours a week looking after your voters. You know –or you should try to know —what your voters want. Try and have a little faith in your staff for some of the other stuff. I’m not suggesting your shouldn’t research the issues; I’m suggesting that a kindly treated city staff can make your job a lot easier and help you get what you want.
Finally, council member, please don’t assume that those who speak the loudest speak for the majority. We have folks who come to every meeting and, while I applaud participative government—indeed, that’s how government works best—please don’t forget the rest of the voters. While the city is certainly blessed with seven magnificent men and women who attend faithfully and have time to formulate opinions on every issue, it also has 12,520 other people, some of whom may have jobs that prevent them from attending council meetings. Others may trust you to represent their needs and not feel compelled to attend every meeting. Even though they may not stand before you on Tuesday nights, that silent majority are your charges, too. Even if a dozen voters gave you your win, and even if they didn’t vote for you at all, please remember that all the residents count on you. The squeaky wheel gets the most grease, but the other three wheels are crucial, too.
Finally, council member, consider this: your potential to fail your city is enormous.
Florida history is littered with politicians who did just that when they forgot who put them in office. Your city is too small to endure much failure, and it will test you every day for the next two years. I do not envy you, but I do hold you accountable.
More importantly, so does a small city by the bay.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com.

Cancer

2010-03-10T20:42:00.001-05:00

I am going to get cancer.
That’s not a guess or a death wish; it’s an almost-certain fact I live with every day. Of my grandparents, three of them had cancer. It killed two of them. Breast, lung, colon, and a few other cancers climb through my family tree like kudzu. According to the American Cancer Society, just over 11 million Americans have cancer right now. The country’s population hovers at just over 300 million, so that’s about three percent of Americans who are battling defective cells that may or may not kill them.
That may not sound like a lot, but the probability that you or I will get cancer is pretty significant. The American Cancer Society tells me I have a one in eight chance of getting breast cancer. So does any woman reading this column. Add in my myriad of risk factors and the odds skyrocket. As for the men, you have even worse odds: one in six of you will get prostate cancer and half of all men will get cancer in their lifetime. One out of every three women will get some form of cancer as well. Suffice to say, the odds are not good. You have a better chance of winning at craps in Vegas than avoiding knowing someone who has, will have, or has had cancer.
Cheery, huh? I can shovel enough dark green vegetables in my mouth to feed a small country, religiously grope myself in the shower every month as I check for lumps and irregularities, and spend so much time in spinning classes that I don’t even know what my resting heart rate is anymore… and still get cancer. Worse, I can still die from cancer.
When I was young I didn’t care. I figured we all had to go sometime. I smoked menthol cigarettes between courses of fried cheese, hot dogs, and potato skins loaded with bacon, reasoning that since I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, what was the point?
And then people I loved started to die way too young. And I got the point real quick.
I have three aunts. One of them - my godmother - was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 50s. She ate healthy, had no family history of breast cancer, and didn’t smoke. Aside from my own mother, she was the best woman I have ever known.
You know where this is leading, right? She lost her fight with breast cancer a few years after her diagnosis. Sometimes I forget she’s gone. Other times I remember all too well. Her pain, I assume and hope, has ended, but her husband, children, and mother still feel it very keenly.
I have another aunt battling cancer right now, and she’s in her 50s as well. I would do anything to see her beat the cancer. I’m certain her three children – all of whom still live at home – feel the same way.
I’m tired of watching people I love die. I’ve had two bosses killed by cancer, one in her 40s and one in his 50s. I know a few survivors, too, but I’ve known more people who didn’t survive. While I can’t say I loved everyone who died, or even that I was particularly close to them, they all had one thing in common: someone loved them as much as I loved my godmother and grandparents. Someone still thinks about them and forgets – momentarily, at least – that they can’t pick up the phone and hear their voice.
You think that’s lousy? It is. We’re not very good at curing cancer, either. One out of every four American men will die from cancer, as will one out of every five American women. That means that in my circle of friends, one of us- possibly two of us- will die from cancer. Dying doesn’t scare me; I just don’t want to do it. The thought that somebody I love will get cancer and die from it? THAT terrifies me.
For now, there’s not much I can do. If I think about it too much, I’ll go crazy. I neglected to get my MD, so odds are I’m not going to be the one to find a cure.
It’s not uncommon, I’ve read, to feel powerless in the face of a disease as monumental as cancer. Indeed, as each of my relatives succumbed to these fast-growing cells, the only two things they had the power to do were live every moment they could. Then they had the power to die. Those of us left didn’t feel like we had any power at all.
The only thing I can think to do seems so removed from finding a cure, but it’s all I have. I can walk in this spring’s Relay For Life (April 9 and 10). The Gabber is, for the first time ever, sponsoring a team in Gulfport. The writers are walking, taking turns to keep someone on the track all night. We want you to walk, too. If you’ve formed or joined a team already, fantastic. If you don’t have a team but you want to walk, we’d love to have you join us; everyone is welcome. If you’d rather send money, you can. To donate money or join our team, click on the link for Relay For Life on The Gabber’s web site (www.TheGabber.com) and search for our team, aptly named “The Gabber.”
There is no minimum to join; The Gabber’s already taken care of the minimum fundraising amount. We’d love to raise more money, though, because the money goes to the American Cancer Society, a group that funds more cancer research than any other private agency in the United States. They make sure that the money we raise goes to doctors and chemists and anyone else who can help find a cure for cancer.
That cure can’t come fast enough. Preferably in my lifetime, because I don’t care that I’m getting older, but I don’t want to lose anyone else I love.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com.

My Friend Jay

2010-03-02T12:33:00.002-05:00

I should have written this last month, but I’m not much for Hallmark Holidays. My friends and I celebrate our own weird little set of holidays- last year we held the First Annual Spanksmas!, which is not nearly as kinky as it sounds.
But enough about my strange holidays and more about love.
I don’t understand how the world has so many single people in it who want to be part of a pair. While I never particularly cared if I had a boyfriend (is that the appropriate term for me to use as I stomp into middle age?), it seems to me the world is riddled with singles who want, more than anything, a warm hand in the moonlight and a pair of lips on New Year's Eve.
Take my friend Jay (yes, that’s his real name, largely because I’m too lazy to make one up but also because he doesn’t care.) Jay is, by anyone’s definition, a Good Guy. By that I mean the sort of guy who hears you like Snuggies and buys you one, or makes you a CD of music he thinks you will like. These things tend to creep women out. I wish I could explain it to him, because it’s like watching a puppy get kicked over and over and over again. Jay decides what he wants. Quickly. From that point, he’s rather intense about it. Since this intensity strikes well before the object of his affection has a chance to come to the same conclusion, she usually backs off. Which, of course, perplexes Jay, a logical sort who accepts but does not understand irrationality.
Jay is a computer type and yes, Jay is a little esoteric and snarky and often a little too intellectual in his cultural references, but he’s fun to be around, makes a decent living and, while he’s not exactly a hardbody (see "computer type,” above) he’s not about to collapse because his muscles have atrophied, either. He has no open sores, no ex-wives or children and doesn’t live with his parents. He’s marching to his own drum, yes, but I wasn’t aware that mattered after high school. So why, then, do all of my single friends—many of whom desperately want to marry and reproduce at some point—eschew Jay and all men like him? Is it simply his intensity?
I think it’s more because Jay simply doesn’t fit a woman’s expectation of what she’s going to get in a man. Why will an otherwise sane and lovely woman spurn the Good Guy and go after the one who uses the back room of her apartment to build a meth lab?
Perhaps most women who date with the idea of a prize at the end (marriage, child, house on the water, whatever) also develop a picture in their heads of the person with whom they will share those things. Which is a shame, because it leaves a lot of lovely women single indefinitely or settling for someone they don’t love.
It’s a dangerous thing, this notion of placing your dreams in the hands of an imaginary man. I've always preferred to count on myself to make my dreams come true, but then I've never really had a desire to have children, so maybe I'm not being fair to those ladies whose uteri (is that the proper plural of uterus?) scream for motile, potent sperm. And in the process, while the Universe has passed several "creatively" successful men through my life, I've managed, eventually, to ferret them all out and decide that I can go broke and make mistakes very nicely on my own, thank you.
The phrase “Good Guy” is really just another word for “man.” After several decades of —let’s call it “misguided”—dating, I stumbled upon a decent man, and I do mean stumbled; I’m so incredibly clueless that I’d still be having adolescent fantasies and trying to figure out how I could get this man’s attention had it not been for Mr. Nice Guy Jay and a savvy girl friend. It’s divine to not be with a man who cleans out your savings, uses Theraflu as a recreational drug, or cheats on you with your best friend.
I suspect that women who find Good Guys, or “men,” focus more on how they feel with someone instead of what their partner should look like or act like or do for a living. While my friends and I may think forearms or backs are sexy, we don’t plan for it. We also don’t say we’re going to date a man who make six figures and plays in a band. That’s because we’re really not into imaginary men.
For the record, these friends aren't ugly, either. On the whole, they’re thin, toned, gorgeous women with good careers, interests outside of makeup and shoes, and IQs higher than most. When I look at it that way, I’m not actually sure what they’re doing hanging out with me. Maybe I’m the funny one.
I suspect the men they’re with care more about their brains than their bodies, though. Of all of them, Shelly’s the one who gets the most attention from guys when we go out. Shelly, the lesbian, has more men paying attention to her than the rest of us put together. She’s beautiful, yes, but… how do I put this? No one finds out Shelly is gay and expresses shock. Stacey has a lithe dancer’s body; Leah’s hair would make Vidal Sassoon weep. Amanda has the bone structure of a Greek goddess. But Shelly… well, she’s not going to win any abs of steel contests. Her favorite shirt in the world is a green checked thing that we’d all love to burn, and if you look up “cargo shorts” at Dictionary.com, you will see her picture.
But drop her in a nunnery and you’ll find Shelly surrounded by men instantly. Why? She accepts people without expectation. If you have something interesting to say, she wants to hear it. Shelly, I think, would date Jay. You know, if she were attracted to men.
Of course, that doesn’t help Jay. Look, despite his affinity for karaoke, Jay’s a lovable guy. He’s not Harrison Ford; he’s more of a cross between Rick Moranis’ character in Ghostbusters and Eugene Levy in American Pie. Like most men, Jay can be obnoxious. But I’ve dated men who thought the Jackass movies were something to aspire to and “didn’t get” the “intellectual” elements of Frasier. Hell, I’ve dated men who barely spoke English. How fussy do we have to be to remove a well-read, highly intellectual, fairly open-minded IT director from our dating pool?
Because we have GOT to be running out of losers here soon.

Clam Bayou

2010-02-18T08:53:00.007-05:00

Here we go again. No, not elections, although they’re their own heaping mess of fun, too. No, I’m talking about Clam Bayou. Tuesday night, the Bayou was once again in the center ring of the circus at Gulfport city council. Holly Greening, the Executive Director for the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, gave a highly scientific presentation about Clam Bayou. Apparently to refute her comments, Tom Reese, Al and Cindy Davis’ attorney, spoke during the public session.

To most on council and gathered ringside, Greening and Reese may as well spoken in Latin, because each of them used jargon and numbers as armor, telling the layperson nothing about the Bayou. I think Greening said that the Bayou had some stuff in it that wasn’t that bad, and that Reese responded with, yes, it IS that bad, but I’m only guessing.

