What About Bob?

The cockroach crawled out from under the refrigerator, tipped his hat and then retreated, smirking as he disappeared. When he came back an hour later, I named him Bob. He seemed annoyed. 

Afterward, I had a conversation about Bob with a friend who grew up in South Georgia. She asked, “Well, was it a cockroach or was it a palmetto bug?” 

Y’all-- I’m using “y’all” here because I need some credibility with the Southern crowd when I say this -- it doesn’t matter how hard you try to re-brand the giant flying cockroaches. No amount of lipstick is going to turn a cockroach into a palmetto bug. 

“Hey, they fly and they live in the palmetto trees, let’s try to rename them to make ourselves feel better.”

It’s not going to happen. They’re always going to be giant flying cockroaches to me. 

I was first introduced to a palmetto bug during one of my family’s vacations in Panama City Beach, Florida. In the 1980s, those one- and two-story mom-and-pop motels were still standing and stretched as far as you could see down the Miracle Mile Strip. 

We always stayed beachside, but that year the only rooms available had doors that faced the parking lot. It rained every day that week and one evening we were coming home from dinner and something large dive-bombed our heads. We didn’t see it but heard it come to rest in the palm tree outside our motel door. It was so upsetting that, like good Midwesterners,we all pretended it didn’t happen. We didn’t speak of it again until the next night when it was raining and my dad went to the dog track. 

My mom, my sister and I settled in to watch TV. Soon, I saw a giant cockroach broadcast on TV and then almost immediately realized it wasn’t being broadcast. It was on our TV. 

We were screaming on the bed and my mom was whacking the floor with a shoe and trying to remain calm. She told us she killed it. We wouldn’t find out until years later the giant roach had crawled under our bed. She lied to us because she realized we wouldn’t sleep if we knew. It was probably the most important parenting decision she ever made. We never stayed in a room facing the parking lot again.

My husband and I got married on July 10, 2004 and a few days later we headed to our honeymoon in Savannah, Georgia. (Yes, we were Yankees. Only Yankees would consider going to Savannah in July on purpose.) 

We drove into town and I saw a woman who was waiting to cross the street had hiked her long flowing skirt up past her knees and wondered why. Then we stepped out of our air-conditioned car and my lungs seized from trying to breathe in water. Even those summer vacations in Panama City Beach as a teenager hadn’t prepared me for that kind of heat and humidity.

Our first night in town we went on a midnight ghost tour, and I wore jeans – because in my Midwestern mind it was dark and I assumed it had cooled off. The heat index was in the high 90s and I immediately regretted my outfit. 

As we were walking down the sidewalks of haunted Savannah, I heard a rustling in the leaves on the ground. It was quiet when we stopped, but when we began walking, the rustling sound started back up. 

I asked someone about the noise. A woman from Lakeland, Florida said this was the sound of the palmetto bugs running under the leaves. I was horrified. 

The woman said roaches are common in Florida and she had gotten them inside her peanut butter jar, even though the lid was screwed on tightly. You can imagine my disgust but also terror, because in a couple weeks we were moving to Florida. (I had already found an email from one of my husband’s new co-workers about alligators and “spiders as big as your palm.” I almost didn’t go through with the wedding.) Cockroaches in the peanut butter jar? Nope. 

The rest of our vacation was spent in the pool and napping, because it was just too hot to go anywhere. Three days into our trip, I found myself standing on a street corner, waiting to cross. My hand reached down to the hem of my long flowing skirt and I pulled it up above my knees. I understood. 

A few weeks later we would pull into Tallahassee in the U-Haul truck, and when we opened the door, I thought we’d moved to Hell – it was that hot. Who moves to Tallahassee on July 29th? Yankees. 

Two weeks after we moved in, my husband took a business trip, leaving me behind. We lived in an apartment and the maintenance man had briefly left the front door open.  

I turned around and saw it on the carpet crawling away from me. It had to be two-and-a-half inches long. I gasped. I grabbed a shoe just like my mom all those years ago in PCB and  pounded and pounded on it. Nothing happened. I think I heard it laughing as it crawled under a large piece of furniture. 

I went into hysterics. I marched down to the rental office and two people said, “Hi, how can we help you?” and I lost it. I started sobbing and said something like: “There’s a huge cockroach in my apartment and I’m not from here, and where I’m from, only dirty people have cockroaches.”  

