OHIO LAYERS
I had a custodian who enjoyed the weather channel and thought the end of the world was coming every day, via hurricanes or snowstorms. I don’t think she ever went outside.
Another employee was also fixated on the weather. He did a lot of indoor apartment painting and wanted every day to be 74 degrees like Costa Rica, so he wouldn’t sweat.
A neighbor of mine asked if I had a winter place in Florida.
I was surprised. I’m not there yet — retirement in Florida.
But I know a klezmer musician — a bushy-haired baby-boomer clarinetist — who is moving to Florida and taking up golf. So anything is possible.
Maybe my friend will play a freylekhs (hora) by the water fountain on the 16th hole. (Mickey Katz did that. His band got paid to surprise a golfer on his birthday.)
Some Clevelanders complain about the cold. Arizona versus Florida. That is the discussion.
My wife, Alice, and I went to a wedding in Florida last spring, and a guest asked Alice, “Are you still in Cleveland?” Meaning “Are you nuts? Do you like gray skies, slush and potholes?”
Another Cleveland woman at the wedding said, “The day I hit sixty-two I had to leave.” She spends the winters in Scottsdale, Ariz. A third Clevelander, originally from South Africa, preferred Florida over Arizona. “I like the ocean,” she said.
Last month, at a gig in Florida, I ran into a waiter who had lived in Florida and Arizona. He said Arizona’s summer is unbearable. Florida’s is bearable.
What about Ohio? Ohio-with-layers in the winter and Ohio-without-layers in the summer.
