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 sco onoter. 

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 set 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 (probably 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.