Dear Tom,
Let me be the first to congratulate you on your seventh Super Bowl ring.
I am grateful you are playing in Florida now. It is a wonderful state. No, “wonderful” is not a strong enough word. Florida is love.
If you are at least relatively sexy you can make out with somebody every single night of the week when living in Florida. Granted, not every make-out partner will be the caliber of a Gisele (or a Tom Brady—wink) but it’s like how it is in football, you have to pass to the wide receivers who are open. There are good nights when, say, you’re on spring break in Panama City Beach and spot a first-round draft pick out of Alabama in the middle of a crowded dance floor.
On other nights the only option is the third-stringer you met in the parking lot of a shuttered K-Mart at two o’clock in the morning. It doesn’t matter what you’re both doing in said parking lot at that hour, or why your new friend was showing off a loaded flare gun just seconds before your lips met.What matters is that Aphrodite, Neptune, the vedic god Varuna, along with other gods of love and glamor (many of which reside in the gentle waters off Florida, in my opinion) brought the two of you together to share a magic moment.
Florida’s love is not confined to the erotic, of course. Have you ever noticed that every driver in Miami honks at every stop light? Some interpret this as a sign of rudeness, and they are correct. But it is rude in the way that families are rude, not too far off from yelling at a beloved cousin after she accuses you of eating her last cupcake. You both know you did it, but it is important to let every member of a family speak his or her personal truth – loudly. I imagine you run into this kind of situation in the huddle regularly.
In fact, Florida is that state that gives me the most hope for national healing. President Trump has retired to Mar-a-Lago. To be sure, Trump’s residence in the Sunshine State has not tempered him in any visible way. Who can say, however, that after spending several uninterrupted months in a tropical cocoon of self-regard he will not emerge as a more loving person? There is, after all, a guy in Palm Beach who still tows a Trump 2020 flag behind his Porsche Cayenne. How could a president, any president, not be mellowed out by such devotion?
A lot of Democrats are concerned that Ivanka will run for Senate. If she runs as a New Yorker this would indeed be a dangerous proposition. She would be a sinister high-society figure, a daughter of Dracula in Chanel. If she runs as a Floridian she could be a love goddess, the kind of everyday Aphrodite one encounters at the Gucci store in Naples, or the Gucci outlet store in Orlando.
I’m sure you can relate to this, Tom. If you haven’t noticed, people like you more as a Buccaneer than they ever did as a Patriot. Florida has a way of smoothing off the rough edges. ❏
Jeremiah Granden writes a lot of humor, horror, and satire, sometimes unintentionally. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
