A Frog From Naples

I don’t much care for Naples, Florida. New money goes to show off there in huge over-embellished ugly villas dripping with columns and fountains and protected from gawking tourists by custom electronic iron gates. Before Interstate 75, before the expanded Southwest Florida airport, before direct flights from Dusseldorf, Naples was a quiet town with a great beach and warm weather. Retirees from Proctor and Gamble’s Cincinnati headquarters went there to buy modest frame houses or sunny beach front condominiums.

However, the antiquing can be good in Naples for two reasons. Rich people die there and even richer people who are still living, wanting to play the mine-is-bigger-than-yours game, dump some pretty good things they had back home in order to buy the gilded rococo junk that passes for great local style. By the way, the phenomenon of dumping good-looking things cheap in order to buy expensive ugly things is bi-coastal. Check out Montecito, California if you don’t believe me.

We were antiquing in Naples the other day and ran across this iron frog. It’s certainly not expensive and not very old either, probably late 19th or early 20th century. However the frog has a great look and demonstrates very nicely one of the rules my wife taught me when buying what we in the trade call “smalls”. The rule is; whenever possible buy things that can serve more than one purpose.

Let’s look at the frog again with that in mind. One, it’s a cast iron string holder that needless to say can still, very nicely, hold a ball of twine. Two, itÂ’s a great decorative object in and of itself. Many people collect decorative frogs and this one is certainly unusual. Finally, the thing would be very handy at the bottom of a flower vase or sitting on a front hall table holding the stems of heavy blooms or dried flowers. See what I mean, it's a three-in-one object, a nice “small” indeed.

Boca Grande

Boca Grande, Florida is a tiny town on a skinny barrier island just offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. It lies south of Sarasota and north of Fort Meyers. The place is hard to find and expensive once you do since, for starters, it costs 4 dollars to go over a community sanctioned 50 yard toll bridge that reluctantly joins it to the mainland. The island prides itself on being low-key, rich and sufficiently well bred to ignore notables, like the Bush family, who regularly vacations there. Cocktails at anybody's house start promptly at 6:15 and if your liver is strong enough you can go to a different party almost every night. Boca Grande is quiet, envirnomentally concerned, has a new Pete Dye golf course, a well staffed health clinic, and world class fishing.

Old money families from the northeast were the first to find find the beaches and tarpon fishing to their liking and they had enough brains and taste to keep tall buildings away. As late as the 1980s if you didn’t own a single-family house you couldn’t join the golf club. This edict didn’t completely stop the building of condominiums but it made selling them to golfers more difficult. When the railroad quit running, a local philantropist bought the right of way and gave it to the town for a bike path. Years later the same man deterimined that the many bicicyles and golf carts using the path, were making it unsafe for walkers so he built a seperate winding foot path for them.

My wife and I don’t go to Boca Grande for business. Things are too expensive. We go to relax. For a while we even had a little house there that used to be owned by a local man who fixed fishing rods and reels.

The wind is blowing hard as I start to walk the eroding beach that starts at the end of 8th Street and runs north to the causeway that goes to the expensive little toll bridge. To my left, as I climb down the rocks, the sand has washed away completely. All that remains are the ragged remains of old wooden piers and the rubble of concrete barriers called groins that in earlier years were thought to be able to slow down the island's inexorable return to the Gulf of Mexico. The lack of beach is particularly ironic in this spot because it is directly in front of a hotel facility known as “The Beach Club”.

The ocean has smashed the piers and broken the groins all along the western edge of the island and it is clearly only a matter of time before this fragile sliver of sand gets cut completely through. A big hurricane could do the job in a matter of hours. Maybe it will take centuries. But it will happen.

A gale from the north picks up the shredded foam edges of receding waves and bats salty cotton against the concrete and rock rubble sea walls that protect the million dollar beach front lots. A fine fog of low flying sand scours my ankles. With each gust I imagine the land slumping ever so slowly into the ocean taking with it the mansions that now squat on the dunes. Their large expanses of insulated plate glass reflect the setting sun onto white linen trousers, silk dresses and cold, dewy glasses filled with vodka.

The sea doesn’t care. When the houses are gone, green turtles won’t have to contend with porch lights and beach parties as they drag themselves ashore in the humid summer night to lay their leather-shelled eggs. Little fertile bulldozers leaving life in the wet sea sand.