Tacked to my office bulletin board is a gift certificate to a beachside restaurant.
The sticky note attached reads: “Use for Florida anniversary.”
The anniversary — marking the day my wife and I moved from Chicago to Anna Maria Island — arrives Sept. 2.
Weeks earlier in 2005 I landed an editing job at a local newspaper and resigned my position at a paper in Chicago, where at my sendoff party an Elvis impersonator performed “Always on My Mind” and my coworkers gave me an iPod classic — advertised as “1,000 songs in your pocket.”
Connie and I left Chicago Aug. 29, 2005, the trunk of our Saturn packed with keepsakes and clothes and the back seat holding three cats in their carriers and aquarium fish in a bucket of water.
The day we left, Hurricane Katrina hit with devastating force on the Gulf coast in Mississippi and Louisiana.
So we traveled southeast, through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and into Florida, stopping to say “hello” and “goodbye” to family along the way.
I think of us traveling with real speed on the interstates but my datebook suggests otherwise. Now, when we make the trip from Chicago, we accomplish in three days what took five days to drive in 2005.
We made our arrival to the new Gulf Drive apartment in the late afternoon on a Friday, with time enough to settle the cats and fish before enjoying a steak dinner at a beach restaurant and then catching the first of many sunsets on Anna Maria Island.
I’d seen other sunsets in other states.
But that night was the first night I experienced what islanders call “sunset,” a communal happening celebrating the splendor in the sky with the souls on the sand.
A lot has changed since Sept. 2, 2005 — on the island and in my life, for better, for worse.
I came to The Islander about a year after my move to Anna Maria Island and since then I’ve helped publish about 780 issues of this paper, reporting on changes, developments, news.
A few weeks ago, the paper contained an obituary for Jay Erickson, the very man who handed my wife and I the keys to our Anna Maria apartment and, as our landlord, the first person to welcome us to the island.
He was a man who traveled and knew the world, an accomplished man.
He was a family man, with relations who established their own lives and made their memories on Anna Maria Island.
And he was an islander. He walked the beach, watched the sunsets, traveled by bicycle, talked about ecology and shook a fist at the three-story “monstrosity” across the street from our apartment that went up where a cottage once stood.
As I approach my next Florida anniversary, I’m thinking about then and now, tracing the change and looking for what’s the same.
“Sunset” is the same on AMI, even as every sunset is different.