I love driving around Florida in the winter, especially on a weekday, when the feeling of getting way with something is doubled.
Yesterday, Alligator Alley lived up to its name as gators darkened the banks of the canal like slugs. I drove onto the campus of Florida Gulf Coast University and spoke to my friend Lyn's journalism class. The talk went well, I thought, until two students waylaid us on our way to lunch and accused me of an unspecified grammatical mistake. They were, Lyn told me, the campus grammar police. They had only one pair of handcuffs, which they clamped on Lyn's wrists; for my shame they exhumed a black-and-white striped Alcatraz hat and placed it on my head.
The cell sat at the edge of a grassy oval, overlooking a fountained lake. We joined two other lowlifes (i.e., professors) and were kindly given small bags of snacks. Then Lyn's husband Jesse brought us lunch from Taco Bell. Old Johnny Cash songs played from a boom box. We would be incarcerated, I was told, until $75 in bail had been collected - all of it to go to the school's creative writing program.
Students wandered over. "Does this mean we don't have class?" one woman asked hopefully. "I'll get you out," one young man said, "if you give me an A."
We were out in time for Lyn's 3:30 class. (No one ever told me what my infraction had been.) Before I spoke, Lyn talked to the students about their upcoming Grammar Safari to the Outlet Mall.
Still savoring our freedom, Lyn, Jesse and I went to Skip One Seafoods for dinner. It was simple fish house with a painting on the outside wall of two shrimp - one pinching the other's behind - and under it the words: "The Freshest Shrimp in the Business."
Reading the menu, Lyn found an "its" with an unnecessary apostrophe. I tried to calm her, suggesting that, when it comes to restaurants, the worse the grammar the better the food.
Then plates of hush puppies, swordfish bites, grilled dolphin, grilled snapper, cole slaw, potato salad and fried shrimp arrived. I was right.
