On the beach – just us kids

I’m the only surfer in this high school annual photo. Me, in front, my board, an Oceanside 9-foot-6 Nose Rider, orange, easy to spot after wipeout (no leashes then). I lead John, Tim, Richard, Elizabeth balanced on top, trusting four high school boys not to drop her in the Daytona dunes. Bob (also an “S”) shoots the photo. Just a group of Esses on the winter beach. We are featured in the annual’s “S” page, headshots predictable, all in Catholic School uniform, hijinks saved for the beach pic. We tried to be the Beach Boys, us guys, hoisting surfer girl who wasn’t a surfer but smart, nice, defying gravity. She’s now in the Colorado mountains, I hear. Tim owns a bookstore in Philadelphia, not sure about John, I was Richard’s best man at his wedding, before I abandoned beaches for the Rocky Mountains. Richard is out in the Florida bush. Bob died during Covid. We were friends, roommates in a broken-down house in Gainesville. Bob the arborist, trimmed trees, grew homegrown. We were 17 or 18 on this day, 1968, class of ’69. The world boiled around us. We were on the beach. Just us kids.

In praise of Large Print books: "Seeing is Believing"

Wichita, 1962. I read Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books in bed with my Boy Scout flashlight. It was after the parents’ call for “lights out” and a brighter light might have awakened my brother who would want to talk about trains. He spent many hours with his model trains, vowing that one day he would pilot locomotives across the prairie. Instead, he learned the air traffic controller trade in the USAF and spent his career assisting pilots through the crowded skies.

I am about to turn 75 and I need more than a Boy Scout flashlight to read at night or any other time. Kindle, you might say, with its lit screen and adjustable type. Done and done. I love my Kindle. I’ve read some smashing books on it. Big ones, too. In 2022, I read “The Dark Forest” by Cixun Liu, the second book in the “Three-Body Problem” series. A long one at 528 pages. It was a slog sometimes, but the highs outnumbered the lows. Made me watch the first part of the Netflix series and make sense of it. Part Two coming up! 

I always miss holding an actual book. Something magical about sliding a book from a library shelf and opening it to that first page. The feel of it, the smell, the look. Lately I’ve been exploring the Large Print section at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It features lobby racks of new LP books in a section dedicated to donors. In the stacks, the library features aisle after aisle of LP books and CD books for the audible (and Audible) oriented. LP can stand for large print and also LP as in Long-Playing records. LP, record, or album – all terms we used for our 1970s purchases from Peaches. We played those Zeppelin disks long and often and appreciated their albums of songs which live in our bones. We annoyed our children by singing them badly and loudly on car trips. For them, LP might mean Loud Pops.

During my many decades at libraries, I paid little attention to the Large Print sections. They’ve grown as Americans age, especially our large cohort of Baby Boomers. Us. Me.

In the Ormond Beach Public Library’s “Miscellaneous Large Print” section, I saw a red trade paperback that outshone the others and plucked it out. It was “These Precious Days,” a collection of essays by Ann Patchett. I recently read (on Kindle) my first Patchett novel, “The Dutch House” and loved it. Beautiful writing, compelling characters, and a story I wasn’t sure about sometimes. But by the end, I was impressed with the tale of the Conroy family and their creaky old house outside Philadelphia. The writer made me pay attention to the characters as the story unwound and that takes skill. I will read more.

I just did. I checked out Patchett’s essays and read them. With an essay collection, the reader can pick and choose.  “A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities” was not my first choice. A bit dry, perhaps, nothing like “The Paris Tattoo” or “Eudora Welty: An Introduction,” Welty one of my favorite writers.

When I got to it, her talk to the humanities deans grabbed me. She wrote about her days as a grad student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It was around the same time I went to the grad school MFA program at Colorado State University in the last half of the 1980s. There was a generational difference (she 22, me 37) and a gender one. But our experiences were similar in several ways. She had some great teachers and mentors but also some not-so-good ones. She scrambled to make ends meet and so did I. Her fellow students could be annoying but you put a bunch of creatives in cramped quarters and you get conflict. She sums it up: “My MFA showed me the importance of community.” That was my reason to do it and I did find community.

