The ballad of Baba the Thin Man and the Good Ship Cameronia

My sister sent me a packet of stuff she cleaned out of her attic. In it, I found a printout from The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. I took it from there.

My maternal grandfather, Irish immigrant Martin Hett, boarded the S.S. Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. He was 15. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, the Anchor Line, flew the British flag, built in Glasgow. 10,963 gross tons, 515 feet long, 62 feet wide. Top speed 17 knots. Two masts and two funnels, steel hull with four decks. Carried 1,700 passengers, 250 in first class, 450 in second class, and 1,000 with Grandfather in third class. Port of departure: Liverpool. Port of arrival: New York City. Arrived with all hands June 7, 1915.

RMS Lusitania: First British four-funneled ocean liner, called an “ocean greyhound” by the Cunard Line, six passenger decks carried 2,198 including almost 600 in sumptuous first-class compartments, Launched June 7, 1906; sunk on its voyage from New York by Germany’s SM U-20 on May 7, 1915 with loss of 1,197 souls, some bodies found floating, some washed up on Irish beaches, some just disappeared into The Deeps. A Vanderbilt was among the dead. 

Grandfather was originally booked on the Lusitania along with more than 1,000 other third-class passengers. Now shipless, Grandfather had to hang around the Liverpool docks looking for an alternate booking. Apocryphal family stories have him booking steerage on another ship that is also torpedoed and sunk. We like this because we can tell listeners that our teenage Grandfather tempted fate during the war but made it to America after all. Grand tale, no?

I don’t know why I keep calling him grandfather. As a precocious American toddler, a future English major and writer, I called him Baba so everyone else did. My cousins called him Gramps. My father, his son-in-law, called him Mart. Mom called him Dad.

Not sure what Liverpool looked like in spring 1915. My guess is that it looked a lot like the post-war city of 1919-1920 in the first episodes of “Peaky Blinders.” The Great European War was wrapping up its first year with hellish fights in France and Belgium and the Battle of Gallipoli in far-off Turkey. The war in what we now call the Middle East doesn’t get much movie time except for “Gallipoli” and “Lawrence of Arabia” but it was crucial to what came after and the fate of The Good Ship Cameronia.

Baba made his way from Ellis Island to Chicago and in 1917 worked on the El with his brother.

In 1919, David W. Bone’s book “Merchantmen-At-Arms: The British Merchants’ Service in the War” was published. An experienced merchant seaman and author, Bone explores in great detail the war at sea. He relives the April 15, 1917, sinking of the troopship Cameronia in Chapter XII: 'THE MAN-O'-WAR 'S 'ER 'USBAND'. The ship carries almost 3,000 troops to Egypt. You can read the full text at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31953/31953-h/31953-h.htm#. It features drawings by Muirhead Bone, an etcher and watercolorist who was a war artist in the First and Second World Wars. Here are excerpts:

An alarmed cry from aloft—a half-uttered order to the steersman—an explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride!

The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, shattered debris, a huge column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and hangs—watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water—the steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart-beats of the stricken ship.

*****

Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing many outright.

*****

Many of the life-boats reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the tackles—far beyond their working load—is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights, disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the men in the water.

*****

It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers.

*****

We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last buoyant breath of Cameronia is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she goes down.

Many of the troops were rescued by destroyers Nemesis and Rifleman.

Baba loved his ice cream. The Thin Man died at 90.

P.S.: There was another S.S. Cameronia built by the Anchor Line that sailed on its maiden voyage in 1921. It too was requisitioned as a troopship at the outbreak of World War 2 and took part in the 1942 invasion of North Africa, was torpedoed and towed to Algiers for repairs. She was the largest troopship to participate in Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. She carried passengers to Palestine in 1948. Scrapped in 1957.

Breaking: Daytona Evening News 08/16/1972: All heck breaks out in Miami

Reading the Daytona Beach Evening News: City Final. Price 10 cents.

Some interesting headlines:

Youthful and Elderly Protesters Join in ‘Gripes’ on Nixon Policies

After Haggling Aplenty, Campsite Finally Slated to Open Thursday

Askew Orders 15 Pct. Increase in Welfare

Argentine Leftists Stage Wild Jailbreak-Hijacking

Speaking of Hijacks…Airlines Find Subject Less Than Amusing

Display ad placed by a consortium of local banks in bottom left corner has an illustration of a man reclining in an easy chair in front of a TV set. He is smoking a cigar and holding a highball. The text: 

Pro and college football, the World Series, coming up. This little guy has it made. How about you? We’ll finance your color TV. Fact is, we’ll finance the adjustable lounge chair. You finance the cool drink. Have a nice day – have a colorful fall.

Dateline: August 16, 1972

It’s going to be hot and sticky with a high temp of 88 and humidity at 82. Ocean temp: 78.

Welcome to Daytona Beach 53 years ago.

The newspaper is yellowed but you can still see the track marks on the margins from the printing press. It’s a big broadsheet, a size you no longer see. Newspapers have downsized and disappeared.

I was 21 and hitching across America with my girlfriend. We were in Utah or Colorado – I didn’t keep a journal then so I can’t be sure. Wherever I was, I probably wasn’t reading the morning or evening papers. I was reading “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck who wrote it to reconnect with America. “I did not know my own country,” he wrote.  I was aware that Republicans were conventioneering in Miami and there were protests going on. I didn’t know that Vietnam Veterans Against the War members were there and we would be hearing more from them later. I didn’t know that a gonzo reporter named Hunter S. Thompson was covering the fracas and would be famous for his “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

As were so many others, I was out there looking for America. I found it too. It was wonderful and exciting. My favorite summer. I had no clue who Ron Kovic was and what he was experiencing in his heart and on the streets of Miami. I didn’t yet know the name of Scott Camil and the Gainesville Eight were not yet named the Gainesville Eight. I thought I knew a lot but I knew nothing but how much fun it was to be 21 and traveling with a beautiful woman and free of the Selective Service Draft. We met and partied with other young people on the road. It was glorious.

I did read part of this morning’s Daytona Beach News-Journal. I skipped the headlines because I didn’t want to see them. Yes, it’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a day which I used to spend marching for Martin. It also is another day that I am ignoring. I would rather read above the cute Welsh Corgi named Taco that Palm Coast police take along as a therapy dog. Nice photo – one lovable dog. I did look at the weather. It’s going to be cold, folks, surprisingly cold for Florida. I looked up at my big TV. It’s a nice one, Roku HD4. I am not turning it on today. Not protesting in any park but I’ve done that many times. We put on some fine Inauguration Day protests in 2017 and 2018. More than 1,000 people came to our Jan. 21, 2017, Wyoming Women’s March protest in tiny Cheyenne, Wyoming. People I knew from Laramie and Casper and Fort Collins were there. I made my famous almost-salt-free chili for the post-protest feed. We plugged in so many crockpots at the Cheyenne Historic Depot that the power went out. Despite the downer reason for the protest, a fine time was had by all. Local TV and newspaper covered the event. Lots of photos on our cellphone cameras. I will share one with you if I can find it in my photo cache.

I’m returning to my newspaper. In 1972, Volusia County had six A&P stores and now there are none. In 1972, I could buy a loaf of white bread for 22 cents and a pound of coffee for 69 cents. A pack of frozen waffles was 10 cents and a big box of Sugar Frosted Flakes sold for 55 cents (Everyday Low Price!). No prices are listed for eggs but they were cheap, I know that, maybe as cheap as they’re going to be starting today. I can’t wait.

P.S.: You might wonder why I was reading a 1972 newspaper. It was included in a packet of stuff sent to me by my sister who is downsizing and cleaning decades of storage from her house. She knows I’m a history buff who writes about arcane stuff.

