- April 19, 2024
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The way Palm Coast has grown the past 10, 15 years, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we live in a fantasy world.
At least that’s how the city’s first residents saw it — people like my parents and the neighbors I grew up around. For them, Palm Coast was the answer to all their problems. It wasn’t crowded or cold like Long Island or Jersey. It was undiscovered, theirs to build from the ground up.
It was pure. Not like where they were from.
“That was it,” my mom always tells the story — the straw that broke life in Lindenhurst, N.Y.’s back. “When the ‘adult video’ store opened down the street, your father and I knew it was time to go.”
My brother was about 4. I was 2.
But in the F-section, in the ’90s, the streets were quiet and safe and perfect for flashlight tag. The town was a pocket of old-world filled with expatriates and potential.
Nowadays, though, it’s different. Palm Coast is still Palm Coast, but it’s also the place with the huge unemployment rate. It’s where thousands lost a fortune in real estate. It’s where, more and more, gun arrests and meth lab busts are becoming unsurprising.
The city’s not exactly Potterville. But it’s not Bedford Falls, either.
Still, it’s exchanges, not statistics, which make a city what it is.
In the Publix checkout line, I stood behind a young woman who was pregnant, with another kid wedged inside her shopping cart, his legs dangling from the metal. She was bulging, huge, with tattoos on her neck and all the time in the world, apparently, judging from how slowly she filed her groceries onto the conveyor belt.
Of course, this infuriated me. I had places to be, important places — like my couch. If I didn’t get home soon, I ran the risk of not being able to squeeze in an episode of “The Wonder Years” on Netflix before my softball game. So obviously I was in a hurry.
But the cashier didn’t seem to mind. “I haven’t seen you two in here before,” she said to the woman and her friend, who I overheard (cough-eavesdropped-cough) was her step-sister.
The sister laughed. “This is our first day,” she said. “Just moved from Ohio.”
From the glacial pace with which she unloaded her cart, I used my skills as a dot-connecting journalist to surmise that, in Ohio, they either have extremely lax line etiquette, or they simply don’t appreciate the healing powers of Kevin Arnold and the gang after a long day’s toil.
I stared at the cart baby and flashed him the stink eye. I scrunched my eyebrows.
“Watch it, baby,” the look said. “I don’t know how they do things in ‘Ohio,’ but the cute act won’t fly here — got it?”
He chewed on something plastic, then winked at me — I swear he winked at me, just like he owned the joint.
As I grew more annoyed, I couldn’t help but notice the cashier grow friendlier. She wanted to know everything about these two girls: what brought them to Florida, how old they were, what they did for a living. And more, she actually seemed to care.
In the cashier’s sincerity, I couldn’t help but see my own impatience. In total, their dialog probably lasted 90 seconds. But that wasn’t fast enough for me, more a child of the new world than one of Palm Coast, the version of the city my parents dreamed up when they moved me here all those years ago.
Then, the cashier drove the final nail in.
She tore a receipt from the register and extended her hand to the girls. “Welcome to Palm Coast!” she said. And just like that, this city, with all its problems and its growing pains, became a town again. The weather outside was perfect. Mailmen whistled through their routes. Beside me, I swear I saw Mr. Rogers buying vitamins and milk.