Patchett’s essays are marvelous, as marvelous as her novels (see my comments on “The Dutch House”). I was impressed by the cover art, a painting of the author’s dog Sparky by artist Sooki Raphael. The title essay is about Patchett’s friendship with the artist. It’s long, as essays go (88 pages), but it’s the heart of the book. Feel free to cry.

I was pleased to see that Patchett’s essay collection was issued by Harper Large Print, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Harper Large Print had a farewell message for me and other LP readers:

“Light and easy to read, Harper Large Print paperbacks are for the book lovers who want to see what they are reading without strain. For a full listing of titles and new releases to come, please visit our website: www.hc.com.”

This final thought in all caps: “SEEING IS BELIEVING!”

The Affordability Crisis Meets the Bitter Sweet Symphony

I was a Florida resident for just 18 days before I was rushed to the ER with septicemia. I am the family cook and grocery shopper. I barely had a chance to do either before my system shut down and I spent four weeks at AdventHealth Daytona. I did shop once at Publix in Ormond-by-the-Sea but mainly, during the turmoil of moving cross-country, we had a lot of food delivered. My wife fended for herself during my hospitalization with the help of family and friends. I awoke from a medically-induced coma after five days and was put on a restrictive diet due to the after-effects of sepsis and my chronic cardiac condition. My orders to the hospital cafeteria hotline were filled with “you can’t have that” and “no.” 

The food I did get was tasteless mainly because it was without taste and the meds I was taking robbed me of my taste buds. I know this because once I could order a hamburger, I did. “Your brother and I had them for lunch and they were tasty.” I tried it. Tasted like cardboard. I hadn’t eaten any cardboard in a long time but that was what the food tasted like had I sampled cardboard in the past. Only once did I cheat. My sister-in-law brought me dumplings from the favorite bistro and I got a shot of salt and Asian spices. Yum. But I was caught cheating and nurses read me the riot act.

I started dreaming about Publix. You know that TV ad where a beautiful young woman flies across the store on a grocery cart triggering the lights in the frozen food section while “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve swells? (you can see the long version on YouTube). I didn’t have that dream. My subconscious put me in my bed which was transformed into a car and I drove to every Publix in town which are legion. I told that dream to the morning’s first wave of med staff and they thought it was funny. A nurse looked up my diet. “I’d dream about Publix too if I had to eat hospital cardboard.” She didn’t say that part about cardboard but she appreciated my dreams.

After my October 4 release, I received daily in-home care for more than a month. Nurses tracked my ingoing and outgoing. PT helped me exercise. I ate simple meals , shopping done by my wife Chris. She can shop and cook. As for shopping, where I enter the store door, I hear a symphony playing. But Chris is assaulted by the sights and sounds I so enjoy. She has a solid case of ADHD and she limits herself to a few items and is out ASAP. Her cooking skills are limited due to nobody, not her mother or sister or teachers, had the patience to teach a left-handed hyper-kid how to put a meal together. I was the oldest of nine and often cooked for my siblings. I cooked when I was a college student and served food at various fast-food joints. Now I cook for my family. Chris, bless her, likes to clean. We’ve been married now for 43 years.

This brings me to the issue of affordability. Three weeks ago, I shopped at Publix with my adult son who is living with us. He has ADHD but it is a different strain from his mother’s. He is an amazing shopper. He can look at my handwritten grocery list, disappear into the aisles, and return with our heavier and bulkier items such as toilet paper, multi-packs of Kleenex, Diet Coke twelve-packs, kitty litter, laundry detergent. I will be puttering around the store in my e-scooter with a few BOGO items, a rotisserie chicken, a packet of deli chicken slices. “What else?” Kevin says.