This aging M.F.A.-trained writer vs. Copilot's A.I. mind

This is my version of a prose poem that I dashed off late last night. Maybe it's not a prose poem. A ramble, maybe, or just a burst of words that flew out of my head. I've been doing that a lot lately. Words bursting from my mind with very little rewrite. It's fun, really, just to let the words flow. Freewriting is what I used to call it when teaching college composition. I would tell my students just freewrite for 10 minutes and then let's see if anyone wants to read their pieces. Don't think about it -- just write! Do as I do. And I would write for 10 minutes about any darn thing I wanted. Things like this:

So what do you think of Florida my old friends ask. I think what is it they want me to say that I find it the most magnificent spit of land in the U.S. of A.? They are friends so I can't lie. I find it confusing after 46 years elsewhere many elsewheres. Warmer than my recent home Wyoming but confusing. Old landmarks no longer exist or they exist in puzzling forms. The beach seems less magnificent maybe because it’s so managed. The 60s and 70s we drove the wide low-tide beach any time day or night. We drove high tide too with all the attendant risks. Mostly we were pushing Yankees out of the soft sand and sometimes they paid us because they were so grateful that their 1968 Buick LeSabre did not get gobbled by the salty-sea. We surf as the sun peeks over the flat line of the horizon. A tortoise surfaces beyond the breakwater and we hope it’s not a shark. The waves are surfable but just barely and it’s OK because there always is tomorrow and tomorrow after that. My old rental west of the interstate is now a development and the beat-up two-lane road is now named for a gated community called Tymber Creek and yeah that Tymber with a Y and all the timber cut down for new houses says thank you alphabet. On Hartford Ave my father is not out by the street, dressed in shorts and flapping button-down, with beer in hand, yelling at the surfers to slow down. I go to a funeral for a high school friend last week and the widower a guy who was my classmate and teammate and relies on a wheelchair post-stroke looks up and says, “You look just like your old man.” And I take it in stride because I do that’s a fact and I’ve heard that the old friend is incapacitated and it is not true not true at all. We share quips about our conveyances, him his fancy wheelchair and me my fancy spine-assisting e-scooter. We are a fine pair of ballplayers 1969 and we make scholarship choices and it works out for him and he returns hometown and I’m cast off into the cold and I don’t regret it now but I did hundreds of times. Our links to past lives are pulled until they almost don’t exist. I tell my new friends: Yes, this place is too crowded and this is a voice from the Capital City of the nation’s least-populated state. It’s a place where newcomers my students from Torrington and Hanna and Meeteetse say THE CROWDS!!! THE TRAFFIC!!! and we city-born ones say it will grow on you boys and girls it will grow. So what do you think of the new Florida my green-eyed senior citizen? I open the bedroom window, hear the waves breaking at night. The waves. 

MS Copilot rewrite: 

My old friends ask what I think of Florida now. After 46 years elsewhere, I'm confused. It's warmer than Wyoming but different. Old landmarks have changed or vanished, and the beach feels less magnificent because it's so managed. In the past, we drove on the wide low-tide beach anytime, even at high tide with risks. We helped Yankees stuck in the sand, sometimes for a fee. We surfed as the sun rose, hoping to spot tortoises, not sharks.  

My old rental is now a development, and the two-lane road is named after a gated community called Tymber Creek. Hartford Ave has changed too; my father no longer yells at surfers. Last week, I attended a funeral for a high school friend. The widower, a former classmate now in a wheelchair, remarked that I look like my father. We joked about our conveyances, reminiscing about our scholarship decisions from 1969.  

Living here in Florida, I tell my new friends it’s crowded, especially compared to Wyoming. But I hear the waves breaking at night, and that remains unchanged. 

MS Copilot is not wrong but it's bland is it not? It just doesn’t get some things. Surprisingly, it does get other things. I thought about breaking up my big block of type into separate paragraphs. Copilot detected the change and did exactly that. AI scares me a bit. There are times, usually late at night when I am writing things down, when I wonder why I write at all. Really, why?

Ormond museum features art from the war in France and the war at home

(Continued from Jan. 13)

I spend a lot of time at Malcolm Fraser’s “The Soul Escaping Death” painting flanked by a framed spread of many medals earned in World War 1. He served in the French Blue Devils unit and was wounded five times. He also was an officer with the Red Cross on the frontlines.

Chris wanders off. She knows that I may be awhile. 

That’s what you do at a museum, right? Wander. Or roll, depending on your mobility.

If you look up Fraser at New York City’s Salmagundi Club web site, you find that Fraser was a member. I had to search for him and the screen listed 56 items in the file. But the link does not go to the artwork but you can see some in person at the Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens, 78 E. Granada, Blvd. The Salmagundi club is dedicated to representational art so it’s natural that it drew Fraser who painted portraits of the living and the dead, angels, soldiers, and John the Baptist among them.

“The Soul Escaping Death” shows a dead soldier on the ground in front of blasted battlements. He is wrapped in a U.S. flag that he apparently was carrying on the staff he grips in his dead hands. An angel has one hand on the body and another on a robe stripped from what’s supposed to be the soldier’s soul rising into the gilded heavens. The spirit looks free and happy, the vestments looking as if they are morphing into angel’s wings. The soul’s naked body looks female with long curly hair and the possibility of breasts and any genitals hidden under a triangle of pubic hair. It could be that this is Fraser’s vision of the angelic form, one that is human but intersexual, one that represents a brand-new being that we become after death. The exposed flesh of the dead soldier and the angel is rough and brown as if they were connected to the ground like old oak trees. The soul’s flesh is the pink of life, a representation of new life in the soul.

I looked at this painting a long time. I couldn’t decide if it was a work of hope in the face of death or a memoir of an artist who has witnessed slaughter on a grand scale. He was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Verdun Medal. “Verdun” was symbolic of the war for the French, a battle cry and also a memory of defeat. Verdun was the longest battle of the war, lasting 11 months. Casualties were enormous for the French and Germans, with 700,000 dead, missing, and wounded. The site’s towering Douaumont Ossuary contains the bones of more than 100,000 soldiers never identified, French and German dead intermingled. You can view them through little windows.

Fraser was an accomplished artist. Not sure he took many risks. The 20^th century was about to explode and the explosion was captured by poets and writers. The so-called “Lost Generation” gave us exciting and troubling masterpieces.

Charles Humes Jr. is a living artist from Miami who has much in common with this creative breed. Humes lives in the present and creates in the present. As an African-American, he has an endless array of subjects, many taken from daily newspapers. Lest we miss his messages, he uses newspaper clippings in his mixed media work.  The museum’s handout for the new year shows Humes’ “Gentrified” on the cover.

“Gentrified” is a loaded word in the black community. It often means that a black neighborhood is being turned over to developers and the mostly-white gentry who will inhabit the condos/townhouses that will replace independent businesses. Artists figure in this, too. They often are the first to occupy rundown urban neighborhoods because they can afford them. Then the city (I’m looking at you, Denver) becomes known as an arts hub and young people swarm in and then smart developers who saw this coming and bought rundown buildings kick out the artists and renovate them into condos and before long you have ranks of techies wandering the streets looking for art for their walls by artists who once lived in their building but now can only afford the prairie exurbs or some quaint rural village in the foothills that soon will swarm with newcomers seeking real estate in artsy quaint rural villages.

It's not the fault of artists. Hey, I just wanted a place to paint! It’s life in America. Not sure what it’s going to look like in Trumplandia.

Oh yes I do. I truly do.

Humes’ work will be on exhibit through Feb. 9. Next up are Colombian sculptor Felipe Lopez and collage artist Staci Swider. Accord to the handout: “Her [Swinder’s] work is a meditation on aging, memory, and the unseen forces that guide us.” Sounds intriguing and timely. Opening reception at the museum gallery is Feb. 20, 6-8 p.m.

Malcolm Fraser flies with the angels at Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens

What makes a 49-year-old artist abandon his paints and go to war?

That’s the question I pondered when visiting the Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens.

Malcolm Fraser was a Canada-born professional painter and illustrator who had graduated from the Sorbonne and attended Heidelberg University. In 1917, he left the U.S., steamed to Europe, and joined, after some intense training, the French “Blue Devils” unit at the Front. He was wounded five times and received France’s Croix de Guerre for his heroics. Later, he joined the A.E.F., was promoted to captain, and served with the American Red Cross on the front lines.

Fraser ended up spending most of his time in Ormond Beach. Toward the end of his life, he looked for a place to feature his artwork and one that was dedicated to veterans. A $10,000 endowment by Fraser in 1946 got the ball rolling and led to this impressive place.

