Meet Georgie

Georgie is a nice enough guy; a little short of a full load. But he's a decent kind of guy. He is our neighbor in the campground. He works hard at Walmart and at the local middle school where he's a janitor at both places.
Georgie (not his real name) likes to come out of his disintegrating trailer and sits with me while I rock on my chair outside our motor home. He stays too long – perhaps because of diminished mental ability or diminished social skills – and I have to retreat inside because Georgie just wants to hang around too long.
He was born in Indiana and has worked in Ohio. Then his mother and stepfather brought him to Florida. And here he is. He's 49 years old.
I did chuckle the other day when he asked where I have been in the world. I told him I've been to 35 countries and then named a few of my favorites. He considered this for a bit. Then he said, “my mom took me to a water park in Tampa when we came to Florida.”
So Georgie is my personal challenge while we live at the park. I have taken him under my wing with my job to help him understand a bit more of our world.
He generally wants to tell me about his work schedule. And he does work hard – or, at least, he works long. He says he doesn't get much respect for his work. And he thinks his jobs might be in jeopardy because of the collapsing economy. He says he doesn't understand this because he sees so many people coming into Walmart every time he's in there. When I try to explain low margin marketing, poor Georgie doesn't connect to the notion that Walmart works on volume and makes a tiny profit on every piece of merchandise. So I still have lots of work in this area.
Georgie does like the cat and the cat likes him. She climbed on his lap yesterday as we sat in the sun. The cat nuzzled into his armpit and then gave him a little love bite. She has a tendency to do this when she likes the body odor. He thought that was nice of her.

Jo and I have committed to remaining at our Florida park until the end of May because of the accident and the repair time necessary. So we are hunkering down. We find we miss the ocean and we have taken to loading our chairs into the car and driving to the Gulf of Mexico where we relax in the shade of a palm tree and listen to the waves lapping on the shore.
The joy of watching Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Ibis and Wood Storks, as well as Pelicans makes for entertainment. The other day we came upon 70 White Pelicans. These enormous birds have a wingspan between 8 and 10 feet. They collect food in a completely different way from the Brown Pelicans. Browns like to glide across the water at about 15 feet. You watch them point their beaks downward as they spot fish. Then they simply fall out of the sky like pterodactyls. They catch the fish easily and then sit on the water while the flip the fish around in their beak so they can slide the live fish down their throats. Whites, on the other hand, works as a group to surround the fish. They swoop in for the kill while the fish are in a ball in the water and they collectively scoop up the food while swimming on the top of the water.