I am aware of the difference in German cockroaches and the giant flying cockroaches. I had German cockroaches twice in apartments back in Illinois and I don’t consider myself dirty. (Cluttered perhaps but not dirty.) But we had just moved in. It was hot. I was delirious. I was a Yankee. The people in the office sent the bug guy up later that day.

I called my best friend in Chicago at work and said it was an emergency. I told her what happened and wondered how I was supposed to sleep at night. 

She said, “Well, you should sleep with the lights on because I hear they don’t like light.” 

I replied, screaming, “It 2:30 in the afternoon and it didn’t seem bothered by the daylight!” 

She replied, “I know, I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” 

Worst of all, the next day I realized how silly I must’ve seemed and went down to the rental office to apologize. I walked in and just like the day before they said, “Hi, how can we help you?” I told them I felt silly about yesterday and I was sorry,and they said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

I reminded them of the cockroach rant, and although they wouldn’t make eye contact with me, they pretended like it hadn’t happened. They acted like they didn’t recall me standing there snot-nosed, telling them how my husband had left me in this god-forsaken hot-as-hell and how-do-you-keep-your- hair-straight-in-this-swamp-air town. They never did acknowledge what happened. I guess there are some things Southerners have in common with Midwesterners.

After living here for 16 years I have learned a few things. A native Floridian told me the palmetto bugs live in the cast iron plants, so whenever I move, the first things to go are the cast iron plants and the palmettos. 

I’ve never heard the roaches crawling in the leaves on the ground. I think in Savannah it was a symptom of a tourist town with all the bars and restaurants and dumpsters.

I’ve learned about roof rats, and although I’ve never seen a banana spider as big as my palm, it’s only because I don’t go outside in September on purpose. 

A healthy fear of gators keeps me away from all bodies of water outside the ocean. 

I know every house will have bugs because the winters aren’t cold enough to kill anything. 

The three things I know for certain are: I will always be a Yankee, I will always screw my peanut butter lid on extra tight,and no matter how many marketing specialists you bring in to change the name, they will always be giant flying cockroaches to me. 

There's more than corn in Indiana

Last week I heard that Indiana Beach is closing down after 100 years. I was really sad but not for the reasons that others might be. I only visited Indiana Beach once as a teenager but I grew up watching a lot of TV, and that jingle performed by an animated crow from the Indiana Beach summer commercial would stay in my head far into the new school year. “There’s more than corn in Indiana…Indiana Beach.” 

 My family took vacations every summer starting when I was a small child but even though Indiana Beach was located on Lake Shafer just a couple hours over the border from where I grew up in Central Illinois, we never vacationed there. Our first family trip was to Bemidji, Minnesota where my dad used to take fishing vacations without us. The year he took us with him was a disaster but that’s a story for another day. I don’t think my dad took another vacation without his family after that year. We went to see relatives and made educational stops like the U.S. Space and Aeronautical Museum and even took some short pit stops at smaller amusement parks. One year we went to both King’s Island and King’s Dominion on our way to Richmond, VA to see my grandma’s relatives. I’m sure that was not a fun trip for my parents. One year, my dad wanted to stop at Gulf Shores, Alabama because the only time he had visited the ocean had been there when he was in college. After that day my dad decided the rest of our vacations would be spent on the beach, lounging and reading and riding the surf on our inflatable rafts in Florida, but we never went to Indiana Beach together as a family.

 But the memory that I have of Indiana Beach still includes my dad. I was probably 17 years old and outside of seeing my dad at the school where I attended and where he taught English, our time spent together at home was fairly limited. My dad was the sort of guy who was uncomfortable with emotion and filled the quiet and awkward spaces with jokes and laughter. If my sister or I started crying, his eyes got big and he went quiet and just walked out of the room leaving my mom to handle things. He once pretended to be sleeping after I threw up on my parents’ bedroom carpet while my mom cleaned it up in the dark. When I cried after falling down, he would tell me not to be such a baby while he dabbed my skinned knees with peroxide. He knew how to work a room full of people but just didn’t do well one on one with his family.