This leads to a quandary. I don’t mind spending two hours in a grocery store. Kevin thinks a half-hour is way too long. This leads to a question: Should I have Chris drop me off and return when summoned later in the day? Or should I snag Kevin and go team-shopping?

Publix is like Disney World to me, a carnival of foodstuffs. I’m in those TV ads. At least I was until last month when the shopping bill went over five hundred dollars. That’s 10 days of food for three, sometimes four (daughter Annie drops in for an occasional meal). I have never spent that much on one grocery trip. There were many times in my life when I clipped coupons to afford the basics at Albertson's or Safeway for a family of four. I joined shoppers who clicked on their coupons and had the store computer ring up the savings. I would get to the receipt’s final line and boast, “I saved 75 dollars." "I saved 101 dollars.”

I save money at Publix with the BOGO items. Sometimes I get BOGO items just to get BOGO items which will add to the savings line.

Ormond Beach old-timers offer advice. Shop at Wal-Mart. Yes, I know, but it’s Wal-Mart and the Walton family supports Trump and right-wing kooks and yes, I know that one of the sisters has opened an incredible art museum. My sister Mo is a CostCo fan. She talks up the place all the time even though her three children have flown the nest and she shops for just two. She is the only person I know with a CostCo puzzle. She brought it to me in the hospital. It has a million pieces and I barely completed the CostCo hot-dog stand before I gave up. Mo and her husband Ralph took me for an initial foray into CostCo Daytona. The front-of-store display was a massive 100-inch television for an incredible price. I later saw a young man pushing one in a cart across the parking lot. I was entranced by the bakery section. They make their own bagels! Multi-packs of cookies still warm from the oven! Pies the size of 1955 Buick hubcaps (remember them?)! I signed up right away and got a 20 dollar discount on the joining fee. I could go out there right now and pay one dollar and 50 cents for a gourmet hot dog with all the fixins and a soda.

We conducted our Thanksgiving shopping at Wal-Mart. Yes, Wal-Mart. I brought Kevin with me as a defense mechanism to thwart the pre-holiday crowds and the sheer size of the place. It wasn’t glorious. I saw no pretty young women soaring on winged carts sailing through the frozen food aisle to “Bittersweet Symphony’s” opening violins. I did see a pair of youngsters shouting “Marco” while their mom yelled at them and then came the distant response of “Polo!” I asked Kevin if that was “a thing” and he replied “Sure.” We bought Great Value products (breakfast bars, pasta, ice cream) and spent a tad over four hundred dollars and I was tempted to remove enough items to go into 300-something but did not. The checker had already yelled “This register is closed” at the poor people behind me. I kept out my receipt as we made it out as that is demanded at Wal-Mart, checking the receipt against the items in your cart. Can’t be too careful during this “fake affordability” crisis.

Cue “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” the Publix ad not the original video which is kind of creepy. The song’s opening lines: “ ‘Cause it’s a bitter sweet symphony, this life/Trying to make ends meet/You’re a slave to money, then you die.”

Lately I’ve been having dreams, Train Dreams w/update

For decades, I kept a copy of “Fiskadoro” by Denis Johnson. I liked the idea of the book more than the book itself. It was an early post-apocalyptic novel set in the Florida where I grew up, the Keys, way south of my youth in Daytona Beach, but still, Florida. With my brother Dan, I was writing a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Central Florida I knew. It was the 1980s and we wanted in on the post-apocalyptic scenario that Reagan’s anti-Soviet MX Missile plan engendered. Dan, Air Force veteran and air traffic controller, was a Reagan man and I was not. There was energy in that – and we were brothers. I miss him still. Today is his birthday.

