Day Two of beach vacation. It’s sunny in Florida, I’m sitting on the beach with a blind 12-year-old girl. We have sand in all major orifices including the crevices between our teeth.
The gang’s all here. My wife is reading a book. Becca, my blind goddaughter, is eating sand.
“Well, I just wanted to know how it tasted,” Becca pointed out.
Becca is eating sand, of course, because she is from a North Alabama region called Sand Mountain, and they do different things on Sand Mountain.
This is not Becca’s first time at the beach, but it’s her first time being in Florida with actual Floridians.
My wife and I grew up on the Gulf Coast and thought it would be fun to take our goddaughter with us on a beach trip so we could introduce her to some uniquely Floridian pastimes. Such as, standstill traffic, highway construction, and DR Horton subdivisions.
So far the trip has been great. Yesterday, Becca had boiled peanuts. There was a learning curve. It wasn’t easy teaching a blind child to eat
boiled peanuts, but we eventually got there.
I taught her how to open the peanuts, how to suck the Cajun-spicy juice, and most importantly, how to wipe her messy hands on the seat of her shorts so that she had little orange Cajun handprints on her rear.
“Are you sure this is how I should wipe my hands?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem very neat.”
“You’re fine,” I insisted like any guy would.
Then we pulled over to eat seafood. We stopped at a genuine Florida fish house called Boon Docks in Panama City Beach. It was the kind of authentic place with tin roofs and seagulls soliciting handouts. There was a long wait.
When we arrived, the hostess pulled me aside and said, “Did you know there are orange handprints on the seat of this little girl’s pants?”
Becca was thrilled.
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