36. Flamingos at Play

Date: June 30, 1988
Age: 11

I am still here in St. Petersburg, Florida, at these same silly meetings. The hotel is tacky, and the food is poor. See you soon.
Love, Dad

My dad used to have a thing for flamingos. We didn't have any plastic ones with flapping-windmill wings rooted into our yard, but we were damn close. Perhaps it was my dad's way of trying to bring a little bit of South Florida into the Eastern Seaboard, that we had so much shit adorned with flamingos. (I don't even know if flamingos are native to Florida, but they are associated with the state.) My childhood home was relatively unscathed, but my parents had a beachhouse in Cape May, New Jersey, and it was festooned with this bird--flamingos on the doormat, kitchen clock, framed artwork, refrigerator magnets, potholders, and my father's "hawaiian" shirts, to name a few locales. A friend who came with me to Cape May for a weekend once, she and I went around the house and counted every flamingo. I think they numbered in the 40s. And this isn't a big house, so imagine 40 flamingos concentrated into a modest space. So it's a bit ironic that he's labeling a hotel as "tacky" on a postcard championing his favorite home decor of the day.

If you were to visit his current home in Coral Gables, you would never know that he once had a flamingo obsession--not only is it void of flamingos, but there's nothing tacky about his house in the slightest. It's filled with fine art, exquisitely decorated, and just waiting to be photographed by Architectural Digest. I visited for the first time three years ago, and it was truly jaw-dropping.