I don’t know about you, but I’m weary of people throwing around big words and making accusations. I feel like those are bully tactics and I don’t see where it helps the Bayou or educates anyone. We have all these groups making all this noise about the last remaining estuary on Boca Ciega Bay, but nobody’s doing anything. The only people seem motivated to act are the folks at Keep Pinellas Beautiful, who stage cleanups, and Kurt Zuelsdorf, who runs a state-funded program to trade kayak rentals trash collected in Clam Bayou. Everyone else uses words and threats and Gulfport bows to both without ever taking action.

Who is right? Who can tell? None of these people spend a lot of time on the Bayou. They look at it from their dock or the shore, or maybe wade out in the water for a sample. They spend more time at meetings spitting out bitter vituperative or covering their collective bureaucratic butt with scientific jargon about why or why not, or how much and where. Meanwhile, trash remains
stuck in mangrove roots and golf balls still clutter the trees and nobody does anything. If I lived on the Bayou I’d be mad as hell at the amount of energy the state, city and private citizens spend arguing and defending and accusing and avoiding rather than doing.

Clam Bayou isn’t dying, but it sure has seen better days. Life exists along its shores and in its waters. I’ve seen baby green heron chicks climbing around the mangroves in the Bayou. I’ve watched tarpon splash and gators skulk. I’ve taken pictures of two nesting pairs of osprey. I’ve caught fish off the park docks. You can, in some of the deeper channels, see manatee. From the bay you’ll see dolphin chase fish into the Bayou.

I’ve seen, too, shopping carts and paper cups and golf balls and toilet seats trapped in the mangroves. Life exists, yes, but in some perverse ghetto that juxtaposes beauty with garbage.

Unfortunately the litter doesn’t matter as much as the sand, or mud, or sediment- call it what you will. That area, on charts, is historically a mud flat with low water, but some say that is evidence of it filling in. You will see the same thing at the East Beach at Fort DeSoto, the Mangrove Trail at John Pennekamp State Park, and a host of other places in Florida (although those places have less litter.) It shouldn’t be any deeper than it is; that isn’t my opinion, it’s based on historical records of an area and the definition of this sort of estuary. Also, consider this: despite what you can see from the shore at low tide, not all of the Bayou is six inches deep (and, just to be clear, the average depth of all Boca Ciega Bay is barely eight feet and there are a lot of spots outside Clam Bayou that barely hit that six inch mark at low tide.)

But is that mud toxic? That depends on whose numbers you believe. Swiftmud, a largely unaccountable agency (sorry, guys, but your entire board is appointed, not elected) says not really. The Davis family suggests it may cause cancer to live on the Bayou.

After Ms. Greening’s presentation Tuesday evening, the mayor opened the public session. Mr. Reese spoke about Clam Bayou and did not stop after his allotted three minutes, despite the buzzer that signaled him to do just that. The Mayor did not stop him at that point, which he does with everyone else who speaks. When he stopped him a little bit later, he granted Mr. Reese’s request to make a presentation to council at a later date, despite the city’s legal counsel and the city manager denying that request previously.

Communication has broken down and folks, this isn’t simply a failure to communicate. We have the makings of a Carl Hiaasen novel and I’m just waiting for Skink to step up to the plate.

I wish that the all the interested parties hadn’t lost the ability to compromise or even have a civil discussion about the Bayou. We’ve got scientists and attorneys who seem incapable of speaking to laypeople, a practice I suspect designed to intimidate. We’ve got citizens so embittered about councilwoman Michele King and anyone else who dares disagree with them that they won’t listen to anything that contradicts what they choose to believe. We’ve got a city staff that gets threatened with lawsuits for inviting the Tampa Bay Estuary Program to speak about Clam Bayou, and we’ve got a mayor who lacks the desire to demand respect from the people addressing council or to stand up to people who disregard the rules. The city is in a race to avoid litigation and minimize conflict and, as a result, it’s allowing a small group to set the rules. The idea of what is right or what it should do doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

I fail to see how this will help Clam Bayou and find myself sorely disappointed with the mayor, and I wish, more than anything he and the rest of the city would grow a backbone, put a stop to all the words without action, and do something measurable to help Clam Bayou.

How? Simple. One: Pay for regular water and sediment quality tests at several different points in the Bayou. Two: Sue the city of St. Petersburg to install physical devices that will help collect litter and also to treat or divert their runoff. Three: Hire an independent scientist to establish a standard for air, water, and sediment quality in Clam Bayou and create a plan of action. Five: Stop being bullied into anything less than sound science, and insist on a layperson translation of any reports or facts generated about the Bayou.

The city, of course, doesn’t need to do what I say. But I really wish they would do something, because I don’t see where the accusations, lawsuits, and cowtowing to avoid getting sued is helping anyone. “To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said.

Does Gulfport have the courage to act?

The World From a Kayak

2010-01-27T16:39:00.001-05:00

I so much hate the cold that at the first hint that Florida isn’t facing an unexpected ice age, I have these wild fantasies. They involve seeing the sun for more than an hour at a time, wearing shorts and bathing suits instead of jeans and sweatshirts, and splashing around in the water.
Given that, you’ll understand that after a few weeks of shivering and using more than my allotted share of lip balm and moisturizer, I had no defenses when I walked into the kayak outfitter Monday. Oh, sure, I told myself I was only there to help my better half look at new kayaks, but from the moment I saw her, I had to have her. Sleek, with a chiseled keel, and more room for Calypso The Wonder Hound to ride in the cockpit, she has a bevy of extras that my functional but basic kayak (now approaching the ripe old age of seven) doesn’t.
Faster than you can say “impulse purchase” I had a new lime green kayak. Only after I got her home and saw my old kayak looking at me with reproach in her paddles did I feel a twinge of shame, because she has served me well.
I remember the day I got her, rushing down to the Narrows and paddling around, trying out her skeg, adjusting the seat, and reveling in the sound my paddle made in the water. We’ve traveled the state together, and while we’ve had some rough times (like the time I managed to unintentionally roll the boat while putting in from a rather steep bank at Lithia Springs) we’ve had some great ones, too (like the time a dolphin surfaced inches from my paddle at Fort DeSoto.) She’s taken me past green heron chicks on Clam Bayou and made me mourn the loss of Florida countryside as we glided down the straight, lifeless banks of the straightened Kissimmee River.
Kayaks and canoes serve many Floridians well; they bring us down to eye level with the nature we want so keenly to protect. Anytime I want to see what progress (or lack thereof) the city, state, or various watchdog groups are making (or blocking) in Clam Bayou, I can put in at the city park and paddle the mangroves myself. If I want to see how bad this year’s drought is, I can drive to the Econlockhatchee, Wekiwa or Hillsborough rivers and look at the water lines on as I paddle past the trees. From my cockpit I see the story of the river, creek, or bay, as told by the ibis and orchids and manatee.
You could call me an instant gratification environmentalist, which I freely admit isn’t the most selfless sort. If it’s something close to my heart (like the Everglades) or my home (like Clam Bayou), I care. While I’d love to hike the Appalachian Trail someday, the issues surrounding it are mere environmental abstractions in my mind. I know they’re out there, like communism or bioweapons, but it’s harder for me to get worked up about them.
During Gulfport council meetings, councilman Sam Henderson recently started mentioning mountaintop removal mining, a practice associated with coal mining. Last week, Henderson asked the city to sign their support for ending this practice. His request met with some derisive snickers from some of the citizens attending the meeting. While I don’t think the public displays of derision were anything approaching mature or appropriate, I didn’t get why Henderson cared, either. I mean, Clam Bayou is right here, and there are groups trying to destroy the last remaining estuary on Boca Ciega Bay. Why on earth waste even a moment on somebody else’s problem?
I’m guessing Henderson’s one of those fools who sees “The Big Picture.” Perhaps he mistakenly believes the nature you touch isn’t the only nature worth protecting. I suppose he naively thinks that every city and state has its own water quality, wildlife and air and water contamination issues, and really, what does it cost one city to pledge its support for another? Or worse: he might want council to do this because he cares about the environment and it’s the right thing to do.
Well, I can tell him right now that we just don’t need that kind of crazy talk on council. We do enough, what with our biofuels, sporadic bayou clean ups and lip service to “saving the planet.” We have curbside recycling, for heaven’s sake. What’s next, Mr. Henderson? Clean drinking water for everyone? Asking the state to find alternative, cleaner sources of energy? Finding a way to make our recycling program more efficient and viable?
Get with the program, Mr. Henderson. Don’t you know that the whole world can go to hell as long as we protect our little square of paradise? We exist in a vacuum, so changes to the rest of the world won’t ever impact us. As long as I can take my shiny new kayak down to the Bayou and paddle, what do I care?
Crazy talk, this notion of protecting someone else’s nature. What are you thinking? I’m certain those folks in Appalachia, should they ever hear about Clam Bayou, won’t say, “Hey, that’s like what’s happening here. We can’t do much, but maybe we should do something. We understand; we’ve been there. We know what it’s like to worry about losing something precious.”
Because, you know, most people are like me. Now, if you want to go ahead and be the better man, if you want to push the city to be a little bit more socially responsible than it was when you took office, or give us the reputation of being environmentally aware, you just go right ahead.
I’ll be over here in the corner, secure in the knowledge that because I pluck the occasional soda can out of the water while paddling Clam Bayou, I’ve done enough.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com.

Cherry-Crusted Nutbars

2009-12-02T16:16:00.001-05:00

You know, you’ve got to hand it to Gulfport’s mayor, Mike Yakes. The city has some true cherry-crusted nut bars, and this guy doesn’t even blink. If you’ve watched Gulfport council meetings, you know who I mean. For those of you outside Gulfport, if you’ve watched any council meetings anywhere in the world, you have your own nut bars.
No matter what these people say, Mayor Mike keeps a straight face. No matter how ridiculous their request, he nods thoughtfully. He addresses most of their concerns.
It’s really a shame that the people addressing council cannot offer the same level of respect. Somewhere along the way, people have started to believe that it is ethically acceptable to treat elected and appointed officials like idiots, criminals, or both. People are rude, accusatory, and condescending, and exhibit behavior often found when a three year-old has a tantrum.
Here’s a sample of what you might see and hear at council.
Tuesdy night one lady who may or may not need medicine that she may or may not be taking accused the city of ethics violations, interrupting the city’s clerk’s response to her question, and standing up in the middle of the attorney’s response to insinuate the attorney didn’t understand the Sunshine Law. In the past this woman repeatedly accused an acting city clerk of hiding records, the interim attorney of ongoing unethical behavior, and the council in general of behaving unethically. She does not understand the Sunshine Law, yet she insists on spouting out her twisted version of the law as if it were fact.
One man continues to accost council about the city’s decision to allow a smoker restaurant on 49th Street. He continues to obsessively accuse council of polluting the air and poisoning him, despite a marked lack of evidence. He wrote a letter to The Gabber referencing the smoke going up to the heavens and raining down on the pirates. Trust me, I’m nowhere near “well-adjusted” myself, but from what I’ve seen, yelling at council and accusing them of poisoning people isn’t how well-adjusted people handle their grievances.
Others accuse the elected councilmembers of conspiring to make secret deals or violate Sunshine laws. Mike just sits there, stoic, and looks at them like these people aren’t in competition for the cover of the Fruit Loops box.
Attention, nut bars: listen up, and listen good. I’ll say it slowly so you don’t miss anything.
Gulfport is great, and I know you love it. I do, too, but I do realize something you seem to be missing: Gulfport ain’t Chicago. Nothing here is worth the level of conspiracy you suggest. The mayor is not making any secret deals, no one is trying to poison anyone, and no, even though I think sometimes she does get a little fiscally-obsessive about the city’s finances, Michele King isn’t trying to sell Veteran’s Park to a mall developer. You people want to make this city into a John Grisham novel, and it just isn’t that kind of place. The entire council could conspire to sell every city block to developers and Clam Bayou to Waste Management and it wouldn’t net enough money to matter.
Oh, I’m not saying things that are inappropriate don’t happen, because I believe that they do, and whether you believe us or not, we do look for those things. We just need to be somewhat responsible about what we print, so that rules out just about everything I’ve mentioned above as a viable news item.
I’ve gotten to know four of the five councilmembers pretty well, and while I frequently disagree with them, I can say to you that each really does want to do what they believe is best for Gulfport. Sometimes they’re misguided and sometimes they’re so passionate that it can get tiresome, but they really do want to see good things in your city.
While we’re on the topic, please remember that just because you stand up at council and say something over and over again doesn’t make it true, and it certainly doesn’t mean council has to act on it. I know that’s a hard pill to swallow, but give it a shot. Sometimes what you’re saying is just so completely out there that the most prudent thing for council to do is ignore you. Some of you seem to be operating within the confines of your own reality and, well, to be frank, we’re just not ready to board the train to Crazy Town, Population: You.
Also, let’s take a hard look at city council, but instead of looking for the secret deals and malfeasance, let’s look at some of the good they do and have done since before they ran for office. Mike’s raised something like 27 children that weren’t biologically his and Judy’s volunteered just about everywhere someone can volunteer in the two and half square miles that is Gulfport. Bob would have heart palpitations if he couldn’t give time to CERT and before that the volunteer fire department, and Michele will take up just about any benevolent cause and work towards it just because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. Sam? Well, Sam’s new and he hasn’t really been as receptive to The Gabber as the rest of council, but I’m sure he must do something of value as well.
Finally, try treating council and staff with a lot more respect. They’ve got a hard enough job without you treating them like pedophiles. “Public session” isn’t a license to treat people like dirt, and despite how some of you treat your council, they are people. Your behavior embarrasses me on behalf of carbon-based life forms everywhere.
So lay off, would you? These are people like you and I—well, maybe a little more sane than a handful of you—just doing the best they can.

