I arrived in Pensacola on Wednesday evening and spent three full days here.(including New Year’s eve and New Years day. My time was basically broken up into three experiences. 1) I went to the Pensacola Beach every day and sat in the dog area. Pensacola has two sections of a long beach that are marked as dog friendly but even there the dogs are expected to be leashed. One day it had just rained and the beach was pretty empty and the three other people there all let their dogs run free with Jerry but on other two days Jerry mainly sat next to me while I sat in the chair pictured above and enjoyed the view. 2) We went to dog parks. I checked out three different off leash dog parks mainly to see if there was any significant difference in the experience depending on the neighborhoods. 3) I went to local restaurants. On Pensacola Beach I found two fabulous dog friendly restaurants (with views) that served blackened fish sandwiches and cold beer.
It is now Sunday morning and I am sipping my morning coffee as I type and then I will shower, pack, load the car and take off for Jacksonville.
As is my way (and my intent) I talked to people. I talked to people on the beach, in the dog parks and even in and outside of the local restaurants. Of course it is shocking that it is like there is not a pandemic here. In one restaurant I commented to the server how odd it was to see the hostess and the servers without masks and he asked if I would like him to put on a mask for when he served me. I found that to be very considerate. (I declined the offer)
At one dog park I had a long conversation with a guy who was retired from New York and living on disability. He was ten years younger than me but we found common ground both in our shared experience having lived on Long Island 50 years ago and in our relationship with our dogs. He described himself as a “libertarian conservative” and told me that he hated Biden (matter of factly the way someone in Denver would say they were a Bronco fan). I asked him why and he said because Biden was not really in charge and letting “other” people make decisions for him. I agreed that I assumed that Biden set the overall policy and trusted others to implement the details but wondered why that was bad. I remembered how Jimmy Carter had supposedly obsessed over all of the details to the point of knowing which aides had access to the White House tennis courts at what time and wondered whether that level of control is really beneficial. The guy agreed that in the end it was probably better for a president to set policy and hire competent people so we talked about some policy issues.
He told me that his doctor had told him how bad universal health care would be for patients and I repeated the two lines from candidates I admired who summed things up pretty well. Elizabeth Warren said during her Presidential campaign that people like their doctors but nobody likes their insurance companies and Andrew Romanoff (I merely described him as a guy who ran for Senator in Colorado recently) often mentioned how hard it would be to imagine a candidate running for office in any country in Europe promising to bring them American style health care. We talked about the Medicare system and how the conservatives had worried that Medicare would ruin health care for everyone and that now every senior has the same basic program and none would voluntarily give it up. Medicare is a system of universal health care for everyone over age 65 and seems to work pretty well in accomplishing its primary goal.
Truth is we were on “different teams” or so it seemed, and certainly used different language but basically wanted the same thing for ourselves and for the rest of the country and for the world. I am only two weeks into this trip but the more I talk to people who are different than me the more I realize how similar we really are.
Pensacola was not intended to be the highlight of this trip, but it has been a delightful stop. I am on to Jacksonville.