But back to Johnson. I read “Train Dreams” a decade ago when I still lived and worked in Wyoming. It’s a novella and I read it in two days. It touched me. I didn’t think it would. I did my best to read “Fiskadoro” but failed to finish -- I just couldn't get inside. Is this the same writer? My heart ached by “Train Dreams” end, much as it did last night when the credits rolled for “Train Dreams” on Netflix. It’s set mostly in Idaho, my old neighbor, and in the tall-timber forests I grew to love in my 40 years in the Rockies. Most of that time, the timber industry and environmentalists waged war. I wasn’t in the fight, but my location in the cities of the Colorado/Wyoming Front Range made me suspect.

I put that aside as I watched Robert and other loggers in early-20^th-century Idaho and Washington cut 500-year-old trees. Robert worked for his wife and daughter. He traveled to jobs by train, the most efficient form of transportation then. This was a love story featuring Robert and Gladys and little Katie. The couple planned and built the cabin themselves and did all the work. Tragedy came and some resolution followed. The ending is breathtaking yet somber.

It's a beautiful work, Johnson’s novel and the Netflix film directed by Cliff Bentley. The credits roll to a song called “Train Dreams” by Nick Cave. He was the right person for the job. I have it on my playlist now: 

Lately I’ve been having dreams, crazy dreams I can’t explain; A woman standing in a field of flowers, a screaming locomotive train; Crazy dreams that go on for hours and I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.

Robert doesn’t have the words.

I keep searching for them.

UPDATE: The Dec. 1 New York Times carried a review of a new biography about the late Denis Johnson. The book, "Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures," is by Ted Geltner. He assembled it through interviews with family and friends and fragments of notes left behind by Johnson. The writer spent his last years living in a cabin in north Idaho. If you live in the West, you can picture the cabin and know what it feels like as December snow swirls outside.

Death by Lightning: To be gone, gone and forgotten

On the morning after I watched the conclusion of “Death by Lightning" on Netflix.

One of the final scenes really got to me. It’s First Lady Lucretia “Crete” Garfield (Betty Gilpin) confronting the assassin Charles Guiteau (Matthew McFayden) in prison before he is hanged. She is angry and distraught about her husband’s death at the hands of this addle-brained miscreant, the likes of which we’ve seen too many times. Crete (President Garfield’s endearing name for her) tells Guiteau that she has halted the publishing of his tell-all book. “You will be forgotten!” She also knows that history will forget her husband, that he will be some sort of trivia question about the shortest-serving president. Nobody will remember what a fine man he was.

But this viewer now knows. President Garfield, streets will be named for you. Millard Fillmore too. In the 1980s I lived in the Cherry Creek block north of the funky-but-soon-to-be-ritzy Cherry Creek North Shopping District. Chris and I walked from our rental on Fillmore Street to the old Tattered Cover Bookstore when it actually had tattered covers for sale – cheap! – and the Cherry Cricket for football and beer and burgers.

Millard Fillmore. Yet another forgotten one. From Wikipedia:

Millard Fillmore was the 13^th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House and the last to be neither a Democrat or a Republican. A former member of the House of Representatives, Fillmore was elected vice president in 1848 and succeeded to the presidency when Zachary Taylor died in 1850. Fillmore was instrumental in passing the Compromise Act of 1850 which led to a brief truce in the battle over the expansion of slavery.

"Brief truce” indeed.

He also later ran for president as a member of the Know Nothing Party.

Fillmore is now mostly a Jeopardy question: Who was the one-term 13^th president? Here’s a hint: There is a comic strip about a duck named for him.

Not surprisingly, there is also a comic strip named “Garfield” that features a misbehaving cat. Baby Boomers’ kids had Garfield stuffed animals.

You can look it up.

In Denver, Fillmore is situated between Detroit and Milwaukee streets. We rented a typical Denver bungalow brick house with a porch and a swastika on the chimney. I walked to the branch library and found that this swastika stood for auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s when the Nazis hijacked it.  

A writing colleague lived in our basement and another writer friend and his girlfriend lived in the big corner house on the next block. Fillmore was a friend to writers if only for a short time.