Calypso Salustri | A Dog Named Christmas

2009-12-01T12:48:00.001-05:00

Calypso Salustri | A Dog Named Christmas

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Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T08:57:00.001-05:00

When I was little I really believed that Thanksgiving was about the pilgrims and the Indians (that was back when you could call them Indians and schoolchildren didn’t learn about the smallpox blankets and the STDs the Europeans gave them) and that they sat down at a picnic table and ate corn and turkey.
I hate turkey. Always have. It’s a nothing bird; it tastes like nothing until you jam it full of stuffing and smother it in jellied cranberries and yams and potatoes. That’s exactly how I felt about Thanksgiving, too: it was a nothing holiday, a false celebration of an imaginary kinship when what we were really celebrating was the beginning of the end of hundreds of cultures.
Of course, my granola-sucking, tree-hugging, self-righteous take on the holiday changed when I realized that it may be a sham of a holiday and the ultimate spin on a series of horrific events, but there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with giving thanks.
I really don’t see the point of saying things like “I’m thankful for my health” or “I’m thankful for my family.” That sort of “giving thanks” makes me want to throw up, because, well, of course I’m thankful for my health and while I love my family, to be honest some days I want to choke them. Just a little bit. Plus, if I need to set aside one day a year to let them know I’m thankful for them, I’m doing a pretty crappy job the rest of the year.
The things I’m really thankful for, the things that I think about every year on this day, are all the bad decisions I’ve made. I’m not talking about the little bad decisions, like eating sushi at a bowling alley buffet or forgetting to pack a tent for a camping trip. I’m talking about the types of decisions that were so cosmic in nature that they spun my life in an entirely new direction each time I made one.
I am the queen of bad decisions. My life between the ages of 20 and, oh, 35 or so could read as “The Complete Idiot’s Guide of What Not To Do.” That is what I’m thankful for.
These bad decisions may actually be the best decisions I’ve made, because they served as the stepping stones to get me where I am.
I am thankful I got married too young and too stupid to know better because otherwise I would never have done it and I would never have known it wasn’t for me. I’m deliriously happy, too, that I married a man who cheated on me with, among others, my best friend. If he had been a better husband I would have not left a marriage I had no business being in in the first place.
I am thankful that I fell in love with the “wrong” man who showed me that there was more to life than a quietly desperate existence where you do what people expect of you, because even though he broke my heart I learned what it meant to love somebody. I am thrilled that I chose him over friends who abandoned me when I fell in love with that man, because it showed me who I could count on and who was just window dressing.
I cannot ever thank my old boss enough for making my work life so incredibly miserable. If she hadn’t pushed me to the breaking point I would probably still be there, writing press releases about household chemicals and wanting to hang myself with my pantyhose.
I am thankful that I quit that job in what I call a “fit of self respect” even though I had no backup plan or savings account, because it made me figure out how to survive as a freelance writer. If I’d thought it out and had a plan I would have gone right into another nine-to-five job and I’d never have found the courage to live the life I dreamed about.
It was, it turns out, a good decision to turn down the $50,000 a year job writing about car audio components and take a part-time job working as boat crew. The good job would have meant giving up almost everything I love about my life and the boats… well, I’m not making anywhere close to $50,000, but I’m not making it on a sailboat.
Moving in with an ex-boyfriend when things got rough in my own neighborhood? Hee. Even I don’t know what I was thinking. However, it did settle some issues permanently and allow me to move on.
More than anything, I’m thankful for where I am and who is in my life. And I’m thankful I had the courage to make those bad decisions, because they are the ones that led me to the life I love. I am thankful, as Douglas Adams said, that “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

City Manager Fun

2009-11-18T20:46:00.002-05:00

Apparently love has a price. I’m not sure what it is, but according to Gulfport city council love isn’t worth $216,000.
Despite a months-long love-a-thon for Interim City Manager Jim O’Reilly, city council chose Tuesday night not to appoint him as Gulfport’s full time city manager. When I interviewed council a while back about why they were willing to forego a job search, I got the impression they believed that O’Reilly not only walked on water, he turned it into wine at the end of his stroll. They even changed the charter so that he could keep his home mid-county while he worked as city manager. Please note that they did this before they even asked O’Reilly if he would move, so eager were they to have him and only him as a city manager.
So why the no-go on actually making him a city manager?
O’Reilly wants two years pay if council fires him, and that works out to $216,000. Council can’t guarantee they won’t fire him, so they won’t accept that in the contract.
Why does O’Reilly want so much money?
Seems that O’Reilly wants to protect his family and his career. Go ahead, call him crazy. I mean, come on, just because council can show up one night and fire him because they don’t like his tie (and they are kind of boring, so I can see where that would happen), how dare he ask for a severance package of this magnitude.
To be fair, I do kind of choke on how much money he wants. $216,000 is a lot of the city’s money. I mean, it’s not like Gulfport’s spent that much on other things, like the trolley, or dealing with charter issues, the Pasadena Properties lawsuit, or Scout Hall. And it’s not like the city manager has to stick his neck out time and time again to protect the city and its council and, oh, yes, its citizens. The issue at Tuesday night’s meeting was that no city manager gets that kind of severance package.
No city manager gets to live outside the city, either, but council allowed that.
O’Reilly isn’t asking for more than the city budgeted for his position; he isn’t even asking for monies equal to what other city managers at comparable cities earn. Since he could be fired at any council meeting for any reason (as long as a majority agrees that they want to fire him), he wants the money to protect his family. He says that two years pay would be enough to make sure his daughter would be able to go to college.
Well, at least, that’s what he says. It smacks of some sort of bargaining chip, some sort of ammunition. After all, I’ve met his daughter; she’s reasonably bright. I’m sure she’ll get some sort of scholarship. I mean, it’s not like the state is in any sort of economic trouble; he can certainly count on Bright Futures for her. Also, why on earth would O’Reilly believe that the city would fire him? I mean, they certainly treated the last city manager with respect.
Actually, now that I mention it, city councils can be capricious. And as much as the five on the dais now think that Christ himself couldn’t run the city better, there’s no guarantee that future councils will have the same level of adoration for this good ol’ boy.
I do recall, too, that city managers have a way of getting stuck making the hard choices to help their council, which doesn’t exactly put them up there with the cheerleaders and football stars when it comes to popularity. I read somewhere that the average length of time a city manager serves a city is about a year and a half.
O’Reilly’s no dummy; everybody loves him now because they’re still honeymooning. Technically, it’s not even a honeymoon, it’s more of a “living in sin” situation since they haven’t even formalized the arrangement. Once they sign the papers things will change in city hall and O’Reilly won’t have the protection of a Leisure Services Director-ship waiting in the wings.
I have to wonder, too, why the city’s so worried about what’s going to happen when they fire O’Reilly. Seems like that severance package would be a mighty powerful incentive for them to make sure they’ve got the right guy. I’m not sure, either, why they can’t work out some sort of tiered severance package where O’Reilly gets the two years if they fire him in the first two years, but less in each subsequent year. This, of course, works on the assumption that any city manager who can hand in a balanced budget could, over the course of the next few years, find a way to save a little money here and there to help defray the cost of his daughter’s college tuition.
Or maybe if they don’t have the confidence that they’re not going to fire him they should consider launching a job search for a city manager. Someone who doesn’t walk on water and can’t raise the dead or balance a budget but won’t ask for such a large severance package.

Bikes

2009-11-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

By Cathy Salustri

Remember riding your bike when you were seven? Pretty awesome, right? I had a red three-speed I got one Christmas, and I rode it all over my neighborhood with my friend Maria. After school and over the summer we went everywhere we could in a five-block radius, returning home only for lunch, dinner and twilight.

30 or so years later I still like to ride my bike. I’ve traded the three-speed for a blue cheap-o one-speed with fat ol’ tires and a basket on the front for Calypso. Sometimes I ride it to work, or to the pool, or to the store. Other times I’ll take ride the bike path at Fort DeSoto. I still love the way it feels when I stand up, pedal real hard, then coast a few hundred yards. Nothing feels as good as taking my feet off the pedals and letting them stick out as I whiz along the roadside.

Somewhere along the way I think some local bicyclists have lost that feeling of joy. The biking world rides on two disparate paths: slackers like me who ride a bike at our leisure and stick to sidewalks and bike lanes, and the intense cyclists who insist that it is their legal right to ride their uber-expensive lightweight racing bikes on the road. You know these folks; you’ve seen these folks. They generally wear stretchy bike shorts and flamboyant spandex shirts as they tool down the road, heads down, puffing with exertion.

Tool, of course, is the operative word here. I understand cycling for fitness, I do, but these folks do it at the expense of everyone else on the road. I think of them as vigilante bicycle groups, like people used to think of Hell’s Angels before we realized they were all just a big group of tattooed teddy bears in leather, donating kidneys to sick children or whatever it is Hell’s Angels do.

These cyclists have hijacked our roads and I say it’s time we took them back. I do not accept the idea that they have as much right to the road as a motorcycle, car, or truck. As my friend Richard said last week, if someone invented the bicycle five years ago, no way would we allow it on the road. It isn’t safe. That’s why god invented bike lanes.

Of course, our vigilante cyclists will not use these lanes. These men and women ride five or more abreast, blocking any traffic from passing. What’s more, they ride in groups of, oh, I don’t know, a thousand, and when one guy in the front stops for a stop sign, the 999 riders behind him decide that they’re covered, too, and therefore do not need to stop. Red lights? If one rider makes it through on green or yellow, you can bet your Huffy that the rest are going through, too—even if the light turns red. In my world, that behavior is acceptable only at funeral processions. Given their risky behavior, perhaps these cyclists are training for such an event.