Its priorities are clear when you leave handicapped parking and roll through the jungle. As Credence sang:

Better run through the jungle, 

Better run through the jungle, 

Better run through the jungle, 

Whoa, don’t look back and see.

I roll on my electric scooter and Chris walks. A beautiful space, and peaceful. I can barely hear the traffic zooming by on one of Ormond's busiest intersections. We enter the sheltered labyrinth and follow the lines on its painted multicolored surface decorated with butterflies and hummingbirds. It was designed by by Joan Baliker and the late Carol Bertrand and refreshed by Mack Sutton (artists must be named). This one is within a big gazebo and is a great play place for kids. I think about the outdoor stone labyrinth at my hometown Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, now covered with snow. 

Along the walkway is a monument by Mark Chew to veterans of the Korean War. Its streamlined silver surface reaches for the trees and beyond. It's the shape of a flame but cold as the Chosin Reservoir. Around the next turn is a bronze for Vietnam veterans by Gregory Johnson. On what looks like an old kitchen chair sits a helmet and canteen. Dog tags and a uniform shirt hang from the chair back. Its legs straddle beat-up combat boots.

I linger. This was my generation’s war, not mine physically, but it's lodged in the memories of any guy of draft age from that time (December 1968 passed Draft physical Jacksonville FL, high school deferment; December 1969 Selective Service Draft Lottery #128; Navy ROTC midshipman 1969-71; two months served on USS John F. Kennedy as midshipman, summer 1970; released from the Draft on Jan. 1, 1972). I once read this about those times: "Vietnam sucked the soul out of an entire generation."

Memories remain. 

Johnson's statue is homey, I think, the things a grunt might leave behind when he changes into civvies. Or it could be a family's reminders of a GI whose psyche never made it back home. Think of war stories: Krebs in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” or Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July” or Billy Lynn in Ben Fountain’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (whatever happened to Ang Lee’s 2016 movie based on the book?).

We emerge from the jungle and its memories. The sun shines on a colorful "Can Do" sculpture by the late Seward Johnson, part of the public art display on Grenada by the Ormond Beach Arts District. Also on the ground is the "Embracing Peace" sculpture celebrating the famous Times Square kiss on VJ Day. Inside the museum, a bronze plaque lists more than 200 residents who served in WW2 (updated in 1999 to list African-American veterans) and one dedicated to WW1 veterans. A WW1 Doughboy helmet rests in a glass case by Malcolm Fraser’s photo and bio that greet visitors. This is a decorated soldier, and we are here to see his artwork.

(To be continued)

President Biden signs the "Jackie Robinson Ballpark National Commemorative Act"

President Biden signed the "Jackie Robinson Ballpark National Commemorative Act" on Saturday. It designates Daytona Beach's 110-year-old Jackie Robinson Ballpark as a commemorative site and "makes it a part of the African American Civil Rights Network," according to a story in Monday morning's Daytona Beach News-Journal.

The article caught my eye because it was headed by a big photo of the ballpark's statue of Jackie Robinson handing a baseball to two young fans. Robinson's jersey said "Royals." This isn't news to locals as Robinson first played here for the Triple-A Montreal Royals on March 17, 1946. That was more than a year before his April 15, 1947, MLB debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson is celebrated every April 15 on his namesake day at every MLB park. He is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He broke every record worth breaking. He died way too young in 1972. He's idolized by millions.

But the 1940s were no picnic for a black big-league ballplayer. He was all alone in Daytona and Brooklyn and every ballpark he played in. He got death threats and hate mail. He was yelled at by hateful whites. Some players refused to play with him. 

It was hell playing in Brooklyn, Cleveland, and Chicago. Imagine how hard it was to play in Deep South Daytona. Some will say that a beach town in Florida was different, say, than Selma or Little Rock. There was prejudice but it was a more laid-back wastin'-away-in-Margaritaville kind of racism. But it was in the air and on the ground. And in some dark hearts.

When my family moved to Daytona in 1964, blacks were not permitted on the beachside after dark. They had their own beach named for the Bethune family of educators, a family so esteemed there is a college named in their honor and Mary McCloud Bethune's statue was installed in 2022 in the Florida display in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building, the first statue of an African-American in that hall. Many whites in Daytona called Bethune Beach "N-words Beach." The first black surfer I surfed with appeared at our beach in 1969. Coaches at my Catholic high school recruited black players for our football and basketball teams which made us the only integrated high school among the four in Daytona (the rest weren't integrated until the 1970s).

But worse things happened in this part of Florida:

From a "Freedom Never Dies" special on WUCF, a PBS station at University of Central Florida in Orlando: 

By 1930, four thousand blacks had been lynched nationwide by white mobs, vigilantes, or the Klan. Most of these occurred in the Deep South, many with law enforcement complicity. And while Alabama and Mississippi had more total lynchings, it was Florida, surprisingly, that had the highest per capita rate of lynching from 1900-1930.

"Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore" documentary debuted on PBS stations nationwide 24 years ago Jan. 12. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee narrated. Sweet Honey In The Rock and Toshi Reagon performed original music. Here's some background information from the WUCF web site:

Combining Murder Mystery, Incisive Biography and an Eye-Opening Portrait of Jim Crow Florida, "Freedom Never Dies" Sheds New Light on one of America's Earliest and Most Fearless Fighters for Civil Rights.

In 1951 after celebrating Christmas Day, civil rights activist Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette retired to bed in their white frame house tucked inside a small orange grove in Mims, Florida [Mims is in north Brevard County, a 45-minute drive from Jackie Robinson Ballpark]. Ten minutes later, a bomb shattered their house, their lives and any notions that the south's post-war transition to racial equality would be a smooth one. Harry Moore died on the way to the hospital; his wife died nine days later.

"Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore" explores the life and times of this enigmatic leader, a distinguished school teacher whose passionate crusade for equal rights could not be discouraged by either the white power structure or the more cautious factions of his own movement. Although Moore's assassination was an international cause celebre in 1951, it was overshadowed by following events and eventually almost forgotten.

"Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore"  produced by The Documentary Institute, restores Moore to his rightful place in the Civil Rights saga.

Our daughter Annie begins the new year by getting "washed in the ocean"

A fine day for a baptism. 

Our daughter Annie arrived with Chris and I for the Salty Church’s annual New Year’s Day full-immersion baptism. Annie was joined by 51 others who all wore the same black T-shirt with this inscribed on it in white letters: “Washed in the ocean freed from my past today I am new” (see photos). Annie, Chris, and I were joined by family members and friends and we trudged through the soft sand to the water. 

Some of us walked, I trudged. But I was prepared. I used my high-performance rollator walker to blaze a trail through the sand. The rollator was equipped with big knobby tires which, I surmised, would be a better machine for the beach than my tiny-tire-and-tennis-ball-equipped walker. I pushed it forward and then walked to it, pushed again, walked, so on and so forth. The idea was that if I pushed it as I did across our living room, too much weight would dig-in the wheels. Now I’m not saying I am too much weight but I am and my ploy worked for a time. That’s when Joe the Biker arrived to assist. Dressed in black Boot Hill Saloon T-shirt, jeans, and big boots, he was equipped for riding his Harley and to assist a handicapped old guy through the sand. He stomped down the pesky sand granules to make a runway that paved the way to water’s edge wherein dwelt the hard-packed sand. Joe said he liked baptisms and while he was not one of the baptizees, he was happy to be here and considered it a blessing that he was sober and alive and well in ’25 and praised Jesus and I said Amen.

I was mobile via my legs the last time I was on this stretch of beach 10-plus years ago for my brother Dan’s funeral or send-off is a better term. I joined a long line of mourners that had walked from the Salty Church to the Grenada approach and onto Ormond Beach. Surfers paddled out for the appropriately-named Paddle Out and airplanes piloted by Dan’s friends flew over in the missing man formation.