Now, Garfield. It was named in the 1880s. The street runs north and south and dead-ends on the north at the old City Park Golf Course and on the south at City Park. After Fillmore, Chris and I lived in a walk-up apartment on Cook Street that was so close to the Denver Zoo that we could hear peacocks screeching at all hours. Garfield was a few blocks east as you walked to Colorado Boulevard.

The unforgettable thing that happened to us on Cook Street was the Christmas blizzard of December 1982 that buried us in three feet of snow for a week. The infamous event in the neighborhood was the assassination of radio talk-show host Alan Berg in June 1984, by The Order Neo-Nazi gang. He was at 14^th and Adams, another street named for a president, actually two of them. They were not assassinated. They are not forgotten.

I have a library of presidential books willed to me by my father. No Garfield or Fillmore volumes in the collection. I have an original copy of Mark Twain’s hardcover bio of Ulysses S. Grant, known as one of the best memoirs in presidential history. I also have a trade paperback of it. Several other Grant bios.

We bought our first house in 1985 on South Grant Street in Platt Park in Denver. The next street over was Sherman. We all know the origins of those names. Street names you won’t find anywhere in the South. Our bungalow-style house was built in 1909 and needed work. Our son Kevin was born there. Neighbors were nice. We let them rent our two-car garage for their woodworking business which is how we got our living room furniture that we no longer have. I walked to work at Gates Rubber Company. I came home, got on my running clothes, and jogged to Wash Park where every Yuppie jogged after work. 

My mother grew up in the Wash Park neighborhood. Wash, of course, is short for Washington, our first president. In the 1920s, the resurgent KKK once burned crosses in this Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Public school kids used to harass my mom and sister when they walked home from St. Francis. Mom said that was the first time she was called a redneck. Their father, my grandfather, was an Irish immigrant whose neck had been burned many times. The streetcar ran nearby. Some of the original houses have been “scraped off” and now are monstrous million-dollar-plus townhomes.

I looked to see if there were any streets named for Garfield in my Florida county. Garfield Avenue runs through Deland, not far from Stetson University and the historic downtown. There is a house like ours for sale on S. Garfield.

Every day and everywhere, we live with ghosts.

Down by the river with family, friends, and Rockefeller's ghost

There was no wedding, but one hell of a reception.

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025. My niece Bryce celebrates her wedding to Zak. They eloped and got hitched, as my grandparents might have said. They wanted it that way, Bryce’s mom Nancy said. She is my sister-in-law, widow, high-school sweetheart of my brother Dan who died at 60 from blood cancer. That was 12 years ago. He never got to see his daughter go to college, get engaged, and set off on a new life. But I did. His older brother, his childhood pal and mentor. I saw it all from afar, from Wyoming. And now I am back on home turf.

The reception was held under a massive marquee tent on The Casement grounds along the Halifax River in Ormond Beach. It was a gorgeous November night, beautiful sunset and warm breezes. The Grenada Bridge begins at property’s edge and rises majestically west over the Halifax River and butts up against mainland Ormond and its fine library. The bridge is crowded with weekend motorists off to their own dinners and receptions. Someone is off to the ER in a wailing ambulance. It’s loud here, the most traveled stretch of Ormond Beach. But picture perfect..

That’s why John D. Rockefeller chose this site for his Florida digs. He entertained guests at The Casements, so known for its innovative window design that allowed plenty of air to circulate in the pre-AC years. Rockefeller played host to celebrities such as Will Rogers and industrialists such as Henry Ford. They too had a chance to escape their winters for a short while. Florida lore is filled with tales of snowbirds.

Across the street, Rockefeller built the Ormond Hotel. It went to seed after John D’s death in 1937. Replaced by condos, an oft-told Florida story. But The Casements remain. Its splendid lawn is where Chris and I picnic watching free concerts in the winter and spring. The spacious porch hosts the bands. Its nine acres are a historic site and the house is a museum.