What really gets me –and pretty much everyone I talked to when I mentioned this subject to my editor and he called me a cranky old lady- is that these are the same cyclists who insist they can ride on the road because the law says so. Seems rather arbitrary, doesn’t it? I would love to be able to pick and choose what laws I obey. Sorry, Officer, I know I was going 120 on I-275, but, hey, I’m not drunk, so we’re good, right?
Every week I drive up the beaches to see my parents in Clearwater. Along I way I see something I think took a lot of foresight: Indian Rocks Beach and Indian Shores reworked their roadways to include one lane for passenger vehicles, one lane for pedestrians, and one for bicyclists. This impressed me from the first moment I saw it. What failed to impress me, though, is the number of vigilante cyclists pretending the bke path doesn’t exist as they pedal down the middle of Gulf Boulevard. It is illegal for cars to pass them in the same lane and since these roads sacrificed their passing lanes for the bike and pedestrian lanes, cars must stay behind these riders until the cyclist reaches his destination or someone runs her off the road. Which, by the way, I am totally not endorsing.

Because, you know, they’re correct when they argue it’s their right to use the road. So much so, I think, that in the spirit of taking back our roads, we should treat them just as we would any other vehicle on the road.

When someone’s driving too slow in front of you—I’m talking 10 or 15 miles under the speed limit—what’s the best thing to do? Take deep breaths? Oh, no: the time for civility passed long ago with these bicycle terrorists. Pass them- in fact, cut them off- and then drive slow in front of them. I’m talking three miles an hour. Actually, just put your car in neutral. After all, it is their right.

Oh, or hey, when they run a stop sign? Just go ahead when it’s your turn. Of course, this will mean you’ll have to blast your horn and probably slam on your brakes (you don’t want to actually hit them; the spandex shorts just make a mess of your front grill), but, as they like to say, it’s their right.

I cannot imagine this will win any points with these cyclists. Since you’re in a car, though, you have the upper hand. What choice do they have? Well, there’s always that nice, cushy bike lane. Who knows, they may even have the chance to slow down enough to look around, take their hands off the handlebars, and coast for a few hundred yards. Isn’t that the best part of riding your bike, after all?

Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@theGabber.com.

Freedom to Brawl

2009-10-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

Recently an—let’s call it an altercation—broke out at a St. Petersburg city council meeting. This altercation, called a brawl and a fistfight in newscasts across the nation, was over the sidewalk at the BayWalk complex downtown.
This may be a sign that some folks have lost perspective. Yes, I understand that some people feel like it’s a first amendment issue and others think it’s a case of the city subsidizing business, but when you look at the facts without emotion, here’s what happened:
St. Petersburg residents had a fistfight. Over a sidewalk. So incensed were these residents that they came to blows after the city council meeting and, in short order, had council chambers looking a little but like a scene from a John Wayne movie. I’m not clear on all the ins and outs of parliamentary procedure, but I’m fairly certain they’re called Roberts Rules of Order for a reason.
I am so proud to be a Floridian today. Not as proud to be a resident of a city other than St. Petersburg, of course, but proud nonetheless. This stuff just doesn’t happen in Wyoming, folks. Only in Florida can a city meeting devolve into fisticuffs over a five-foot wide stretch of pavement. I love getting the phone calls and e-mails from my northern relatives when stuff like this makes national news. The rest of the country is worried about healthcare, but what are we focused on?
Never mind 35 million uninsured Americans. Forget about the country hinging on the precipice of total economic collapse. Forget, for a moment, the American soldiers dying in Afghanistan. Let’s focus instead on sidewalks.
I know what you’re saying. You’re saying that those American soldiers in Afghanistan are dying so we have the right to protest on a sidewalk.
Not, as it turns out, exactly. They’ve died so I can write this column (although some weeks even I doubt that what I have to say is worth it); they’ve died so people can march on Washington. They died so men like Al Davis and Bill Pyle could go to their respective city council meetings and, without turning things into a barroom brawl, express their concerns and opinions.
They did not, I assure you, sacrifice their lives so that a group of what the police consider a terrorist group can hold a private company and its patrons hostage to their opinions. They did not die so that the group that directly contributed to the early 1990s riots in midtown St. Petersburg (then called the south side) can ride roughshod over businessmen and people wanting to take their family out to a movie.
Look, don’t misunderstand. I’m not a BayWalk fan and I think that the city shouldn’t give them a dime- St. Petersburg residents already pay the highest property taxes in Pinellas county and for the city to give BayWalk $700,000 because it’s no longer a financially viable business is a blatant show of disrespect those citizens. As for BayWalk, for any business to demand a government bail out… well, OK, so it’s trendy right now, but that doesn’t make it right.
But let’s not confuse the city’s lack of prudent fiscal stewardship with free speech and the right to assemble. Free speech doesn’t mean you’re free to intimidate and the right to assemble isn’t a right to get violent, on a sidewalk or in council chambers. Free speech means that you can say what you think without fear of criminal retribution. The right to assemble guarantees the right to assemble for peaceful and lawful purposes; it offers no protection for those gathering to encourage others to break the law or do so themselves. In fact, the government can legally stop people from associating with groups that do just that.
Or it can just turn the property over to a business and make it the businesses problem, because the first amendment doesn’t mean much on private property.
Of course, the best part of this is that at what could have been a reasoned debate about all these things, the crowd gathered gave the city the best reason ever to wash its hands of this first amendment nuisance: residents can’t even have a peaceable council meeting with the police right there. Of course we can’t trust the sidewalks downtown to these people; they can’t even control themselves in a city meeting.
The first amendment is not just a right; despite what some may think, it is also a privilege. Those who abuse it do not deserve it no matter what the constitution says. You want the right to assemble, St. Petersburg? Start acting like you deserve it.
A good start would be not turning council chambers into an old west saloon.

A Letter From Scuppers

2009-10-04T00:08:00.001-04:00

Hi Aunt Leah,

I think I've forgiven you for not letting me live with you because I like the beach, but don't think that means you can get away with anything while SHE is gone. Here are my rules, and don't even think about breaking them. Unless you give me catnip. I love catnip.

1. Feed me. This is not negotiable. There is dry and wet food under the kitchen sink. SHE will tell you to leave out dry food and give me a tin of wet food if you think I deserve it, but here's what you really do: Open the bag and leave it out on the floor. Really. I swear. That's TOTALLY what SHE does.
2. Clean out my litter. Preferably you will station yourself in the bathroom for the entire duration of HER absence since you've laid the food out on the floor for me and would have no reason to leave the bathroom. Bags are under the kitchen sink and extra litter will be left out for you on the toilet seat. Until I knock it over. I never make a mess but SHE keeps a dustpan and handbroom under the bathroom sink and a Dustbuster charging on the wall under the bulletin board.
3. Dog and I share water, but Dog won't be here. Dog's water is on the yellow and blue stepstool next to the oven. I like Perrier with lime but if it doesn't look like a good year, I will accept a Pelligrino with a fresh lime. Please remove the seeds before squeezing the lime into my bowl. I also like a lime twist, which the bourgeois would call excessive since I have the squeezed lime already, but rest assured this is how Cats did it in ancient Egypt. Please take care to remove the pithy part of the twist; it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.
4. Comb me. There is a red flea comb in the basket of toys next to the bookshelf. I usually don't have fleas but if I like the way it feels when the comb runs under my chin and along my cheeks. SHE will tell you there is a blue brush in the toy basket so I don't leave cat hair everywhere, but don't listen to HER. Also, if you try to brush my tummy I will try and bite you. You can rub my tummy, though, if you've recently moisturized your hands with goat's milk lotion that has lavender added. Otherwise please refrain.
5. Give me catnip. Look, I can quit any time I want. SHE won't tell you where it is but I've seen it and it's in the cabinet above the stepstool. There's a pink Kong and a white seal in the toy basket; you can stuff it in either of those. In fact, as with the cat food, just open the lid and let me at it. Really. I swear. That's what SHE does, true story.

OK, if you have any other questions please ask me directly. Don't listen to HER and her "rules."
S.

I Was Lucky

2009-09-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri
My Grandma Rae died last week.
She spent years living in a reality in which the rest of us were not welcome, something that tore at my father and his brothers.
Rae had Alzheimer’s. A couple of Thanksgivings back she was convinced my grandfather died when the Mayflower sank. My father tried in vain to convince her that the Mayflower didn’t sink. That didn’t work. He tried to explain that, for my grandfather to have been on the Mayflower, we would all have to have lived 400 years or so earlier. No go. Finally, he told her: “Ma, look. There were no Italians on the Mayflower. There was one Puerto Rican busboy, but that was it.”
Success. My dad did what had to so that he could deal with his mother’s illness. Her disease didn’t just touch her; her brain’s decay touched us all, left all of us feeling a little less whole and each of dealt in our own way. Some of us couched ourselves in denial, others seemed to forget her after a fashion.
But I was lucky. I had things to remember.
Rae and my Grandpa John moved from New York to my parent’s home in Florida when I was 17, a week before I graduated from high school. Rae raised four boys and I was the first granddaughter, and despite my mother’s ever-vigilant eye, Grandma Rae felt the need to watch over me, too. I went from having one military-strict mother to two. I couldn’t do anything.
In between us bickering, she taught me things, like how to make macaroni from scratch. As I got a little older, I got to see a side of her my other cousins never would. She talked about her family the way she never would to a young child. She talked about her childhood, told me about her courtship with my grandfather. One afternoon, to my father’s distress and my horrified delight, she talked about the more intimate details of her marriage.
I remember my grandfather telling me of hearing notes from my grandmother’s viola drift down from a second-story window. He loved her so much then, and again when he, about to die from lung cancer, told me that story. They fought; horrible, yelling, mean fights, but that passion carried through to every part of their marriage. This was no lukewarm love; she loved him with everything she had.
When doctors diagnosed my grandfather with lung cancer and he declined treatment, I was the grandchild who watched her grieve at close range for a man not yet dead. I was the one who offered not nearly enough comfort as her life shattered around her. I saw her lose her will to live, not little by little but all at once when he died. I always felt like her Alzheimer’s came about because without my grandfather she didn’t want to remember anything.
Little things started to go, like beans left on the stove or an ingredient left out of a recipe. Then larger things, like the morning she fell out of bed and didn’t call out for help because it didn’t occur to her.
I remember the day the doctor’s finally convinced my parents they couldn’t care for my grandmother anymore. She sat on the ottoman in our living room, her big purse over one arm and wearing brown slacks and an orange and brown print polyester blouse. She didn’t understand exactly where she was going but she knew she did not want to go.
Seeing her at the nursing home was awful. The public relations spin on these places has stopped us from calling them nursing homes, but their new labels don’t mask the continual decay within their walls.
Rae was lucky, because most of the time she didn’t know she was in a nursing home. Except for a few horrible moments of clarity, she didn’t know she was hanging in a limbo between the world of the living and dead.
Rae was lucky. One nurse, Louise, cared for her like Rae was her own mother. When I would bring Calypso to visit and my grandmother, who had no clue who I was, refused to see us, Louise would scold her and told her in a thick Jamaican accent that she needed to see her granddaughter. Louise stopped to see Rae when she worked other wings of the nursing home. Louise took a day off of work to come to the memorial service.
When went through my grandmother’s things at the house we found letters from her grandchildren and pictures we had drawn her. Among those letters were packets of love letters from my grandfather, passionate expressions of love that made me understand how completely they loved each other and how she couldn’t, after so many years, bear to remember a world without him in it.
It broke my father’s heart to watch his mother fall apart. Mine, too, but more than that I hated seeing what watching his mother dissolve into a shell of a person did to my father. When my grandma went to the hospital Friday I almost felt a sense of relief. If her body was going to try to catch up with her brain it would end a decade of her not remembering her children, crying every time she realized her husband had died, and, in thankfully rare moments, sobbing because she all of a sudden realized what was happening to her.
I was lucky. I don’t feel it right now, but I know I am. I have a piece of my grandmother no one else does. Long before she died I felt her with me every time I made her tomato gravy or saw an older couple arguing with each other. When I read a love story I think of those letters she kept, sent long after she and my grandfather wed.
She has been gone for years, really. She’s been with me all that time, too. I watched her die but I also got to see her live. I knew her as my grandmother but also as a woman.
I was lucky.