But today was for the living and a fine day it was. Blue skies, gentle breeze, modest waves. Annie donned her T-shirt and joined the crowd. The Salty Church preacher greeted us, said a prayer, and issued the day’s instructions. I could tell Annie was a bit nervous but also giddy with possibilities. She is the Evangelical of the family, attendee of conservative Christian churches and one who dwells within the web of True Believers. This is the last cynical thing this fallen-away Catholic will say on this post. For this day, I am not a sarcastic liberal. I have written here about my recent experiences in a Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital where doctors and nurses and CNAs and therapists worked for 25 days to save my life. I am indebted to them and to an organized religion that would build a healing place and hire healers to manage it. While in a coma, I dreamed of reaching out and touching the hand of God or someone very much like him or her. I listened to the twice-daily prayers over the loudspeaker and said some of my own prayers. I allowed others to pray for me and took communion from a lay communicant from St. Brendan the Navigator Catholic Church. I absorbed departing greetings such as “Have a blessed day.” I often repeated their blessings.

I have much to learn from the congregation of human beings.

One of those things is that my daughter, whose struggles with mental health issues have caused her much pain, will now be baptized. I watched as two church members said a prayer, lowered her into the water, and how she sputtered and smiled when she emerged. She was touched by the spirit and the fact that her aunts and uncles and nieces and family friends came out to see it happen. And then we convened at our house for cake and tea. Annie opened gifts which included earrings and necklace crosses and a giant conch shell my brother brought from Palm Bay. The cake was delicious and a chocolate phantasmagoria.

All told, a glorious day.

Happy New Year: Fear and Loathing in 2025 America

A friend once asked me to name my favorite writers. It's a long, long list, but I gave him the top five: Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, and Hunter S. Thompson. Fine writers all.

My friend who shall remain nameless made an astute observation: "But you don't write like any of those authors." 

A fair point. I don't write like any of them. But how could I? These writers had their own styles that are much admired and frequently copied. That's what beginning writers do: imitate their maestros. But you eventually move on to find your own voice if you stick with it. I've stuck with it and crafted my own style and it apparently has few fans in the publishing world but that's life in the fast lane. 

I haven't given up and I'm called to write for a number of reasons that make up my 74 years. My parents read to me and I gobbled up Yertle the Turtle and Winnie-the-Pooh. I read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and billboards as I peered out those big windows in post-war automobiles. I wrote stories for my third-grade teacher Jean Sylling and she put one up on the bulletin board. It was about aliens in a flying saucer landing in my Denver backyard. I was embarrassed but also thought it a bit grand, a story I wrote put up for all my classmates to see. 

My father the accountant had a big library and I read through many of them without really understanding what was going on. My mother usually had a baby in one arm and a book in the other. That's who introduced me to "Catch-22." She read and laughed and I was curious but was only 11 and not interested enough until I was in high school and close to draft age and Heller's novel haunted me and made me laugh. I turned on my chums to the book and its hilarity resonated with them but we rarely talked about the war part. 

Strange happenings were all around and I soaked them in but did not write about them. My parents and eight brothers and sisters were all distinctive entities and I inherited their nuances. My forebears visited my dreams. I attended Catholic School and irony and metaphors surrounded me but I was not aware of it until later, much later. I watched "Get Smart," "The Monkees," and the evening news and they all kind of blended together. Sex was a puzzle that we Catholic teens were left to figure out on our own and it's still a work-in-progress. 

My childhood and teenhood were all precursors to hard lessons to come. I really thought I had it made at 18 and the world was my oyster although I'd never eaten an Atlantic Ocean oyster as I surfed in that salty sea whenever I didn't have to take care of my siblings or go to school or go to work to afford that school. I dated the most beautiful creatures on Planet Earth but they might as well have been the imaginary aliens that landed in my yard in my third-grade story. 

Speaking of alien life forms: I am no closer to understanding the human condition than I was in the third grade. I refer to recent happenings in the U.S. of A. It is past time to revisit Thompson's Fear & Loathing chronicles and Yossarian's naked self and Billy Pilgrim's time jumps and the residents of Macondo and O'Connor's Misfit. I may not fully understand them but they live inside me every second of every day.

How does the fog come in on the day after Christmas?

The fog comes/on little cat feet

Thought of this Carl Sandburg poem as I sat watching the ocean as fog crept in. Cats weren't on my mind as much as the view from Tom Renick Park in Ormond-by-the-Sea. My visiting daughter stood beside me. Waves rolled through the fog and crunked on the shore. The surf wasn't bad. Rollers breaking outside but you could ride them out of the fog like a vampire surfer. Three young surfers appeared suddenly, boards under arms, walking north on the beach. No wetsuits. Gotta admire those guys. Two days ago there was sun and a bit of wind and all the surfers wore wetsuits. Must be the wind. The fog today traveled on a light north breeze. We were shielded by the adjacent condo high-rise. Still, tiny mist dabs fell on my exposed legs and dotted my windbreaker. I kept expecting a cat to appear but the only sound was traffic along A1A and kids on winter break cavorting in the playground. No way to hear little cat's feet. I imagined it just the same.

My first winter solstice on the Florida coast

This solstice I awoke to lawnmowers, just one, the riding mower Brian pilots as he mows my yard and the ones adjacent and across the street. It’s winter solstice and in Wyoming I didn’t wake up to lawnmowers. Snowblowers sound similar but the pitch is different, closer to a screech than a roar. And the mowers move quickly as they crisscross the salt-air-resistant St. Augustine grass that is like a weaving rather than the upright bluegrass or fine fescue of Wyoming. Yes, bluegrass, a lawn type suited more for the green of Kentucky racehorse pastures than the brown of the high prairie. When bluegrass matures, it feels fine on bare feet. Not so the Florida varietal; its runners poke feet. It keeps growing after summer and Brian is here every other week in December instead of every week in June. The Florida rains arrive and you can almost watch the grass grow.

Winter solstice announces the rough part of winter and the beginning of longer bouts of sun although we barely notice it day by day. Summer solstice announces the glorious days of summer and the slow passage of the sun across the sky or so it seems when you live in the Sunshine State and you work mowing lawns or pounding nails or laying down roofing shingles. Brian finishes the big front law and moves to the back. He makes three passes in my tiny yard and then he’s on to Number  70 or Number 66 or motors across the street to Number 67. I hear him most of the morning and it’s odd is what it is, this summer sound at Christmastime. Soon the leafblower erupts and it’s more akin to snowblowers and I wish I found comfort in it but don’t.

In Florida and Wyoming, the sounds of December 21 mean one thing: summer is coming. In Wyoming, it takes its own sweet time. In Florida, well, it’s already here.

Watching surfers the day before my 74th birthday

They are tiny figures on the outside sandbar, straddling their surfboards, heads bobbing up with each oncoming wave, and then obscured again behind the froth.

I know how it feels, this waiting. It’s not like other kinds of waiting, waiting for a traffic light to turn, waiting in the grocery store line, waiting for school day’s final bell.

It’s waiting for the future, waiting to see the heft of the wave, the promise of the day’s best ride as the sea moves beneath your board and lifts you up and it’s up to you to see where you go and what you do

And sometimes it’s a bubbling brute of whitewater that pushes you off the board and into the drink and depending on the wave size, how much time you spend cartwheeling until you emerge to find your board.

These young surfers out there today, they wear leashes and their boards spin with them and sometimes into them.

In the 1960s, the boards were bigger and unleashed, could whack you good if close enough, the skeg or fin a sharp knife that can leave a mark.

My surf life was short, a high school thing that I left behind in my twenties and I don’t know why.

Some of today’s surfers will be out on the waves in twenty years – remember how young you were at 37, half my age now? At 17, 37 is forever years away, 74 is so far down the line that it doesn’t exist except among those old people who clog the roads as you speed to the beach before the waves get blown out.

Age beached me. I can’t walk. I can swim with a floatation device. I can get to the beach by car and use my walker to get to the water, let it lick my toes, take me back to 1967 when a December day with waves was good enough but not as glorious as a July day with surf and 80-degree water and my fellow surfers surround me and I spy my girlfriend pull up and park and she waves and I return the wave and feel as if I will live forever this way, a young man in the ocean, just waiting for the next wave.

