Going Native

Ladies and gentlemen, I will now become a Florida "NATIVE."

My family - many of them gun-toting champions ENB-10431 FLWeekly 1/2 Ad 3/29/07 of the second amendment - never followed cow paths or tourist trails to the end of the line here to give me an easy title, like the parents of some other natives, also gun toting. I didn't even get here until I was 40, and that was without a gun or a pickup or a birthright.

But that's over now. Henceforth, I will designate myself NATIVE just because I want to, and to hell with the past. That's the American way.

And why not? Last week I counted no less than three "NATIVE FLORIDA" bumper stickers, all of them on pickups. I wondered: Why should an accident of birth tag me with any particular label? If I have to shave my head, plug my cheek with tobacco, drive a Ford 350 with a "BEEF" bumper sticker and shoot hogs at dawn or dusk, I'll do it. Well, maybe I'll do it.

(By the way, not one of the drivers whose vehicles sported a NATIVE FLORIDA sticker looked anything at all like a Calusa or even a Seminole Indian, but how can you judge a book by its cover? I'm sure they were really, truly NATIVE. I trust them on that because their trucks are so big.)

I can say, "How YOU doin'?" with the best of them. Or maybe I can buy a NATIVE membership - if you know where, let me know. I could lie, too. Just sport a NATIVE FLORIDA bumper sticker like a guy who takes communion without ever converting to the Church.

My credentials are poor, though. The fact of the matter is, when my father was alive he refused to come to Florida. I lived in a house on the Caloosahatchee River with a spare bedroom and bathroom for three years in the mid-1990s, first with a girlfriend and later with my oldest son, Evan (London born). Daddy wouldn't get near the place, sunshine or not. And that was even though my mother asked. But she didn't insist, so they never came, together.

A New Yorker by upbringing, my father went west on the GI bill a few years after World War II and met my mother, who grew up on a cattle ranch 30 miles from the nearest town and 9,000 feet above the nearest beach, in the Colorado mountains. He met her a long ways from cows, though, at a classical music library in Denver.

Daddy was native to Bach, Beethoven and fist fighting, along with hunting and fishing. Mother was native to evenhandedness, horses, and men who wore cowboy hats and boots so they could work a big cattle ranch - not so they could sell real estate or trucks or look good at a Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q restaurant.

The first time daddy came to the ranch to meet my mother's parents and her brothers, he managed to bury their powerful Dodge Power Wagon in door-deep mud three miles from the ranch house.

That was a day after his little Hillman, native to a small European island, died at the top of a big hill above the house (a log

cabin with a pumphouse and an outhouse,

even when I was young). He had to be rescued 4:01 PM Page 1 that day, too.

Embarrassing as his first visit proved to be with the Colorado natives (not counting the Ute Indians, who had summered across that very range), Colorado became his place. But he never thought himself a NATIVE, or wanted to be.

When I finally arrived in Fort Myers in 1994, I became quickly aware of my status as an outsider. Daddy was an outsider, too. He didn't consider himself native to much of anything, except the United States of America. His NATIVE was the native right of every person to be treated the same way, and the native right of all people to worship as they saw fit, and the native right of each individual to live in a space that others could join only by invitation.

Every woman or man his own country club, in other words, regardless of race, creed, color, sex, income, stock options, family blood lines, geographic heritage, or size of pickup truck. Groucho Marx might have been okay with it.

Daddy believed in helping old people and poor people and young people with a vote. He sported a Depression-era mentality that placed FDR somewhere in the celestial orbit of the dippers, or even at the pinnacle, with the North Star and Abraham Lincoln and the Noonday Sun. So I guess he was a native liberal.

His kind of NATIVE was, to paraphrase Ross MacDonald's definition of Americans, a great counter-puncher. Against enemies who sought to kill Americans, for example, he proposed saying little. Instead, he wanted to employ overwhelming weapons with a ferocity that he could and did, on occasion, practice personally in the real world.

He was NATIVE to toughness and acts of kindness toward strangers - the time he saw a man pull a knife on a woman in city traffic, and ran the son of a bitch down; or the time he stepped into the center of a bloody car accident when others froze to take care of a dying guy, while I watched; or the time later in his life he helped my uncle, who had gotten old, lift a branding chute onto the back of a truck after daddy had broken three ribs a day or two earlier, without so much as a grimace or a sound.

When I first came to Florida, my little brother gave me his car. To celebrate with a roots hurrah, he affixed a bumper sticker that said, NATIVE COLORADO.

When I moved onto the river here, my neighbor planted another bumper sticker on that set of wheels: UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS, it said. That's another kind of NATIVE, another state.

Although I'm proud of both states, both bumper stickers embarrassed me. Don't brag about yourself, is my view. I'm native to it, like my father and mother.

But I also want to be NATIVE FLORIDA. So how do I perform this hat trick? I'll do what my two littlest boys do - even with their native birthrights - and imitate my wife, Amy Bennett Williams. Daddy never got to meet her, but he would have recognized that she and he came from the same place.

And she's pure Florida, a NATIVE not by imperative or birth (that was Illinois), but by love and choice.

Her Florida is a state of both principle and geography. I'll call it the 51st State. Maybe I should have that bumper sticker made up, then slap the thing on her car: "NATIVE FLORIDA, 51st STATE."

Look for it on local roads soon. Be proud. You're probably a native, too. n