To the north of the marquee tent are the caterers. They cook paella (seafood and chicken varieties) and steaming bowls of seasoned rice. I enjoyed my chicken paella and wonder why paella and not a barbecue or shrimp boil. I consider this a fine choice as I eat everything on my plate. I drink soda water and look around at this mostly young crowd most of whom are drinking alcoholic beverages. They are a spiritous and spirited bunch. Mostly strangers, but friends of the happy couple and their families. I run into my old friend Tommy who had a stroke and walks with a cane. Tommy and I reminisce about a trip we took long ago. My girlfriend and I lived in Boston and we were walking back to our apartment on Beacon Hill when I spotted Tommy walking down the street. The next day we hitched rides to Vermont to see his friend Danny who made marijuana pipes. I was 21 and so was he and we both hitched many rides in those days. When I returned to Boston, I started a new job. We were both younger then than most of the people at this gathering are now. We are still here.

My niece and her husband threw a magnificent party. We joined in Jewish champagne toasts – l’chaim! -- from the groom’s family and the bride and groom were hoisted in chairs onto the dance floor in the traditional hora ceremony.

Chris and I pose for goofy photos at my niece’s photo booth. I have to make a stop at the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cart. I accompany my wife to the dance floor. I put the e-scooter in neutral and we move about. She loves to dance. We recently decided no more “sitting this one out” for me. We rock and weave to The Village People, slow-dance to Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” I try to match her natural rhythm to my machine glide. So good to be close.

We had a lovely time.

Ann Patchett pulls me into the lives of "The Dutch House"

Ann Patchett's novel "The Dutch House" was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. First place went to Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys." I have yet to read Whitehead's novel but did read his amazing "The Underground Railroad." 

"The Dutch House" was my first Patchett novel. I don't know what took me so long. She's an amazing writer and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. Novelist and bookstore owner -- two full-time jobs. I read Patchett's novel via Kindle from Amazon as I require large-print books or enlargeable print e-books for my clunky eyesight. In the future, I will acquire my print books at indies such as Parnassus. I can get e-books at Libby and a large assortment of large-print books at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It's crucial in these dark times to keep alive the light of good literature and the nonprofit literary world. The fact that Tom Hanks narrates the "The Dutch House" audiobook is enough for me to get it just to hear what Hanks does to the first-person voice of the narrator.

"The Dutch House" follows the lives of a family and their house from the title. The house was built by a Dutch family in Elkins Park just north of Philadelphia. It's ornate and weird, inhabited by others after the aging Dutch wife died with no heirs. Buyer was Cyril Conroy, a World War II veteran and man of seemingly modest means. He loves the place. His young wife hates it. And his children, Maeve and Danny, grow up obsessed with it after their father's second wife throws them out. The tale is told by Danny.

It has a Dickensian flavor to it. Both the house and the characters loom large. A  bit like the painting of Maeve on the cover of the book's first edition (painting by Noah Saterstrom). The setting isn't the gritty hovels of 1840s London but the polite environs of  Philadelphia and New York City. I was caught up in their lives and was heartbroken at the end. I loved the characters so much I didn't want to see them go. That takes skill, bringing a cast to life so we are bereft when they exit the final page. I don't want a sequel but do want them to hang around for a spell like the ghosts who inhabit the house. 

The book ends with the lingering feeling that we all live parallel lives in the houses we have inhabited. How many times have you driven by "the old place" and been hit with a sense of longing?

That's "The Dutch House." 

One final note: I downloaded a "Kindle Unlimited" post-apocalyptic novel to read following Padgett. I read all kinds of books. But this one was all action and style. I won't name the book because it's a book and there's a writer who worked hard on it and I don't want to hurt feelings. I've written many novels, all unpublished, and it is a lot of work. So, as I cast around for my next read, I won't settle.