The sea calls my name

Wind from the ancient sea

A hurricane-force wind blew down the pine onto my roof on a February day. The house shook and I looked out the front window to see the pine cantilevered from the ground to the roof. Damn it’s Super Bowl Sunday and I have a game to watch but that’s how it is in Wyoming where there are plenty of mighty winds but no hurricanes. Like in “Oklahoma” where “the wind comes sweepin’ ‘cross the plains,” in Wyoming, the wind comes sweeping across the Gangplank of the Laramie Range right through Cheyenne and on to Nebraska. Wind from an ancient sea, nothing to stop it but my tree and my roof and a limited imagination.

We slept with bedroom windows wide in the middle of winter. Furnace so efficient we cranked it down but were still warm as toast in our beds. I came to bed late, Chris already sleeping, and the wind would ruffle the dainty curtains etched with palm trees. The wind lulled me to sleep. Trees might come crashing down or maybe just big branches but this was Wyoming and trees were scarce and far between. As I fell asleep, I imagined the wind with a salt tinge, fresh from the ocean, traveling the thousand yards from the beach to our little house and through the wide-open jalousie windows and the beat-up screens and into my memory where it remains.

And last night, I heard the ocean while reading in my house a short walk away from the Atlantic. It’s wide, the ocean, wider than Wyoming and the entire West with its gangplanks and sweeping plains and rock-ribbed cliffs. I threw open the window and realized the ocean was kicking, stirred up by some force beyond the horizon. It was loud, as if waves were breaking at my tympani. I rushed to bed, tucked myself in, memories of the surf kicking up and into my teen-age room, promise of big waves tomorrow, surfing with my brother, gone these ten years, the sea calling us as if it knew our names.

A swim in the Y pool may not be a walk in the park

I am training myself to walk again. It's no walk in the park.

I looked up "walk meaning" and found some leisurely reading.

It's a verb (I walked to school) and a noun (It was a leisurely walk). It's a word you hear on almost of every episode of "Law & Order:" "We can't just let this perp walk!" If he does, I'm certain he will walk quickly from the building most likely in the company of his attorney.

Walk is quite popular. A chart on Google Ngram Viewer shows that the popularity of walk is at an all-time high in the 2020s. It may not remain there judging by our unfit population, all in need of a good walk or even a not-so-good one.

This brings this post to me. I cannot walk. My body revolted and, judging by a photo taken in a hospital ICU, I was revolting afterward. "That's not me" I said when my wife showed me the photo of the old man on the gurney. He was obviously out of it. IV tubes snaked from his arm. He had been intubated and fitted with a feeding tube. You couldn't see the Foley catheter or the heart monitor but they were there amongst the jumble of sheets and blankets.

That was Sept. 9. I can walk now, sort of. I get around with a standard walker complete with tennis-ball feet and I also have a rollator walker with four wheels. I sometimes scoot around on an electric scooter labeled Buzz Around XL. When Chris and I go for a walk on the bike path, she walks and I scoot. Still, we call it a walk. I do. 

But I can't walk, not yet anyway. Over the past five years, I hurt myself in ways that blunted my walking mechanism. That's a silly way to put it. I sometimes tell people I am partially disabled. I did that the other day. Jeff escorted Chris and me on an introductory tour of the Ormond Beach YMCA. We joined and wanted to see what we were getting into. A lifeguard about my age but looking 20 years younger, showed me the chair they use for hefting people like me into the pool's shallow end. I explained that I was partially disabled and that I could walk down the five steps into the pool to join each morning's water-ex class.. I plan to walk unaided or maybe with a cane in the near future. I aim to be a walker again. It will not be a walk in the park and it hasn't been. Still...

Did I really need that ambulance on the September night in question?

Most Americans, it seems, have been following the hunt for the murderer of United Healthcare exec Brian Thompson. But it’s not the manhunt that has received most of the attention. Instead, it’s the deeply flawed American healthcare system which, to most people, represents the American Healthcare Denial System beholden to Wall Street. Valid medical claims are turned down because they hurt Healthcare United’s bottom line. I shall throw my insurer in there, too, as my family has been denied payment by CIGNA for medical claims. Much of that is related to mental healthcare for my children. I could write a book on our experiences with various insurers as we worked to save our children. I will not write a book -- what’s the point? Inequalities of our system have been going on for decades and will continue.

My experiences with my healthcare claims and those of my wife have been great. Heart attacks, it seems, ring a bell with insurers. Near-death experiences with septicemia also resonate in the corridors of both CIGNA and Medicare. Those were claims made by me, the Widowmaker in 2014 and the septicemia in 2024. Seems as if I have a major malfunction every ten years.

The latest issue took me by surprise. I got a bill from Volusia County Emergency Medical Services for an ambulance transport to Advent Health Hospital in Daytona. They write that Medicare has turned me down for the $894.80 ride and said it was a “ ‘non-covered service’ because it does not meet Medicare’s medical necessity requirements.”

This seems quite odd to me as Medicare has partially covered at least one ambulance ride. In January in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I caught Covid and one cold January night I couldn’t breathe from the congestion and an ambulance took me to the local hospital where they got me breathing again and sent me home five hours later. That met Medicare’s medical necessity requirements.

At the ER on the night of Sept. 9, the Code Blue team was called out as my heart stopped twice  after I had two seizures. Chris said it was quite a sight to see as medical personnel rushed into the room and saved me. My vitals were wacko (medical term) and staff guessed I had a massive infection of some kind and they placed me in a coma for four days.

Pause here to let readers know that my dear wife took a photo of the comatose me and I will share it if you ask nicely and agree to publish my next novel. 

When I came to in ICU, I didn’t know where I was and what had happened. To read the full experience, go to my previous posts here and here. Turns out I had septicemia from an unknown source and it blasted my bodily functions such as walking and talking, eating and defecating. I was moved from ICU to a medical floor and then the twelfth floor which Advent devotes to physical therapy for stroke victims, the partially paralyzed, and mystery cases like me. I made enough progress by Oct. 4 that Advent released me back into the Florida Wilds and that’s where I’ve been ever since.

I am a lucky man. I am blessed more than I should be blessed. There is one thing I will not be and that is almost $900 poorer because I didn’t meet Medicare’s requirements for sick people. Twenty-five days in the hospital? A quick survey of my hospital history: I spent five days after my heart attack, three days after knee-replacement surgery, and two days following a spinal fusion. I am so glad I wasn’t sick enough in September and decided to take an Advent Health cruise.

Volusia County Emergency Medical Services sent me a list of items I must file for an appeal. They include all of my medical records from the hospital (“you may be required to pay a fee") and “a letter from any physicians you may have followed up with in regards to your ambulance transport.” I can see how daunting this might be for someone, possibly a retired someone recovering at home from a near-death experience.

There is some irony here. It wasn’t the bad guys at CIGNA that turned me down. That mega-insurer is my secondary and they haven’t had a crack at me yet. I pay too much of my pension for that coverage. I also paid for Medicare which is a government program. I should be railing against the stinkin’ gubment, right. Old Joe Biden let me down.

But during my recovery, I’ve noticed that Medicare is concerned about higher costs and wants all of us to use its new reporting system. This addresses higher costs and the millions, maybe billions, of fraud claims by people who should be strung up on the highest yardarm (archaic Navy term). One of the highest costs for patients and Medicare is the abuse/overuse of ambulance services.

Trump’s Project 2025 may be behind Medicare’s new cost-saving initiative. But wait – Trump is busy enlisting nincompoops to head government agencies and getting his ass kissed at Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and hasn’t yet assumed the mantles of power.

The only thing left to blame is the USA’s antiquated and rapacious healthcare system. The death of a healthcare executive is a tragedy. And it is tragic that some find humor in it.

Delighting in the suffering of others is a MAGA trait, is it not? What in the hell are we doing?

Winter is coming and it's time to stockpile soup for a nasty 2025

I blame Max Brooks.

Yes, the guy who wrote “World War Z” and the excellent graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters” (artwork by Caanan White).

In his 2020 book, “Devolution,” Brooks combines a gigantic eruption of Mount Rainier and a Sasquatch invasion and civil war and the bumbling of clueless techies. All hell breaks loose.

