Gator For Lunch

  Summer is a great time to sit back and enjoy a leisurely lunch with family and friends. Disastrous restaurant experiences may be a dime a dozen but let me share my tale of woe. Mine is a little different. The service was terrible, but the decision to leave was not because we waited a mere hour for our food. We left because I had an encounter with something that strikes fear into my very soul, a description which demonstrates why I write a humor column and not adventure stories. My son was visiting from New York and for lunch we spontaneously chose a local Asian restaurant with a beautiful lake view. I asked to sit outside, and we moved our table from the deck to a grassy bank to be even closer to the water.

       Then terror struck. (I am getting better at this.) My son said, "Oh. Look at the young alligator swimming to the bank. People must throw food to him from the deck. He is just a teenager." Then, I said, "I hate alligators." Big mistake. According to my son's theory, my negative comment was intuitively understood by the young gator. Next, I look teen gator in the eye and again I say, "I hate you." My son responds with, "Mom don't do that." The rest is sort of a blur but somewhere in the timeline of what followed, I challenge the gator, my son comments again on my negative vibe and the monster gets out of the water and starts up the bank. Have you ever seen me move really fast? Carrying a pot of tea? I was past the deck and inside before you could say, "Here comes the gator."    

       Have I ever eaten gator? When people eat alligator, it is compared with chicken. No, I have never eaten gator, or possum, or snake. I know, I am picky, picky. Because people don’t raise alligators for food, they have to be caught in the wild. Driving behind a slow-moving pickup truck in a Florida resort town, I wondered, ‘What’s in the back of that truck?’ It looked like a pile of old tires. It was a dead gator. Ooh nasty.

        Florida has beautiful lakes, but they all go to waste because they are filled to the brim with man eating, carnivorous alligators. So sad, if we were in the North, says this Yankee transplant, there is no swimming like lake swimming. I live near Payne’s Prairie. Payne’s Prairie was once was a lake but it is now filled with gators meandering in their clumsy menacing way from water puddle to water puddle. I am told that there are wild horses, but I have never stayed long enough to see any.

         My hatred of alligators is a little tricky because I lived in a Florida college town that is the unofficial Alligator Capitol of the World. The University of Florida with great pride refers to itself as The Gator Nation. All University of Florida graduates from the dawn of civilization to the end of time are members in The Gator Nation. Their school loyalty exceeds extreme patriotism. Gator images abound. My peers, the past grads who are now in their 60's and 70's happily wear Gator Nation caps and drink coffee from Gator Nation mugs. Do I conform? Only at football games when the crowd chants, “Go Gators.”