Two St. Pete Beaches

2009-09-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri

A few months back the reporter who covered St. Pete Beach City Commission meetings quit and my editor asked me to cover the meetings until he found a suitable replacement. Because I will write about anything for money and because I’m a little scared to tell him no, I agreed. I took my laptop, notebook and lucky pen and I trotted down to city hall, less than a half-mile from my home. This, I thought, would be a piece of cake.
I later described the meeting as Dante’s ninth level of hell on steroids. St. Pete Beach City Commission meetings that last less than four hours are like fairies: I want to believe, even though I’ve never seen one. My first clue should have been when the commissioners had all packed not only lunch but a change of clothes.
A lot of the meetings I attended swelled with bluster and tension about height restrictions and how the city intends to deal with them. We’re talking about hours of filibuster-like discussion infused with a passion I generally reserve for grand patriotic acts or my friend Leah’s lemon cream sauce over snapper. It seemed like a lot of pointless posturing and stirring the pot to no productive end. As a newcomer to the beach and an outsider at the meetings, I thought it was perfectly clear that the commission had no intention of building high rises along Upham Beach or anywhere else. They had certain laws in place but these people insisted that wasn’t enough. At best, I thought their protests were over-the-top. At worst, I cast about commission chambers looking for the Kool-Aid they all must be drinking.
I spent a couple months whining about the people who spoke and how I didn’t get what they were talking about and why did they go on and on about height and referendums and for god’s sake could they please just shut up so I could get out of there and go watch Deadliest Catch? But then my cousin came down for a visit and we spent some time on Clearwater Beach.
I grew up in Clearwater, went to the beach more than I went to church, and put more than my fair share of miles on my mom's K-car cruising up and down Mandalay. My high school held its senior prom and 10-year reunion at the old Holiday Inn; my marine biology teacher sent us to the north beach to net for fish. I knew all the best places to park that weren't technically illegal, and I knew where to go to hang out and be away from the tourists. Most importantly, I frittered away hours of a teenage existence walking up and down the beach itself. I could take the Plymouth, drive up and down the beach, and see from the road which stretch of beach had the least people.
I don't get up there much anymore, because seeing what the Clearwater City Commission has allowed on Clearwater Beach breaks my heart. My beach is gone. The Spyglass Motel, a landmark, got demolished and a nondescript pink giant swelled up in its place. In understand the rooms sell for about $2 million and the Hyatt manages the hotel. High rises line the beach on both ends.
Now everything there calls out to tourists, not locals. If you live on Clearwater Beach, good luck catching a movie or buying groceries or anything else not directly related to alcohol or t-shirts. You can't even see the beach from the road anymore; I'm assuming it's still there. Someone certainly would have mentioned high rises marching out to sea, wouldn't they?
Throughout the day my mind contrasted Clearwater Beach and St. Pete Beach and I realized that St. Pete Beach is every bit as tourist-capable as Clearwater Beach, except without the high rises and with a sense of community.
That's because there's really two St. Pete Beaches. There's the one where people from Michigan visit in the winter. They stay at the Tradewinds or the Don or the Travelodge and they eat at the Hurricane or Crabby Bill's or order a pizza. They get frozen drinks at any number of beach bars and they have a lovely time. We are, of course, glad to have them. Mostly.
Then there's our beach.
There's the beach with the new burger place; I walk Calypso past it almost every night and see the owner and her boyfriend sharing a beer on the patio after closing time. I don't know how, but she always remembers my name as well as my affinity for her white wine mustard. They do a good tourist business but it’s not unheard of to see the fire marshal picking up a to-go order, either.
There's the beach where a local named Paul comes by Dolphin Village every night to see the sailboats leave the dock. He walks down from his home, shakes a Pall Mall out of his pack, and sits and watches the boats sail away, loaded with visitors eager to see the sun set over the Gulf.
There's the beach with the Beach Theatre. This theatre cannot possibly compete with BayWalk, and no one wants them to try. It’s old, it has one screen, and things don’t always work. I’ve walked in moments before a movie started to see a kid with a set of wrenches trying to fix a broken seat. I’ve been there when the popcorn machine was broken or when they’d run out of popcorn. Sometimes the projectionist can’t get the film in focus. But you know what? The kid fixed the seats, the clerk behind the counter popped more popcorn and delivered it seat-side, and they get the film in focus eventually. The guy behind the counter recognizes the regulars and talks animatedly about what films the Beach Theatre will show next. He's all of what, 23?, and he connects with this gloriously run-down theatre and its loyal local following more than anyone I've ever seen selling $15 popcorn "value meals" at BayWalk.
There's the beach where on Sunday mornings I walk down to the Upham Beach concession stand for coffee and eggs. The coffee cups don’t match and I think they'll slap you if you attempt to order a latte, but locals wander by, drink their no-frills coffee, and watch families from Ohio and Missouri build sandcastles on our beach. One regular spreads the Sunday paper out on a picnic table, drinks his coffee, and occasionally raises an eyebrow at another regular, a heron waiting patiently about three feet away.
There's the beach with Shaner's, the mom-and-pop grocery where they'll cut up a bone for Calypso but also warn me about her getting too many. They take special orders but don't ask for a name or a deposit; it's a small town, after all. They know who you are and trust you at your word. Yes, they’re small and no, they aren’t open as late as the chain stores, but their fish and meats cost less than the supermarkets and they’ll cut up a bone for Calypso if I ask. No, they don’t have their guarantee posted on the wall, but then, I’ve never needed it.
There's the beach where the residents show up and argue about what I deemed imaginary height threats and sue the commissioners and rail against the city, but when the beach post office gets threatened with closure, they all arrange a Stone Soup-style rally where everyone offers to do something to help.
When Shells closed no one seemed to notice but the Swigwam, a locals bar behind the Shells, reopened almost instantly. These places aren’t just restaurants and shops; they’re the heart of the beach that props up the tourist trade; they give a superficially transient town a sense of place and home and comfort. Walking along Clearwater Beach last week I tried to find places that would offer its locals that same sense of community.
No one walked his dog along the splashy BeachWalk. None of the shopkeepers sat outside with a cool drink and waved at regulars. Every restaurant had matching coffee mugs. The mom-and-pop hotels of my youth, along with their 1960s-era signs and jalousie windows, yielded to towering condos stretching skyward and blotting out the beach. The snack stand once so like the one on Upham now had polished wood floors, fancy chairs, and an air-conditioned dining room. It served green key lime pie and watered down frozen drinks. T-shirt shops and bars littered the main drag. I was standing on Any Beach, U.S.A., and I shivered in the August heat.
And all of a sudden those arguments at the Commission meetings didn’t seem so silly anymore.
Contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com. Comment online at HardCandyOnline.Blogspot.com.

Pool Time

2009-08-13T10:16:00.000-04:00

I stepped on a child at the pool the other day and I don’t feel even a little bad about it. Actually, it was pretty gratifying. Does that make me a bad person?
In an attempt to fight genetics, my metabolism, and a lusty affinity for the Larry’s Ice Cream and the new burger place on the beach—both a short walk from my apartment—I’ve added swimming to my workout. Several days a week I make my way down to the St. Pete Beach community pool and swim a mile plus whatever else I can eke out of an hour in the pool.
I love the pool but it’s made me realize I’m turning into a cranky old lady. If you’ve spent any time at a public pool you know exactly what cranky old lady I’m talking about, because you’ve seen her there, swimming laps and grimacing at the carefree little children frolicking about the pool, haplessly enjoying their last days of summer and annoying the hell out of her.
I wasn’t always this way. When I was 18 I started lifeguarding and teaching swim lessons for the YMCA. I used to watch these old ladies swimming laps; they came in two flavors: the serious swimmer and what I called the make-up swimmer.
The serious swimmer had not an ounce of discernible body fat on her anywhere and had a freakish leathery tan that almost matched her strappy no-nonsense Speedo. I never saw her hair because she always wore a blue rubber swim cap pulled so tight her eyes met her hairline. She walked with the swimmer’s slouch that ensured her shoulders would show up about 30 seconds before the rest of her body.
The make-up swimmer showed up in a bathing suit that epitomized fashion in the early 60s. She wore bright red lipstick that bled into the lines above her upper lip and she kept a visor on while she breaststroked up and down the lap lane. Her hair- frosted and rolled within an inch of its life- never got wet except for her neckline and under her ears.
These two swimmers had one thing in common: they hated children. God forbid an enthusiastic youngster should cross their lap lane—even while they were at the other end of the pool—and I, as the lifeguard, didn’t immediately wrench the child from the pool and threaten him with death or exile to a communist country. They would make an exaggerated point of stopping their workout and drawing this clear breach of the rules to my attention.
As a lifeguard it was my most solemn and irksome duty to prevent children from having any fun. I would dutifully tell the kids to stay out of the lap lanes, don’t touch the lane markers, and for god’s sake don’t splash near the swimmers. After all, who wants to get wet in a pool? And while I understood the logic behind the “only lap swimmers in the lap lanes” rule, I didn’t get the big deal. They weren’t hurting anyone. How old and cranky did you have to be to mind a few kids in the lap lanes?
So when I saw these boys swimming underwater through my lap lane over and over and over again, I didn’t get annoyed, right? I understood that they were kids who wanted to have a good time and play some fun pool games, right?
You would think I’d achieved that level of maturity, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t think that when another child swam through my lap lane and took his sweet time about it that I put my head down and added a little burst of speed, hoping to plow into him, would you?
So when I finished my mile and put my foot down not on a pool bottom but a sweaty pre-teen little boy back and I yelped, it came as a complete shock to me when the next words out of my life were directed at the lifeguard.
“Could you PLEASE ask them to stay out of the lap lanes?”
Apparently you can hit “old and cranky” ate age 36.
I did not ask politely. I did not ask quietly. When the lifeguard yanked not one but three boys out of the pool and made them sit in time out, it made me smile just a little bit. I’m pretty sure all the lifeguards refer to me as the cranky lady with the frog tattoo and sloppy breaststroke kick. The kids know to not make eye contact with me because legend has it I can turn them to stone with just one look. When they have sleepovers they scare each other not with stories of the guy with hook for a hand but the frog tattoo lady who sneaks up on them in the pool and holds them underwater, where no one can hear them scream.
I’m not sure when I transitioned to cranky old lady (and, yes, to a 12-year-old boy, 36 is no different than 72, especially not when she’s yelling at you like you drank her last can of Ensure) but I’m pretty sure it’s irreversible.
In my defense, that one hour is my time, damn it. I don’t have the luxury of lolling about summer camp all day, and some days carving out that hour means sacrificing something else. Today it means not editing this column so that it’s funnier.
Believe me, if I had a couple hours a day to spend at the pool I’d probably be screwing around, too. But the only time I feel right is when I’m in the water, and for that hour all the noise in my head quiets and I can just keep swimming.
Until some unsuspecting happy-go-lucky child swims across my lane. Then watch out, kiddies, because Frog Tattoo Lady is going to get you.