Most people are woefully unprepared because we are Americans and live for the moment and ourselves. We do not stockpile food and supplies like the LDSers and Preppers. Why bother? Nothing’s gonna happen.

In “Devolution,” residents of the wired Greenloop community high in the scenic Washington state mountains must find ways to do without grocery deliveries by drone, solar power, and cell connections as they struggle to survive. The elderly artist in the co-op knows how to grow spuds from potato eyes and how to trap and dissect rabbits for a yummy stew.

I was thinking about that while staring at the canned soups at Publix. Look at all of those cans. They don’t need refrigeration. They don’t really need to be cooked as they are MREs. So, acting on instinct and paranoia, I grabbed a bunch of Progresso soups. You don’t even need a manual can opener as you can open the can yourself even if you have difficulties with aging hands as I do. I imagine that all of the refrigerated food is eaten or spoiled. We have long since eaten all the packaged crackers and cookies and snacks.

Soup will save us. I grabbed a dozen cans. Piled them high in the cart. When Chris caught up with me, she surveyed my shopping cart and asked, “Why all the soup?”

“Winter is coming.”

“This isn’t ‘Games of Thrones’ “

“Winter, it’s still coming.”

“I know. But not this week. And we have a fridge and freezer filled with food.”

“People are talking about a civil war. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

“You watched ‘Ghostbusters’ again?”

“But what if…”

“What if what?”

A crowd gathered by the soups. People stared at us, and then at the beautiful red-and-white cans of original Campbell’s, tiny tributes to Andy Warhol. Some wanted to get their own soup to stockpile for a looming disaster such as one the USA will face on Jan. 20, 2025.

Chris, alas, had her way. I put back most of the soups. We kept Campbell’s chicken noodle and Progresso creamy tomato and basil.

The rest of the shopping trip was uneventful. I managed to slip in a box of saltines and boxes of Band-Aids, the large kind, the kind you would use for post-apocalyptic wounds. I checked out and went home to continue reading “Devolution,” large-print edition.

And I had to ask myself: What if?

When we were friends

Some have died. Too many. A High School Friend, knocked back by alcohol, claimed by Covid, I hadn’t seen in decades. No funeral due to the pandemic. We knew each other in high school but I ran with a different crowd, I thought I was all that, you know, how at 17 you can think you’re all that without knowing what that is and what you may become. A few years later, we partied together, were roommates at the beat-up house at the end of the street on the way to Newnan’s Lake in Gainesville. He had a car, shuttled the lot of us to Daytona to be with family and other old friends. On one summer trip the afternoon skies opened up as it does in Florida. We rounded a corner, the sheets of rain easing up, and came upon a rollover. Pickup lost control on rain-slick country road. Little metal cylinders rolled around the soggy pavement and two guys too young to drink legally scrambled to pick them up. One guy motioned for us to come over and said “take as many beers as you want” and we realized that dozen of cans of PBR were on the tarmac. “Take them – cops are coming!” He shoved an armful at me. I stared, and then heard the sirens. “Hurry!!” My Housemate and I shuttled back and forth to his car and we had quite a stash by the time the Sheriff arrived. We were asked if we were witnesses and we said no sir no sir we just happened by afterwards and wanted to help but we’ll be on our way now sir. And we were. Partied all weekend at the beach. My Roomie more than most but thought that was just the way he was so the days and weeks and years went on and I realized that My Friend would never let go of those PBRs and Jack and shrooms and whatever other mind-altering substance came his way. I went West with the woman who became my wife and there was a 25-year reunion at a beach hotel and I was with wife and two kids and My Old Roomie was sober, with a woman friend he had met at AA. Later, he was homeless, or so I heard. I didn’t check to see if that was true. I had my own problems – that’s what I told myself. His sister texted me to say My Classmate had died of Covid, had been sick at home for too long and it was too late by the time he was carted off to the hospital and died. No funeral due to Covid and now it’s been several years and his face swims into view when we talk about school chums, where are they now and so on. My wife and I have now returned to that beach town where we met and memories swirl around like skeeters on a July night. I can tell you one thing that is true: There was a time during my brief span on Earth when this man and I were friends. On this lonely planet, for a brief time, we were friends. That will have to do.

On the ghost trail to Lulu City

I am caught between two worlds.

In one, I am at the beach or in a park or lunching with friends at Inlet Harbor.

In the other, I tense up, stare at the wall, and wonder where I am and who I am.  I drift off, imagine I fly over the Laramie Range. Below are the convoluted rock shapes of Vedauwoo. On one of the heights is my son, waving up at me as he used to wave down at me on the flatlands as I wondered how in the hell a 12-year-old scrambled to the top without falling. I soar above the beach and see the waves I no longer ride or no longer even stand calf-length in since I can’t walk unaided to the water.

I almost died twice during a four-day hospital span that I can’t remember. I awoke a mess, unable to walk or shit or even talk. “What month is it?” I haven’t a clue. The medicos gave me fentanyl to let me float through the trauma and it worked as a mind-eraser. I float through those four days that I don’t remember.

Yesterday I sat for three hours in the nicely-appointed customer waiting room at KIA HQ. The people there seemed human enough as did I. I read a non-fiction book about Japanese fliers who flew airplanes into American ships in a last-ditch effort to halt dreaded defeat. Kamikaze, Divine Wind. In Korea, where my SUV was made, Japanese troops rounded up young females to serve as “comfort women” and worked to death Allied soldiers my father’s age of 20 in 1943.

I live on a thin thread. We all do. I didn’t want to die from septicemia but almost did and it was nothing that I did or didn’t do. An occupying army of bacteria invaded my bloodstream and began to switch off my organs, one by one, like you walk through the house turning off lights, eager to get to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Antibiotics stopped the massacre. And medical staff on a mission. And time. And something undefined. Something blessed.

I sometimes see the world’s forests on fire. Other days, I peer down into Rocky Mountain National Park and see me hiking with my wife and kids. That is just one part of one summer day. It’s frozen in my memory. I am always on the trail to abandoned Lulu City, walking past falling-down cabins with a ghost in each doorway. One of them looks just like me.

A snowless Christmas season ain't all bad

The most beautiful song about missing snow at Christmas is one written by Steve Goodman and performed by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The song’s narrator looks out the window of his Hollywood Hotel on Christmas Eve and sees billboards, neon, traffic, and palm trees, and notes it’s 84 degrees.

He yearns for Colorado. The song’s refrain goes like this: “The  closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere/is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.”

Nothing gets me as nostalgic for Colorado. John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High,” maybe, a 1972 song that planted the seeds for Colorado’s marijuana boom.

The state is not always snowbound at Christmas. I do remember a time when it was, Christmas of 1982, the year of the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard. Two feet of snow fell in one day. I watched it outside my walkup apartment window in City Park South, where we could hear the zoo’s peacocks almost every day.

Chris, alas, was trying to figure out a way to get home from her downtown job. Buses weren’t running as businesses and government shut down. A coworker herded Chris and four others into his 10-year-old compact car and raced up Colfax (“The Fax”) to drop everyone off. He hoped for the best, as did they. After maneuvering through a maze of stuck cars and two-foot drifts, Chris was released on Cook Street. As she said later, “He just slowed down and I jumped out.” A bit later, I saw her maneuvering the drifts, her diminutive figure whipped by the winds and flurries. She was shrouded in snow and ice by the time she reached the apartment. We unwrapped her carefully, fed her coffee and soup, and soon she was able to tell her tale.

We went to sleep secure that the snow would wrap up in the night, Santa would arrive, and we would wake up to a winter wonderland.

Chris woke up with a cold, and went back to bed. I ate, grabbed the snow shovel, and wandered out looking for people to help. Our neighborhood was a mix of old brick houses, apartmentized houses such as ours, and small apartment complexes. Most of the neighbors were young but there were some elders in the mix. I sought them out. But they knew better than to venture out. I was able to help a driver dig out his stuck car but that was it. I headed home.

