Citizen Request for Information

Ms. Olson,

I received a communication from a reader which says that you got a divorce in Sarasota and that you are no longer living in the district of which you are the board member.

The divorce is sad. A lot of people jump the shark on that one. I have flunked shark jumping, however. I have been married to the same guy for almost 52 years, whole decades of which I hoped he would disappear into the sunset so that I would never have to see him again. But here he is sitting on the Stratolounger every night in front of whatever sports agon is running on TV, waiting for me to create some food in the kitchen, where all of us liberated women spend far too much of our time.

Sometimes he rouses himself after answering his elbow-located phone to yell the name of one of our ten grandchildren and then reveals that the darling has “called to say she or he loves granny and grandpa.”

I am a walking refutation of the misogynist’s slogan that no man will marry a feminist. The trap I occupy is that I am a Georgia girl, and all girls cook in Georgia. And they are all good cooks. Georgia girls can’t beat the men off with a stick due to their seductive cooking ability.

That's why so few get divorced in my home state: food.

Couples stay together and do what they should do: make the lives of their partner as miserable as possible. They refer to each other in the ultimate romantic terms of “my old man” and “my old lady.” One sees misalliances at family reunions each year casting baleful looks at each other across their plates of Southern fried chicken, collard greens, and ambrosia when my Georgia family has dinner on the grounds of the cemetery and little church that it established in the 1800s. The family's Civil War dead are in the back of the cemetery while the civilian Drurys are in the front. The most revered family member is Cecil Drury, the town schoolmaster who remained a bachelor, bought timberland, and left a bunch of his nephews and nieces quite rich. They are, according to my cynical Uncle Kenny, now dead and resting in the front of the cemetery, “people with more money than sense.”

The best thing about the cemetery is that one of my randy distant married cousins acquired a girlfriend who, in her passion for this sneaking-around wretch, went to the cemetery and dumped over the wife's headstone in the until-death-do-us-part pair the couple had set up when they were fonder of each other. My cousin actually left his wife and married this firebrand. A few months after the marriage, he up and died and now rests in peace beside the dumped-over headstone of his abandoned but still living former wife.

I hope I live long enough to see what happens to the dumped-over head stone when the wife--or better yet, the girlfriend who became the second wife--dies. These are the kind of sagas of passion and passion spent that the denizens of little Southern towns on the edge of civilization live for. The Drury family has done its part for the entertainment of its neighbors with this cemetery fracas.

I am always sorry to hear of divorce. Studies show our children suffer from their parents' divorce to the end of their lives. No matter how much parents hate each other, children want them to stay together. In Georgia, they do.

My condolences on your divorce, but please let the public know whether you are still living in the district. Ms. Ferreira tried slipping out of Brandon into the local faux posh community of South Tampa. I lived there twenty years and could have told her that the South Tampa people are the same as the ones in Brandon or even Seffner-- maybe worse. They gossip and wander around the streets drunk after dark just as they do in all communities.

I would appreciate a speedy response to my residence question. I bet other citizens would too.

lee drury de cesare