 Fast forward to the summer I went to Indiana Beach for the day with my high school best friend. Indiana Beach originally started as a man-made lake beachfront with waterskiing and wading. By the time I was a teenager, it had morphed into a small amusement and water park. It was the first time I had seen a Lazy River ride and I thought it was the greatest thing ever invented. As a small town kid who grew up with farm kids riding tractor inner tubes down creeks, the Lazy River ride provided hours of sunning and lazing about without the dangers of creek life, and without having to walk all the way back to the house when you were tired. I spent that day riding rides and lying in the sun and eating all the junk food I could get my hands on. And then I went home feeling really sick. My parents were already in bed when I got home and I was downstairs reeling with one of the worst stomachaches I’d ever had with no relief in sight. My dad came down to the kitchen and heated up a mug of water in the microwave. He put a teabag in and added some honey and sat with me while I drank it, telling me it would make me feel better.  He acted as if he had invented hot tea with honey and was trying to market it to the masses. The drink didn’t work but that moment was one of the most touching and meaningful gestures that my dad ever made toward me. The fact that he was able to sit there in silence, not cracking jokes and not feeling awkward in the silence and not being uncomfortable in my pain and sickness. It was a real dad moment. 

 When places like Indiana Beach close down, it not only affects the people who spent every summer there or the local economy. Its reaches are far beyond that. The ripples of that lazy river ride reached out over the border, through the cornfields and into the kitchens of families who don’t know how to communicate with each other. 

 A couple years after my dad died I took a group of teenagers to Indiana Beach for the day as part of a court ordered supervision program that I managed through the local probation office. We rode rides and ate junk food. I specifically remember riding one of those large Viking boats that goes back and forth and I remember screaming the whole time and trying not to vomit. At 26 years old, my center of gravity had changed and I couldn’t keep up with the teenagers around me. I don’t know if any of those kids remember that day. I don’t know if they remember how funny they thought it was to see me lose it on that Viking boat. I don’t know what their lives were like when they went back home that night. I’m guessing many of them didn’t have a moment with their parents like I had experienced with my dad. But just maybe one of them did. And maybe if that memory lingers with them until they’re as old as I am, just maybe there is still more than corn in Indiana.

Where Books Go To Die (originally published July, 2017)

The last book I read was culturally significant but certainly not a page-turner. It was not light summer reading and now that we’re in the throes of summer in North Florida, I need something fun and familiar to read at night. It is about this time every year that I grow extremely homesick for Illinois and I was feeling a bit nostalgic so I picked a book that I’ve already read several times and one that reminds me of home. “Straight Man” by Richard Russo. The reason I get homesick at this time of year is mostly due to the extreme humidity coupled with the heat. As we say in the Midwest, “It’s not so much the heat as the humidity.” I feel like a fish out of water or more accurately, a human in water. It’s something I’ll never get used to and for about five months out of the year I feel that it’s best to stay indoors as I long for the cool breezes that are generated after a Midwestern rainstorm. After it rains in Tallahassee you can see the steam rise up from the pavement and things go from bad to worse.  I still see people mowing their lawns at noon or jogging at 3:00 in the afternoon when the heat index is 105 and I just don’t understand this species of humans called Southerners. Short of moving back home, I’ll just curl up in the air conditioning with a good book and long for days gone by.  

Illinois cornfield near my hometown

During my first semester at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, I showed up for Freshman Composition just like every other student. I was greeted by a particularly angry graduate student who seemed to hate our very existence every day of the week, or at least the three days a week that we were in his classroom. There was a lot of yelling and a fair amount of belittling. I just accepted this as the way things were but someone else (or several someone elses) must’ve complained because one day about seven weeks into the semester we showed up to class and he wasn’t there anymore. In his place stood Beckie Hendrick with her southern accent and her Sigourney Weaver hair and she was telling us that she was now our instructor and that we were starting the semester over. Our grades were being thrown out and we were getting a do-over with her. Needless to say, I liked her so much that I signed up for her American Literature class the next semester. She showed up as Beckie Flannagan as she’d gotten married since I had seen her last but otherwise, she was the same.

On the first day of American Literature, Beckie asked us to turn in a piece of paper with our name and what kinds of things we liked to read, and then she said the most amazing thing. She said it could be a comic book or the newspaper or whatever we really enjoyed reading. She wasn’t looking for the classics, just honesty. Since I had been sneaking into my dad’s room when he wasn’t home and reading his books chapter by chapter since I was nine years old, I wrote down Stephen King.

One day Beckie Flannagan brought in a novel called “The Risk Pool” by Richard Russo and she told us that her professor had written it and that we were going to be reading and discussing this book. Outside of my own dad’s high school rhetoric classes where we dissected mostly ancient writings such as “Beowulf,” and maybe “The Great Gatsby” in another high school class, I had never discussed a book before. I had only read them. Here we were talking about characters and plot and writing and all things pertaining to a book that was not only set in my lifetime but was also written right there at my university by my instructor’s professor. Everything felt so accessible. And then there was Beckie Flannagan herself. Isn’t that just the greatest literary name you’ve ever heard? She was smart and kind and funny and maybe I’m reading too much into this but I think she may have been the first feminist that I knew. She never told me that she was a feminist but just the fact that she had taken over the classroom from this horrible man my freshman year and turned everything around pretty much sealed the deal for me. I loved her.

