I was sitting in a small, cramped Tampa theater, listening to a tone-deaf little girl belt out “Beauty and the Beast,” when it happened. It washed over me like a wave, like an electric shock. A chill. A flush. A fever. An epiphany. A jolt. A surge.

Just like that, it happened — the rest of my life flashed before my eyes.

“This is the future,” I thought to myself as the song dragged on, “and it’s out of key.”
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For three generations I’ve had a family member call the Sunshine State home.

Some member of my clan has sat beneath a palm tree here, sweaty and happy, laughing at the rest of the world. The farthest north anyone has ever lived is Kentucky, where my dad is from. In fact, I like to say I’m more Southern than most southerners since my grandmother came to Florida from Cuba. Top that!

Growing up as a boy in Tampa, Jacksonville was considered up north for me (I thought it was a suburb of Boston), and when I moved to St. Augustine in 1991 to go to school, it was as if I had moved to Alaska by the way the temperature would drop. You even have to wear coats up here and once in a while you might see frost, like this past week. In Tampa, you’re lucky if your ice pop doesn’t melt in February.

But as I spent the week hunkered down in the worst cold we’ve seen all year, trying to convince my boss that I DID have a doctor’s note prescribing hibernation for the rest of the season, I watched bone-chilling clips of all those crazy lunatics living up in that frozen tundra called the Northeast.

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Is nothing sacred anymore? Is nothing safe? Is this world so dangerous that everything we eat, wear, touch and spend any quality time with is carcinogenic? And most importantly, am I going to have to start ironing again?

Say it ain’t so.

I read an article the other day that has the potential to impact my life in the most dreadful way. It talked about a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientific review panel labeling a chemical used to manufacture Teflon as “likely” carcinogenic.

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Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick …

Waiting for the baby time bomb to go off.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick …

That seems to be the story for the first couple of months of a baby’s life. That’s what I’m understanding, especially when you go out. My wife and I just recently got up the nerve to start venturing out of our cave with our new 5-week-old girl, Amelie. You get a bright shiny new sports car with leather seats and no teeth, and you want to show it off — the happy face, the good moods, the pretty girl, the adorable outfits. That’s natural. But it’s the Tyrannosaurus Rex that she sometimes becomes that gets me worried.
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