We had other big snows but rarely ones like this. In 1982, we were recently married and were only four years into our Denver adventure. We still remembered snowless Florida Christmases. It snowed once in Daytona and twice one year in Gainesville. Never a blizzard but a sprinkling could shut down the city. And did

Visiting The Chief in Tomoka State Park

Chris and I ventured out yesterday and we didn't even have any medical appointments. Instead, Chris packed a lunch and we set off past the houses and into the woods. We were looking for a paved bike path that borders North Beach Street. We were seeking paved trails because Chris was outfitted to walk and I was outfitted to pilot my electric scooter. I still can't walk, you see, and since I moved at a glacier's pace with my walker, we needed to find a path that won't bog down my modestly powered scooter. 

We didn't. But we did find Tomoka State Park. Uncrowded and rustic. A place I visited a lot as a kid. We moved to Daytona in 1964 with a Ford Falcon of 10 people and one dog. The beach was our favorite, so different from our Colorado home turf. The surf moved, the mountains did not. Both were vast playgrounds. Tomoka was too. A river to splash in and woods to romp in.

Indian grounds back in pre-Columbian days. The Timucuan Tribe, numbering some 200,000 in the pre-Columbian era. They were wiped out by 1800. They had the bad luck of their location close to St. Augustine where Spanish Conquistadores landed and and set out to locate the gold they were promised but instead found Natives offering them shellfish so killed them. Also, smallpox and VD. I plan to read more about the tribe but realize it is part of a sad saga that was repeated over the decades all across the continent.

Chris walked. I powered my scooter over the hard-packed sand. It was easygoing until we reached the statue of Chief Tomokie. The statue preserves a tale told by the Timucuans or told about them. It was planned and built by Fred Dana Marsh, a sculptor who moved to Ormond Beach in the 1930s. His wife urged him to build a beach house which has since been demolished. He also did the bas reliefs of the Four Muses at Peabody Auditorium (still there) and the Chief Tomokie work. During World War 1, he designed stirring posters for the war effort. Later, he hung out in Paris cafes with other expat artists.

I guess it's nice that all sorts of local places are named for The Chief and his tribe. It would have been even nicer had Europeans had let them live in peace. That's not how colonization works.

We picnicked on a table at the Outpost Store. The Outpost makes great lemonade. We watched visitors slip their boats off of trailers and motor down the river. Later, we shopped at the store. I bought some locally made honey by bees and beekeepers. Bought a book about Florida's early development in the years before the Civil War. A T-shirt too, of course. 

I am pleased to be mobile. I am pleased to be here. Today I'm at the beach in Daytona close to where I surfed as a teen. Those days, what great memories.

Those days.

Halifax Art Festival gets us out on the streets to get our art fix

Ventured out to the 62nd annual Halifax Art Festival at the Riverfront in Daytona. The location was Beach Street that used to be Daytona's Main Street even though there is a real Main Street, a seedier beachside place that our parents warned us to stay away from. 

Beach Street was home to department stores such as Sears and Penney's. We used to get our Boy Scout stuff at Penney's, and our Catholic School stuff too. The movie theater in the 1960s showed first-run movies including all the Gidget and Teens Having Swingin' Fun On The California Beaches I films. Also, James Bond.

It was a big deal to have your homecoming parade down Beach Street. Father Lopez, with its student body of 400, couldn't come up with a huge parade. Ours featured a couple of decorated parent's convertibles and a few floats. No marching band. We didn't have any kind of band let alone a marching one. 

Malls arrived. Department stores and others abandoned Beach Street and seediness set in. Malls, now, are transitioning to megachurches and private schools and consumers have decided to return to bistros and shops on Main Street, I mean Beach Street.

We walked the many blocks of the art festival. Beautiful work by artists so committed to their vision that they schlepped it from Fort Pierce and Gainesville. They they arrived at dawn Saturday to hang their art in their booth and hope to make enough money to defray expenses. This is not a pursuit for the feint of heart. You are inspired to create and then comes the marketing and web sites and travel. 

Chris bought some beautiful beach scenes for our walls now dedicated to Rocky Mountain vistas and wildlife. We like a mix. A splendid photo of fall colors in Wyoming's Aspen Alley next to an oil painting of a manta ray slipping through blue Atlantic waters. Yellowstone bison next to a Florida armadillo. Sunsets from all over. I bought some note cards of the art I admired because I still send art cards to family and friends. We celebrate the beauty while we can.

We are entering the prime season here for outdoor arts events. Wyoming artists have either put their work away or back on gallery walls. Some may answer the poo-tee-weet of the elusive snowbird and gone to Tucson or Marfa or Daytona. We shall see you soon.

Git along little dogies -- and watch out for that six-foot gator behind the palm tree

When I moved from Florida to Denver in 1978, I wandered down to the local bookstore and bought “Centennial” by James Michener. It was published in ’74, two years before the Centennial State’s centennial. That tie-in helped boost the book into the bestseller lists. Michener had a history at UNC. He taught there from 1936-40 when it was called the Colorado State College of Education. He donated all of his papers and research material to UNC and it became the Michener Special Collection. The library was named for Michener in 1972.

When I moved to Wyoming in 1991, I picked up John McPhee’s “Rising from the Plains.” In it, McPhee, with the help of legendary Wyoming geologist David Love, Tracked the amazing millennia of land masses rising from and falling into the plains. On one of my first work trips around the state, I listened to the audiobook and found myself on site at the Red Desert and the Snowy Range and the big caldera that is Jackson Hole. Never looked at them the same again.

I’m writing this because I now have returned to Florida from Wyoming which, as I remind people who seem a bit confused by its whereabouts, I say it’s the big (almost) square state just north of another square state, Colorado, where both pot and membership in the Democratic Party are legal.

But I digress. When I arrived in Florida in August just before back-to-back hurricanes, I vowed to read a book by a Florida writer about an era of the state I knew nothing about. So, naturally, I chose a book about Florida cowboys and their cattle drives. Head ‘em up and move ‘em out – and watch out for the snakes and the gators and malaria-carrying skeeters.

“A Land Remembered” from Pineapple Press of Palm Beach is an excellent novel by Patrick D. Smith. It tells the story of three generations of the MacIvey clan from 1858-1968. In the early years, they face starvation, gator attacks, ambushes by Confederate deserters, and all kinds of wild weather. They round up stray cattle with bullwhips and the crack of the whips give them the name “Crackers.” They assembled herds, drove them to the west Florida port of Punta Rassa near Punta Gorda, and faced all sorts of adventures along the way. They eventually moved from cattle to citrus to land developers, each with their successes and pitfalls. They lost friends and family to raging bulls and rustlers. But all of that land that the family bought in what’s now Dade County became very valuable once air conditioning entered the picture.

It's a fantastic tale, the book worthy of the kudos heaped on it. I couldn’t avoid making comparisons to books and movies of cattle drives in the West, especially Wyoming and Colorado. I worked for 30 years in Cheyenne and learned a lot about the history of the cattle biz in the West. Cheyenne Frontier Days is in its second century and that history is featured in the CFD Old West Museum, the Wyoming State Museum, and many works of art around the city.

“A Land Remembered” is a great novel and opened my eyes to Florida history I knew little about. The MacIveys make their home on the Kissimmee River near the town that’s mostly known as the neighbor to DisneyWorld, SeaWorld, and all those other amusements of Central Florida. Kissimmee hosts an annual rodeo and an excellent museum, the Osceola County Welcome Center and History Museum at 4155 W. Vine St. There you can view dioramas of some of the scrawny cattle rounded up from swamps and scrubland, the outfits worn by Florida cowboys (no Ray-Bans but they could have used them), and info on the various predators that threatened cow and cowboy. The Seminoles also played a part in the trade and Smith does a great job describing their culture in his novel.

I think my next move will be to the Ormond Beach Public Library and see if I can find a Florida-based book targeted by Moms for Liberty. There should be scores to choose from. I’ve been here for two months and don’t yet have a library card or whatever they use for library access these days. I do have access to Libby on my Kindle but Libby is not the same thing as spending hours scanning the new books section. I have found so many treasures there.

