Marcophile: Aunt Bea has left the building

Marco Island is in the doldrums now. Life slows a bit and we full-timers stir from our "season" shelters.

It's a time when we know we can go to the post office in the morning and be home before noon. We can get a seat at the Esplanade bar for sunset.

We can get new heels and soles at Salvia's on the Trail and get the shoes back before Labor Day.

In short, with no major hurricanes bubbling out of Africa as I write, Marco is about as quiet as it gets anymore. It's a nice feeling.

I worry, however, that some people on Marco hate it when things get mellow. They are so busy taking the city to court that they don't take time to enjoy the pleasures of this place they pretend to be trying to save from the big, bad juggernaut known as change.

There is a division here now, a chasm between two very different ideas (or sentimental longings) on what Marco Island should be.

On one side we have those who want Marco to be a thriving, vibrant community with a diverse demographic and a healthy magnet for others to visit. They embrace the business community, respect the real estate interests here and welcome the fact that we actually have children living on Marco.

They know that Deltona's dreamers set aside land for schools and parks because they never imagined Marco as merely a retirement haven with residents peddling about on outsized tricycles, shuffleboarding their way into the sunset and treating Wheel of Fortune as late-night TV.

This side of the divide knows Marco is not a Sun City and was never designed to be. These active Marco movers and shakers know that our seventh-graders are as important as our septuagenarians; they care about and include both groups and everybody in between.

They also know that if we didn't have a vigorous tourist industry here, we'd all be crowding into the same seven restaurants and would have to go to Naples to see a movie.

We'd be at best an upscale Mayberry, still handing over more tax dollars to the rest of the county than we get back in county services.

We have retirees, of course, but we also have hard-working managers and merchants, brokers and bodybuilders and a few of us who benefit from all their talents.

Things aren't perfect, but our town works well with all these forces at work and at play.

On the other side, in Marco's current battle for its identity, we endure the grumbling, grousing naysayers and name-callers who seem to believe that the only infrastructural improvement worth supporting would be a deep, daunting moat around the island.

These people's troglodyte tendencies spew forth in the sewer issue, which seems somehow appropriate, considering their dirty tactics.

They feign fiscal watchdoggery while to some Fantasy Island dream world, wishing that Marco had never become a city.

They long for the "good old days" of turned up streets and swales full of rainwater every summer afternoon. They complain about traffic yet oppose city efforts to improve our road system.

Of course neither side is right all the time. City government needs militant monitoring by its citizens. But we must insist that the ankle-biters, these self-appointed watchdogs, at least know how to tell time. Nobody wants Marco to be Miami Beach, but Mayberry won't work either.

Andy, Aunt Bea and Barney have left the building.