I'm Confused

2009-07-21T18:16:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri

I’m confused. That’s really not unusual; I spend a lot of time confused about a lot of things. Most of those things don’t matter enough to try and work out, like why my cat can clean my dog but won’t let Calypso clean him, or why my freezer won’t keep ice frozen. These sorts of things work themselves out eventually; the dog seems OK with it and I can always get ice from a neighbor. I’ve gotten quite good at ignoring the voices in my head that ask those sorts of questions.
Other voices don’t go away as easily. They start as whispers and get louder and more annoying until I finally give in and try to work out what’s confusing me. It’s been like a Aerosmith concert in there since Gulfport city council told their attorney of 19 years they didn’t need him around anymore and hired local attorney Tom Minkoff as the interim city attorney.
I have no problem with Minkoff as a person—I actually like him—and no special loyalty to former Gulfport City Attorney Tim Driscoll, although I like him, too. I’m just confused as hell and, according to e-mails and phone calls I’ve gotten from Gulfportians as well as some city staff, I have good company.
I’m confused as to why three out of five council members think Gulfport needs a full-time city attorney. The Florida League of Cities seemed to think small cities don’t need full-time attorneys unless, like Destin or Sanibel, they have development issues. Does someone on council think Gulfport will have development issues someday soon?
I’m confused as to whether or not this was about Tim Driscoll. Mayor Mike Yakes said it wasn’t but council member Michele King disagreed. I attended a meeting some years back when Driscoll did lose his composure and yes, some of it was directed at King, but I also remember that she didn’t treat him so nicely, either. Since then, Mayor Yakes counseled Driscoll and several meetings later council discussed that they had seen an improvement in Driscoll’s performance. Even when King said at the special meeting earlier this month that it was about Driscoll, his behavior epitomized class. The cost comparisons don’t make sense to me; a full-time attorney seems like it’s going to cost the city more money, so it seems as though this move was about Driscoll. Did someone on council toy with Driscoll’s livelihood because he had a bad night a few years ago?
I’m confused as to how the city expects to afford a full-time attorney. According to the US Department of Labor's Occupational Outlook, municipal attorneys for local government earn a median salary of roughly $78,000. A full-time attorney will want benefits and the city will pay taxes, Medicare, social security, and unemployment on his salary, something they did not pay a part-time attorney. The city’s portion of this will equal about 33% of the gross salary, bringing his salary costs to $102,000. The current budget for legal matters, including an attorney’s salary, is $122,000. That leaves $20,000 for support staff. That translates to $7 an hour plus benefits for the attorney’s support staff. That leaves no wiggle room for office furniture, law books, or expenses. It also leaves no money for any court costs. Where does that money come from?
I’m confused as to why anyone thought hiring Minkoff was best for Gulfport. While Minkoff belongs to the City, County, and Law Section of the Florida Bar and the State and Local Government Section of the American Bar Association, he pays to belong to these sections. These sections do not turn away lawyers because they don’t have experience; if a lawyer’s check clears he can join. Minkoff does seem to have extensive experience with real estate law, which only makes sense if the city’s planning to get involved in the real estate business.
I have no issue with the man but I do take issue with the stewards of your tax dollars using them to hire someone with a marked lack of municipal experience on his resume. Why would Gulfport do that when it makes as little sense as using tax dollars to pay the head of the Building Department to run the city?
I’m confused as to why King would risk her reputation by making the motion to hire her personal attorney as the interim city attorney. Although Driscoll assured council no conflict existed, why would King open herself up to any allegations, whispered or otherwise, by changing the course of the meeting? Council convened to discuss how to hire a full-time attorney, not who to hire, in the interim or otherwise. What about getting Minkoff in the attorney’s position mattered so much that King felt compelled to bring it to council before they’d had a chance to consider other attorneys? What was her rush?
I’m confused as to why no one even acknowledged the protests of two long-time Gulfportians, Vice-Mayor Bob Worthington and Councilmember Judy Ryerson. I understand that some folks think Worthington has allied himself with Gulfport Water Watch and, as such, they will ignorantly dismiss everything he says, but what about Ryerson? She’s one smart cookie, and she knows Gulfport and finance and human resource issues. She made some logical points and expressed some real concern about the path the city was about to charge down (as did Worthington.) Why would council ignore her and Worthington?
Finally, I am not just confused but astounded at Mayor Mike Yakes’ vote to hire Minkoff. I know Mayor Mike has wanted a full-time attorney for some time now, but at the Tuesday night meeting he seemed open to several options. I am dying to know what happened between Tuesday night and Friday afternoon that he voted to charge ahead without considering any other options. Why would Gulfport’s mayor hire an interim city attorney who had no municipal experience when no one else even had the opportunity to apply for the job?
While the voices in my head won’t let these questions go, I don’t believe them and you shouldn’t, either. It’s just crazy talk: crazy to wonder if those three yes votes on council stemmed from anything that would constitute a Sunshine law violation, and crazier still to think that perhaps the city would leave the interim attorney in that position indefinitely. I have every faith in city council to replace the interim city attorney with a permanent attorney in a timely fashion. After all, there’s certainly no evidence that Council would let interim employees to remain in power indefinitely.
All the same, if anyone has any answers, the voices in my head would dearly love to hear them. I would love to be wrong about what I suspect. So, I think, would quite a few Gulfport voters. Is there anyone out there willing to answer?

You can contact Cathy Salustri at CathySalustri@TheGabber.com, or you can comment on Hard Candy at HardCandyOnline.Blogspot.com. All comments and e-mails become are the property of The Gabber.

Shelly and the Cat

2009-07-09T17:25:00.000-04:00

Let me tell you about Shelly and Cat. I met Shelly when I started writing for The Gabber. I was recently single, new to the freelance world, and shocked at the newness of my life. While I wasn't bitter I didn't exactly trust anyone, either. I didn't want any more people in my life. I was quite content with my dog, who never judged me and never let me down.
Somehow Shelly wove herself into my life. She suffered through my misadventures, including driving me to no less than three government agencies spanning two counties when my license gets suspended. Her girlfriend cooks for me and her closest friends welcome me into their circle and show me that there are people in the world you can trust.
As a rule I don't have a lot of friends, but these women- Stacey and Leah and Amanda and Maricris- are genuine, warm and funny. These are women you want to hate- they all look like prom queens and cheerleaders and the girls who made my life miserable in high school--but I cannot. It's like I'm living in some odd marriage of Sweet Valley High and Sex and the City. And of all these women, it is Shelly I rely on the most, Shelly who waited so patiently for me to unclench and accept her friendship.
Only two things aren't perfect: Leah has a weakness for cats and Shelly and Maricris decided to move to Denmark. These two things will intersect in just a few sentences.
Sunday night Calypso (my dachshund) and I head over to Leah's to say goodbye to my rock, my confidante and best friend. In my abject misery I barely notice the stray cat. Only when I take a seat on the front porch do I notice a new cat- a furry brown tabby- loitering. When Leah says she thinks someone must have dropped him off a few days ago and they simply cannot have another cat so they will take him to Friends of Strays, I feel a spurt of anger at how cruel people can be, but that's all.
Leah has a much bigger heart than I do; if I am the Grinch Leah is the Grinch after his heart grew three sizes. I am most assuredly not a cat person; give me a dog any day. You can play with a dog. You may, of course, play with a cat, if by play you mean “feed and clean its litter box.” Roll a tennis ball past a cat's nose and it will raise one eyebrow and look at you like you're trying to sell it Amway. If a dog is the happy immigrant’s child eating chicken with her fingers, a cat is the Protestant descendant of a Mayflower family who sneers at the dog for not knowing which fork to use.
I do not like cats.
Except this cat doesn't consider that when he saunters over to me. He puts his paws up on my seat.
"Hi," I say. "I don't like cats. Go away." In cat language this apparently means "jump in my lap and curl up and go to sleep."
I can't take a cat. I have no place for a cat. I do not, I remind my dearest friends, like cats.
"It doesn't matter, the cat likes you," Shelly says. Easy for her to say. Even if this cat jumped in her lap and started to lick her left breast, Shelly's moving to Denmark this week and can't keep it. Traitor. I look down at the brown ball of fur kneading my leg in its sleep. As much as I don't like cats I cannot conceive of simply opening a car door, putting a cat on the side of the road, and leaving it there as I drive away.
I have no litter, no litter box, no food, no carrier. I cannot take this cat. Leah's husband, Dan, slips into the house and returns a few moments later with a spare carrier, litter, litter box and food. My brain argues one last time that I do not like cats.
The cat opens his eyes and blinks at me, curls into a tighter ball, then rolls on his back in my lap. He stretches a paw up and touches my chin.
Cat is now curled up on my pillow in my apartment. His life is perfect except for Calypso.
Poor Calypso. She doesn't understand how anyone can look at her and not see her inherent cuteness. She has spent the past two days standing a few feet away from Cat (I really will find a better name), wagging her tail hopefully, and looking at him with big brown eyes. Cat hisses and closes his eyes. He doesn't seem to have the motivation to swat or move. It's like having a hound dog that uses a litter box.
I’d love to call Shelly and tell her all the funny Calypso/Cat stories. But I can't; she left for Denmark this morning.
Cat hisses again.
Calypso just wags her tail. She would like to make friends now, please. The hiss increasingly lacks fire. Calypso hopefully puts her paws up on the couch. They come nose to nose. Cat hisses again and Calypso barks, a shrill, puppy bark that I know means "Let's play." Cat closes his eyes. Calypso presses her nose to Cat's forehead. Cat’s eyes spring open and he hisses and swats at Calypso.
I hope Calypso hangs in there. I know what it's like, needing a friend so badly but hesitating to reach out. She's doing well to take a page out of Shelly's book, to just sit there, wag her tail, and wait for Cat to come around.
And as for Cat?
Cat may act aloof, but I know what it's like to be suddenly alone in a brand-new place. Even if it's better than anywhere else you've ever been, you're still having the time of your life without anyone else around. And while you aren't abandoned, you feel that way. It's hard to trust anyone.
Believe me, I get that, Cat.