Maybe that was a paw holding my hand

After reading my previous post about celestial hand-holding, my college roommate Bob sent this photo of my dog Bart in front of our modest house in Gainesville, Fla. He said that maybe it wasn't any hand that was holding mine as I drifted in La La Land for four days after a series of seizures and heart attacks. He suggested it may have been a paw of my dear-departed dog Bart who was our fourth roomie at the time. Bart was an Irish Setter-Lab mix that I got for a Christmas present when I lived in Boston. He was everybody's pal, but not every dog's. Our landlady's dog Joe, a one-eyed misshapen cur, would start a fight every time he saw Bart. Or maybe Bart started it, who knows? Bart disappeared while staying at my parents' house in Daytona while I looked for a pet-friendly dwelling in my new home in Denver. He disappeared one night and never returned. I got the phone call on a frigid fall night and I was distraught for a very long time. Bob's comments cheered me because he may be right, my dog Bart was telling me that it was OK to stay on Planet Earth for a while longer as we would be playing ball or frisbee in the Great Beyond for eternity. That comforted me. Here's the photo Bob sent. Bart in repose. Hella dog, Bart. Be seeing you.

I didn't see any heavenly white light but someone held my hand

Aug. 18 was the last time I posted to my blog on my PC at my Cheyenne writing desk. Chris and I moved out of our house in Cheyenne on Aug. 22. New owners took over and we shuttled down to Denver Aug. 24 and got on a plane to Orlando. My PC was packed in a U-Haul trailer with many of my other valuables and my son and his girlfriend embarked on a road trip to Ormond Beach. We unpacked and Kevin and Luisa stayed with us a couple days and we took them over to the Orlando shuttle and said farewell, for now.

On Sept. 9, I made a detour to La-La Land (a.k.a. Advent Health Hospital) for a medical journey that I partly chronicled via my cellphone at https://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2024/10/homecoming-ormond-by-sea-oct-4-2024.html. I cross-posted it on my Facebook page and my friends said WTF or something like that. I had numbness in my arms and legs and urged Chris to call 9-1-1 and the ambulance took me to the E.R. where I promptly had two seizures and they coded me twice. The very good ER crew intubated me, put down a feeding tube, and stuck with an assortment of IVs. I spent the next four days in I.C.U. none of which I remember. My wife took a picture of me as I was transported and I swear I look like an old man who almost died. Which I was. When I awoke in I.C.U. the next day, I was a bit fuzzy on the month and the day of the week and struggled with my name and birthdate. I would have been scared but I was too high (Fentanyl the E.R. notes said) to be scared.

Read more in my earlier post. I had to relearn how to pick up a spoon and walk. Reality set in and I got very scared. I asked to read the E.R. notes on the hospital's MyChart. A total of 11 staff worked on me, Doctors and nurses and techs and X-ray people. My story sounded like someone else's story They gave me a big dose of antibiotics because they detected a bacterial infection of unknown origin and it caused sepsis which is really bad and sometimes people die of it -- some call it blood poisoning. If it sounds as if I was in a remote region of Indonesia and stirred up some bad juju, I was not. Cheyenne was the most exotic place I'd been and then meandered through construction at the Denver airport (I was nowhere near the giant red-eyed horse or the Illuminati types who haunt the basement), but then I did get on a plane and you know know how many germs one finds there and then I was in the Orlando airport with many sneezing children and spirits from the Pirates of the Caribbean. 

But it was none of those. The nearest I could figure was the staph infection I had in a leg wound that was treated with antibiotics and skin grafts were applied. Maybe the antibiotics didn't do their job or the grafts were somehow infected. This is all conjecture. I was a sick puppy who spent 25 days in the hospital, half of that time in the 12th floor Therapy Center which takes only stroke patients, the partially paralyzed, the fully paralyzed and some Dementia patients. I received four to five hours of OT and PT five days a week. 

A few days in, PT Adam asked me to see far I could walk with the help of my walker. 5.5 feet was all I could do. Later, he had me try again and I got my Irish up and went 10 feet. He gave me an attaboy and I kept moving the line 5-10 feet a day. I wanted to cry sometimes but I pushed those tears deep inside and used them for fuel for my damaged leg muscles. My last day, I walked 50 feet, rested, and walked 50 more, squeezing out the last few steps. 

Chris was with me the whole time although she only spent two nights with me -- the last one during Hurricane Helene which wasn't much of a hurricane at all in our part of Florida. We had to wait for MIlton for that. A big thank you to all of my family members, especially those who yearned to bring me some white shrimp from Hull's Seafood, But I passed as the tasteless hospital food was all I was supposed to eat. The infection or all the drugs took away my taste buds. They are back now after several dosings of hot salsa and Extra Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Damn, those things are hot. I loved the Cheetos TV movie, by the way.

One last thing. I talked to my Evangelical Christian daughter and told her that someone or some presence was holding my hand while I was not fully there. Might have been one of my brothers, Pat or Dan, or my parents. No, she said, God was holding your hand. All you have to do is ask and He will be here for you. I didn't ask, but he might have been there anyway.

On Nov. 6, we bid farewell to Trump and his Project 2025 ghouls

I would not/will not vote for Trump, not even for dogcatcher. He would find some way to make dogcatching benefit Trump. Some sort of Cruella Devil scheme. I have many reasons not to vote Trump in 2024. One of them is my selfish insistence on using Medicare to save me life. I also have secondary private insurance whose main job is picking up the pieces, if any are left behind by Medicare. Darn few, so far.

Trump and his assembly of ghouls at Project 2025 want to end Medicare as we know it. The program a socialist plot to take profits away from American oligarchs like Trump and the high-tech whiz kids from Silicone Valley. They already got a big tax cut from Trump but they want more, they always want more. So, to save me and the rest of us from Trumpism, vote Harris/Walz. They will lead us into the future. My wife and I contributed to their campaigns. Just a drop in the bucket but lots of drops in lots of buckets means we will have a future.

So, as I recuperate in my Ormond Beach home from almost dying and a 25-day hospital stay, I look ahead to a day when Trump and his Project 2025 minions go away for good.

Milton leaves waves in his wake

The waves are huge. Hurricane Milton is out there still. The waves at its core could be twice the size of those that show up at Ormond-by-the-Sea. Tourists gawk. Surfers ponder and wonder what tomorrow may bring. They know the waves will gobble them up, the currents sweep them along the beach. They can wait, maybe tomorrow. Maybe Saturday the wind will shift offshore and sculpt the waves. It will be worth the wait, days this observer guesses. He sits. Waits, with camera.

Hurricane night

Winds whip the palm fronds, the rain peppers the roof. Hurricane Milton, October 9. 2024.

Milton works his way across the Florida peninsula. Made landfall this evening near Sarasota with 100-plus mph winds. Inland on the Florida East Coast, we get the fringes of the storm. I am snug inside our friend Cathy's condo. It's almost new, built to the latest codes. Power still on. Watched Mets advance to National League finals. Interviewer snagged Cheyenne homeboy Brandon Nimmo. He was in Annie's elementary school class. I hope he was nice to her.

I go to bed with the sounds of Milton in my ears...

Fleeing Milton but I never did get to the end of "Paradise Lost"

We decided to evacuate to a friend's house further from the water. Tides on the beach are running high due to some troublesome hurricanes in the Atlantic and high tide may be really high. Watching hurricane news all day. Many press conferences by the governor and his minions. I almost hate to say this but I now find the voice of Gov. DeSantis quite soothing. It's quite a departure from the scolding uncle voice we usually hear when he's blasting "Woke" folks and supporting Moms for Liberty book bans. And cutting Florida arts funding due to a semi-nude character in a stage play. Big cuts, $160 million I think. No excuse for that but he found one. Maybe it was an R-rated "Paradise Lost." Milton -- get it?

I've seen fire and I've seen rain and still more rain

So, it's been raining for four days and a hurricane is coming. A trial by water. In Wyoming, a trial by fire. Many fires burning in the north part of the state. An hour of this Florida rain will put them out. It's the CFD rodeo and storm clouds come over the mountains -- you can see them coming 50 miles away -- and then there's some lightning so everyone takes cover. The rain last 10 minutes then it's back to bucking broncos. No problem if you get wet. The sun comes out and steam rises from your duds and the show goes on. Rain comes down here and swamps you and you will dry out just in time for the next rain. Maybe.

And what about that hurricane?