I never saw her again after that semester but when I went home that summer with “The Risk Pool” in hand, my dad saw it and showed me that he had Russo’s first and third novels and so we exchanged them and each read the books we hadn’t previously read. He told me the third book was being made into a movie with Paul Newman and I really felt this was a rare moment of connection between my dad and I, standing in his basement of books, discussing books. I remember going to see the movie with him and we both left mumbling the age-old, “wasn’t as good as the book.” Dad died in 1997 before “Straight Man” came out in paperback, which means he never got a chance to read it unless he borrowed the hardcover from the library as he rarely spent the money on hardcover editions. It definitely wasn’t in his collection when he died. I know he would’ve loved it. Even though he was a high school teacher in rural Illinois, I know he would’ve related to the main character’s dry humor and his struggle with academic life at a small college in Pennsylvania.

Richard Russo had moved on from SIU-C when I was still in attendance there and long before “Straight Man” was written but this passage from the book always stops me in my tracks when I come upon it.

        “On my way back across campus, I see Bodie Pie slip into Social Sciences via the back door and remember she wanted to talk to me, so I follow, risking the possibility that I’ll get lost in the building’s legendary labyrinths. Social Sciences, the newest building on campus, was built in the midseventies, when there was money for both buildings and faculty. According to myth, the structure was designed to prevent student takeovers, and this may be true. A series of pods, it’s all zigzagging corridors and abrupt mezzanines that make it impossible to walk from one end of the building to another. At one point, if you’re on the first floor, either you have to go up two floors, over, and down again or you have to go outside the building and then in again in order to arrive at an office you can see from where you’re standing. The campus joke is that Lou Steinmetz has an office in the building but no one knows where.”

It is obvious to me that he is writing about Faner Hall at SIU-C. This is where the English department was housed and probably where Russo’s office was located. This is the building where the previous classes that I wrote about took place. As a student, if you received your schedule and you had a class in Faner Hall, you always went the day before classes began and tried to find your classroom. It usually took about 30 minutes to figure out which door you should enter and which stairway you needed to take even if you’d had multiple classes there before. We usually went in groups so no one got lost, as if we were on a dangerous hiking expedition. We were also told that it was built after the Vietnam War protests in the 1970’s that burned down the old campus. There was a monument next to the building in homage to Old Main. It was considered a “riot proof” building. Russo describes it perfectly. We HATED it. I wonder if Russo had become nostalgic about that building as he writes about it and about the hilarity of the tensions and hierarchy of academic life.

During my junior year at my summer job at the university library, I would see the graduate student from my class who lost his teaching job. We were both working on the 7th floor in the archives, or as the long term employees called it, “where the books go to die.” He seemed the same to me although to be fair, no one who worked on the 7th floor seemed happy. The students weren’t allowed to talk to each other and we had to ask to use the restroom. I thought it was the perfect place for him to live out his days.

After having been to graduate school myself and briefly teaching as an adjunct instructor, I start to think maybe there was more to that angry graduate student than I was aware of. Having spent a small amount of time in Academia, I am now aware that removing a graduate student from a teaching assignment is no small feat. We never asked any questions about where he went or what had prompted his removal. We just didn’t care. We were happy about who The Universe and the English department had plopped down in his place and we didn’t rock the boat with questions for fear that things could change again.

God help anyone who ever had to grade anything that I wrote. I once took an honors class where all we did was read Tennessee Williams plays and then watch them in movie form and then we had to write a couple of papers. The only reason I was in the honors program is because I was an art major and got really good grades in all my art classes. The other students in class were science majors who were taking a break by being in this honors class. They thought I was inferior and they certainly let me know. I remember the professor used to give my papers back with comments such as, “Your writing is awful” written in red ink. I know that I overuse commas and sometimes change tenses mid-sentence. I am aware that art is my strength. Out of all of the classes outside of the art department that I ever took as an undergraduate student, Beckie Hendrick Flannagan is the only instructor’s name that I still remember these 27 years later and I only remember one thing she told me and it was on that very first day of American Literature. It doesn’t matter what you’re reading as long as you’re reading. I can still hear her voice in my head with every page I turn. 

-Julie