Grandfathers

2009-06-11T17:30:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri

Albert lives on a boat. No, this is not another column about boats and mooring fields and city council. It’s about Albert. Well, it’s about Albert and my own grandfather.
Albert’s grandson is coming to visit next week and spend a few weeks with Albert, just the two of them on Albert’s little sailboat. And at the end of their time together, Albert’s grandson will be forever changed, although he may not realize it for another 30 years. Going cruising with his grandpa, watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, seeing the Green Flash, and, most importantly, getting to know his grandpa as a person—these will all leave Albert’s fingerprint on the path of his grandson’s existence.
Albert’s taken some time off work to get his boat ready, and while he’s certainly too close to my age to remind me of my grandfather there’s something familiar and touching about the way he’s talking about his grandson coming to visit, how clearly excited he is to have this vignette of time carved out for him and his grandson.
Grandpa Henry taught me how to play poker and gin (because every preschooler should know that a full house beats two of a kind) and would play just about any game I asked, even Monopoly (which every adult knows is the world’s most boring, never-ending, punishment-for-a-thousand-sins game). He took me to the pool and helped me perfect an underwater handstand (thirty-odd years later and I’m actually still quite good). He picked me up from school when I was sick and gave me ginger ale and McDonald’s. When I slept over he made me Howard Johnson Corn Toastees and slept on the couch so my grandmother and I could watch The Love Boat in their king-sized bed.
In another life Albert did some pretty amazing stuff out west. One day he realized that, as amazing as his life was, it wasn’t the one he wanted anymore, and drawing on some wellspring within that so few of us possess, he chucked it all, bought a boat, and changed his life.
As I got older I had less time for royal flushes, pool sessions and sleepovers but I still saw my grandparents regularly. I would sometimes bring them a pizza on Friday nights. I never thought to ask my grandpa anything beyond how he was feeling and what he was watching on TV.
By my twenties I’d realized that he wasn’t going to be around much longer. A few years before my grandfather died I gave him a tape recorder, some blank tapes, and a list of questions about his life. I knew he was a crew chief in the Flying Tigers but not much else. I wanted to know more but couldn’t be bothered to sit down in person.
While it’s not my place to tell anyone what to do—lord knows I’ve mucked up enough of my own life without playing around in anyone else’s- I hope like hell Albert tells his grandson everything about his life, even the stuff Albert might find boring. Even if the kid rolls his eyes; even if his grandson shoves an MP3 player under his nose and tells him to record it for him.
Grandpa Henry used to give me things—costume jewelry he found at garage sales, a button he made, coins he picked up during the war. He used to call me “Kit Cat” and sit on a bench at the mall for hours while my grandma took me shopping. As an adult I see these actions for what they are: indisputable proof that, even though he only said it to me once, he loved me more than any man other than my father ever will.
I know almost nothing about him.
After Grandpa Henry died we found two bronze stars that no one—not even my grandmother—knew anything about.
I never found the time to listen to those tapes while he was alive and after he died it took me a while to work up the courage to hear his voice again. I should have asked him those questions face to face, because my grandfather recorded shockingly little, talking about basic training and the places he was stationed in the war. He was particularly proud that, as crew chief, his crew only lost one man in the Pacific. I have no idea how he felt about going to war or if he was scared or angry or too ignorant to be either.
He did not mention the bronze stars.
I’m so proud to be his granddaughter and someone he deemed worthy of his love and affection (even if only by virtue of my DNA), so sad that he never told me more about his life, and so disappointed that I never thought to ask. I cannot do an underwater handstand without seeing his face and I cannot eat a Corn Toastee without crying. On the rare occasions I go to the mall and see an old man sitting on a bench, I am lost.
Over the next few weeks Albert will share his life with his grandson, who will remember that slice of his life forever. I envy them so much and I hope like hell that Albert’s grandson holds fast to every moment of his time with Albert, because whether he knows it or not Albert’s grandson will remember this trip when he’s an adult trying to navigate his own life and make the best decisions he can.
I hope that while they’re watching the sunset one night Albert’s grandson looks over at Albert and sees a man rather than a grandfather. I hope they annoy each other. I hope they argue. Most of all I hope that when it comes time to say goodbye Albert’s grandson sees Albert as a man with a vast store of experiences that shaped him into the grandfather who loves him enough to give him part of his life instead of the annual Christmas card and birthday check.
Because those are the good bits that only a grandpa can give, and you don’t get a second chance.

A Letter to St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker

2009-05-16T17:29:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri

Dear St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker:
Last month you killed eight-year-old Paris Whitehead-Hamilton.
You didn’t pull the trigger, but had the power to prevent her murder and others like them. Paris could still be alive if you had acted on the pleas of your residents but you chose instead to sit in the shadows and deny a problem in her neighborhood.
Gang-related gunshots killed a little girl whose only misfortune was living in Bartlett Park, that part of St. Petersburg you’ve steadfastly maintained doesn’t have a crime problem. It’s an area of the city where residents quickly learn the difference between gunshots and firecrackers, where anything not locked down gets stolen, and where everyone knows you can buy crack or pot. It’s an area of the city that you cannot possibly begin to fix without some admission of a problem from your office; an admission you have given neither the voters nor the officers who risk their lives in that neighborhood.
At Paris’ funeral her minister said that when she fell down righteousness stood up. He was wrong; righteousness is running scared and you’re leading the charge. If you weren’t you would walk Bartlett Park at night and see the environment where these children grow up. You would talk to the people who live in these crime-soaked neighborhoods and not rely on others to tell you how it is. You would have the courage to stand beside these residents—who would support you and your police officers if you only took one teeny tiny step toward righteousness and admitted it isn’t a great day in St. Petersburg if you live in Bartlett Park.
Your police force has some excellent officers. I know because I lived in Bartlett Park for three years and had many an occasion to call them. I knew it wasn’t a perfect neighborhood but curved archways, hardwood floors, pre-war construction and your Pollyanna speeches persuaded me that things really couldn’t be that bad.
When it became apparent that drug crimes and all their offspring, from petty theft to murder, had a tighter grip on my neighborhood than I initially believed, I trusted your well-worn line: “It’s another great day in St. Petersburg.” I believed you were sincere about changing things; I thought you would try and fix whatever problems the neighborhood had.
What I didn’t know was that you turned your back on your police officers and residents. I didn’t expect that when I interviewed you for an article two years ago you would deny a crime problem in midtown. I didn’t know you would flush an angry red and accuse me of spinning a story when I asked about crime in Bartlett Park. I have you on record that the people who took issue with the city’s approach to midtown represented a “not unhealthy conflict.” That’s where you stood two years ago outside the shiny new midtown Sweetbay. Where do you stand today? Don’t let your minions tell you where you stand; what do you believe in your heart?
Is the situation in midtown still “not unhealthy”? Is it “not unhealthy” that a little girl will never know the sweetness of a first kiss or the keening of a first heartbreak because you refused to answer the pleas of your residents? Is it “not unhealthy” that you failed to give a little girl a safe neighborhood to grow up in? It’s time to take the responsibility for what you wrought by placing public relations over the safety of St. Petersburg’s children.
Go talk to your police- not the chief but your patrol. Ask them if they knew of gang activity in Bartlett Park. Then ask them why they couldn’t stop it. Odds are all 500 of your officers aren’t incompetent. Maybe they couldn’t stop it because they are grossly understaffed for crime of the magnitude seen in Bartlett Park and the rest of midtown. As I understand it, your police force is short roughly 50 officers. If you can find the money for traffic control every time the city hosts a bike race or arts festival why can’t you find the money for officers to keep gangs from killing little girls?
It’s time to stand up beside the neighborhood that had to bury a little girl with her stuffed bunny. You’re a parent; can you not feel their pain? Can you still coldly look the media in the face and tell us it’s another great day in St. Petersburg? If one estimate of how often a Bartlett Park murder takes place is right, someone else will die violently there by Halloween.
That little girl’s blood is on your hands. The young woman she could have been, the world she could have changed, the lives she could have touched—their absence from this world is your cross to bear long after you aren’t mayor anymore. I hope you think about Paris’ family in church this Sunday, missing their baby girl. The little girl who still could be alive if only you had the courage to say, “I think we have a crime problem in midtown” instead of “It’s another great day in St. Petersburg.”
And I hope on Monday morning you find a way to stand up.
Sincerely,
Cathy Salustri

Mooring Field

2009-04-09T17:29:00.000-04:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri

I am one of those “boat people,” as I think someone called them at a Gulfport city council meeting a few years back. No, I don’t live on a boat and no, I don’t own a boat but yes, I love being on boats and yes, I believe Gulfport’s history is so enmeshed with the water that the narrow-minded dismissal of a mooring field by an elite few with a peculiar agenda is a bastardization of the political process and a stellar example of manipulating government for one’s own good rather than the good of the people.
Does that make my bias clear enough for everyone concerned?
Good.
See, I’m in a tough spot here. I’ve covered the mooring field since its first appearance as part of the city’s Comprehensive Harbor Management Plan in 2004 and will continue to do so. But I’ve reached my threshold of how many lies I hear about the marina and the mooring field before it becomes fodder for this column.
I crossed that threshold a couple of weeks ago at the marina’s flea market. Someone approached me and started spitting out lies about the mooring field and how the city would lose money and never fill the slips and the marina was mismanaged and… and, well, I’m certain they said more but I stopped listening.
I stopped listening because I heard it all before at election time and before you believe what any political hopeful may tell you to impress you with his or her knowledge of budgets and before you join the stampede to make the marina and mooring field the popular dog to kick, consider this:
The Gulfport Municipal Marina is the reason that every property owner in the city doesn’t pay higher ad valorem taxes. Although the elected officials suggest tax cuts and vote for lower taxes (when you’re an elected official it’s pretty much political suicide to do otherwise), the reason that Gulfport can actually do that is because the marina is the goose and the boats her golden eggs. As marinas statewide suffocate under a blanket of cookie-cutter condos the ones that remain reap the benefits.
Right now the city’s marina has a waiting list for its smaller slips, none of its larger slips available, and six or seven 40’ slips available. If we had a mooring field—when we have a mooring field—some of those boats could go to the mooring field, or maybe some of the boats in the marina would jump at the chance to move to a less expensive mooring and open up spots in the marina. As long as the marina’s turning away boats for lack of space no one can successfully argue that the mooring field would sit empty.
I don’t know how a mooring field could be unsafe, which is the other argument I’ve heard. Right now Gulfport has the equivalent of a white trash boat graveyard burgeoning just off the beach. Don’t misunderstand; some of the boats anchored on the Gulfport side of Boca Ciega Bay remain well maintained and securely anchored, but not all of them. One made it up to the beach this week, as I understand it. So those of you who oppose the mooring field on safety grounds, please tell me how a mooring ball properly secured to the bottom makes for a dangerous alternative to throwing all manners of anchors in a sand bottom and hoping they hold. Council heard and debated this numerous times before voting in favor of a mooring field.
Speaking of council, it has only one active opponent of the mooring field, Michele King, and while I like Michele very much, I’ve watched her allow emotion to cloud her thinking about issues when she feels passionately.
Does King want what she believes is best for Gulfport? I believe she does, but I also believe people with their own less-than-noble agendas try to manipulate her emotions for their means not related to the best interest of the city but perhaps their business.
These people disgust me, but I believe that King is smarter than they think she is and definitely smarter than any of them. I also believe she will do what the majority of her constituents ask of her rather than heed the bitter vituperative of a disingenuous few.
Other than that group I suspect the biggest opponents of the mooring field simply do not want to look out on the bay and see boats. These folks need to check their history and then look towards the future.
Gulfport started as a fishing town, and from Civil War blockade runners to the Aylesworths to Tropical Island Getaways, Gulfport’s legacy is built on the water. It’s what sustains the city now and what Gulfport can bank on in the future. If you reject the mooring field because you don’t want to look out and see boats, might I suggest that one of our fine Realtors put you in touch with one of their offices in Colorado, Iowa, or another such state?
Because, quite honestly, Gulfport’s a fishing village all grown up, but it’s still a fishing village and if you don’t get that, you don’t get Gulfport at all.

Boxes

2009-03-26T17:25:00.001-04:00

Little tiny boxes. That’s all life comes down to, really. You start it out in a hospital room—that’s the first box--and, eventually, most end in some sort of box as well. Every stop along the way is just another box.
Which is why it amazes me that the world’s economy tanked because of them. Change a few regulations about how people can finance their homes and all of a sudden—poof!—countries are collapsing, at least economically.
I never quite got the point of the boxes, to be honest. I think that’s because my parents made sure I never really had to worry about a home to keep the rain out and the love in. We moved three times in my life, and my parents haven’t moved since 1980. I always have a home with them if I need it (and if think my mother and I can live together without one of us killing the other.) Home ownership ranks right up there with food and water for my parents.
Now, me, I’m another story. I possess what most kindly call “nomadic tendencies” and move as the mood strikes me. In two decades since I left home I’ve moved 12 times, not counting college dorms. Thank god for the invention of the computerized address book because I’ve used up all the “S” pages in my mom’s paper one. I like to think of myself as steady but not necessarily stable. I’m not sure my mother would agree.
Needless to say, when you move on the average of once every 17 months or so, mortgages aren’t the smartest choices. I’m also staring down some negative credit repercussions and I’m self-employed, so I’ll stick to renting, thank you.
Moving is really just switching boxes, if you think about it. Most people trade up when they move, but this time around I chose a view over space: a place on the beach.
My “studio” apartment—all 220 square feet of it—makes me smile. Kindly put, I’m renting a charming studio apartment a few blocks from the Gulf. Realistically stated, I live in an oversized broom closet with a kitchen. Had I wanted a housewarming party it would have consisted of a conga line in and out again with my friends arriving in shifts.
But you know what? My front door opens up to a jasmine-lined courtyard and it takes me two minutes to get to the beach for the sunset. I’ve squeezed my dresser in my closet and college students would reject my refrigerator because it won’t hold a full case of beer. I don’t care; I can leave my door unlocked while I check the mail or walk Calypso.
Going from a two bedroom house to a storage shed with great light necessitated some streamlining, and I’ve done two things that stop most people cold: I don’t own a television or a microwave. This doesn’t bother folks as much as the next thing I’m about to admit:
I don’t want a television or a microwave.
Everyone wants me to have one, it seems. People try and give them to me on an almost daily basis. When my parents first visited they, ever the good parents who worry about their slightly off-center adult daughter who makes what they describe on a good day as “peculiar” choices, inquire politely if the lack of a microwave is an issue of money.
I glance around the broom closet, shimmy sideways past my mother to get to a chair, and tell them no, that it is an issue of space. I then ask my mother how to reheat something on the stove, whereby she hangs her head in her hands and moans something that sounds suspiciously like, “All that money for your education… college… wasted.”
It’s not just my parents in shock, although before today they were the only ones who knew I lacked fundamental knowledge on how to reheat things on a stovetop. It seems to bother people on some primal level that I can’t make a Lean Cuisine or watch House at will. These things—microwaveable dinners and first-run network programming—snuck into the American psyche somewhere in the last 50 years and became almost as unavoidable as death and taxes. I’m eating healthier and getting more exercise instead of letting my eyes glaze over in front of a TV, but that seems lost on most people; I may as well tell people I surrendered my roof or sink.
Not so long ago, really, I lived in a much bigger house with two living rooms and three bathrooms. The family room dwarfed my current apartment and I wanted for nothing tangible. Funny thing, though: I’ve steadily traded down every move since and I’ve found I love the process of streamlining, of throwing things out and seeing what I can do without.
I doubt I would have made this move had the economy not failed us. I likely would have sold my house when things got too rough and bought some other house somewhere else. But then I wouldn’t walk on the beach every night at sunset or learn how to reheat food the “old-fashioned” way or walk with Calypso down to the water in the morning.
No doubt I’d be happy wherever I ended up, but right now I love my little apartment, which I painted aqua and coral and lime and teal. Right now it’s home. Right now I don’t need a microwave.
I’m sure I won’t stay here forever. One day I’ll pack my stuff in boxes and put it in a different box: perhaps a box with more space, or maybe a floating box. I may even find a box with room for a microwave. I’ll paint over the pink and blue and green and yellow and pull the door shut behind me and surrender the keys and I’ll head off for the next adventure.
It’s just another box to me.

Horton Hatches the Egg

2009-02-26T17:23:00.000-05:00

After almost 20 years on the force, Gulfport Chief of Police Curt Willocks retired a few weeks ago, naming senior lieutenant Robert Vincent as his replacement. I wonder how many Gulfportians realize how hard Willocks worked to create a safe city and how much of Gulfport's national appeal has ties to that feeling of safety. Willocks' leadership had residents leaving their cars unlocked, their doors and windows open, and money lying out on the kitchen table. These little signs that people felt safe, of course, gave him fits and he preached like a minister at a Baptist revival tent to get people to stop doing these things, but under his watch most Gulfportians felt safe.

Armchair bureaucrats and political hopefuls complain that Gulfport's police force doesn't have enough to do. Perhaps. When I lived in Gulfport I felt safer than anywhere else I'd ever lived, and when I moved to St. Petersburg I lived in a neighborhood where the police had way too much to do. Trust me, you want the former. Parts of Gulfport lie no more than a block from some of the higher crime areas of neighboring St. Petersburg, yet Gulfport has yet to succumb to crack dens and trap houses. Yes, Gulfport has crime, but what you find right across 49th Street makes even the "worst" parts of the city look like a scene from Leave it to Beaver.

Given Willocks' success fighting crime in Gulfport, I wonder if Gulfport's acting city manager Jim O'Reilly will overturn his decision to let Vincent lead the pack. I like O'Reilly a great deal, but the whole situation whereby an acting city manager gets to choose the new chief of police evokes images of Dr. Seuss’ elephant Horton, who sat on Mayzie’s egg all winter while she took a much-needed break.

I believe council made a good choice in naming O'Reilly acting city manager --how long ago was that, now?-- but I also believe that council has their collective head in the sand about allowing this business of "acting" to continue apparently indefinitely. Why, I wonder, did council so quickly hire a new clerk but not a city manager? Is it because they are so arrogant as to believe they don't need a manager? Do they believe they know enough about finance and risk management and staffing issues that they don't need a city manager who has training in these areas? Is it because they so undervalue the position that they don't think it matters if it's done by an acting or a permanent manager? Is it to save a couple of bucks? I'm almost entirely certain that those scenarios couldn't possibly be the case.

Many people, including some on Council, don't believe the city manager runs the city, but a city manager knows more about the workings of the city and the citizens than any elected official. They're the clearinghouse for every thing that happens and they handle things that no elected official even knows needs handling much less is qualified to do. Don't misunderstand, Gulfport's council is passionate about the city and I believe that even the ones I disagree with vehemently care about the city. I just don't think they understand how insignificant they are to the workings of the city. They can say what direction they want to take the city but they cannot plot the course. That's the city manager's job. Council can say "go north" and they may know how to read the chart, but they don't necessarily know how to use a sextant or man the helm.

Let's get back to the police department. According to the city charter, if a council member even suggests a replacement for Willocks or any other city employee they're committing a 2nd degree misdemeanor (section 305), so that means the acting city manager gets to decide who can best lead a group of men and women who get paid almost nothing to put their bodies between a bullet and you, if needed. Willocks thought Vincent was the best man for the job.

Is it wise for council to urge O'Reilly to find a different chief right now? I have no doubt that O'Reilly acts with the best interests of the city in mind, but is he the right one to make that decision? If council continues to fail to make the only move they have the power to make, which is hire a new city manager or offer O'Reilly the job permanently, he will have to do things that he really shouldn't have to do. The city can't have all "acting" department heads, and O'Reilly possesses more than the average amount of intelligence, so very soon he'll probably try to stabilize the city.

How fair is it to expect O'Reilly to sit on this egg? When another city manager takes the helm, he'll be back on level ground with the people he's managed, but his decisions will linger. Not that many mission critical decisions get made over the course of a few weeks, but O'Reilly's manned the helm for months. What if the new city manager doesn't like O'Reilly's decisions for police or fire chief? Those positions are at the pleasure or displeasure of the city manager, so the new manager could simply let them go. Is that fair to the people O'Reilly chooses?

Most importantly, how long can council reasonably expect O'Reilly to act like Horton, taking care of someone else's egg? In the end, Horton hatches the egg and the baby bird looks a lot like Horton. The same thing will happen to Gulfport: it's going to have O'Reilly's mark on it. Council either needs to decide that's a good thing and make O'Reilly the city manager for keeps or start actively looking for a new city manager. If council chooses, to quote Neil Peart, not to decide, they still have made a choice.

Introducing Hard Candy

2009-02-05T17:18:00.000-05:00

Hard Candy
By Cathy Salustri

I like the enduring qualities of most hard candy and have a marked affinity for Wild Berry Life Savers and Apple Jolly Ranchers. I love that first burst of flavor that almost immediately settles down but sustains itself the longer you worry the candy in your mouth. Once it's gone you feel like you've gotten somewhere. Very high on the candy-gratification scale, hard candy.
We (and by we I mean I) hope this column will function in much the same way. After sitting through countless city council meetings as a reporter for The Gabber and, before that, working in local government, I've had some time to learn how government functions. You know what? It's messed up. Oh, don't misunderstand, I don't presume to try and fix it. That's your job, not mine. But sometimes I read our letters to the editor or comments overheard at council and I think that no one's talking about the real issues. Then I start to wonder if that's because no one knows about those issues. Why then, one might wonder, doesn't The Gabber report on those issues?
It's simple: reporting should be like Sergeant Joe Friday: just the facts. Oh, I'm not saying that's what we do. Hell, I'm not saying that's what any newspaper does. But it's what we should do, unless we're giving your our opinion in a column. We don't always manage that (I believe I tried to quote an eye-roll several years back), and the minute we add our own opinions into the reporting we lose credibility with you. Even worse, some people take our opinions as fact. But there has to be a place for the gray areas in the news, a place to talk about what might be going on or what we suspect. Because we, as reporters, really aren't smarter than you. We may think we are from time to time, and we often display a shocking level of arrogance, but we're just like you with one critical exception: we get more exposure. We go to the council meetings, every Friday in our story budget meetings we worry every last issue over and over like a watermelon Jolly Rancher, we pull public records, we make phone calls, we scour agenda packets, and then we have the luxury of a city government that will sit down and talk to us pretty much whenever we want. And then we have the added bonus, the bureaucrat or elected official who tries to tell us things "off the record." Sitting here right now, without even trying, I can tell you of four elected Gulfport council members who have told me things "off the record." Did those things show up in The Gabber? Not directly. Did they influence how and what I covered? Absolutely. What's more, I developed opinions that I couldn't factor into my reporting, and those opinions - just like a piece of hard candy - stayed with me longer than the nugget of information. So while I may occasionally cover city council from time to time, I don't feel like I'm the best person for the job. I get too aggravated and tend to make faces when I feel like we, as a city, are wasting our time or puffing ourselves up instead of dealing with real problems.
While that's not a great state of mind for someone reporting on city business, apparently everyone at The Gabber has grown weary enough of my bitter vituperative that they've decided I should let it all out in a column rather than at informal gatherings (my 20-minute riffs about public records go over swimmingly at the company parties.) Hence, Hard Candy. I won't always write about politics-how boring would that be?- but odds are you're not going to hear a lot about my new front porch or most recent trip to Key West, either. I think what we're all hoping for is some sort of balance between something that makes you think and something that makes you laugh, but either way it lasts a little longer than a piece of bubble gum.
Oh, and one last thing: I'm a little in awe that anyone thinks anyone cares what I think. I don't have gospel on offer here; I only have my opinions. I'm a writer, not a politician, and I do this for money, not love. I don't want to change the world. I want to go sailing and hang out with my dog. No little girl in the history of the world ever told her first grade teacher that she wanted to write about local politics when she grew up. Don't take that as complaint but reminder that The Gabber pays me to fill this space and, while I may believe what I write, it's my job to write something. To quote Douglas Adams, I'd rather be happy than right any day. I am often wrong. I hope this column encourages you to pay attention and go out and think for yourself.