I say zeppelins, you say dirigibles

Signal Corps Dirigible No. 1, U.S. Army, circa 1908

I found this nifty photo of the Army Signal Corps' first airship. I don't know the photographer's name. Thomas Scott Baldwin designed the SC-1 at the urging of Chief Signal Officer Brigadier James Allen who had seen one of Baldwin's dirigibles at an air show in 1907. The SC-1 was based in Fort Omaha, Nebraska, and drew big crowds whenever its tiny engine propelled the hydrogen-powered dirigible from its hanger. This photo was taken between 1908 and 1912, when the army's only airship was scrapped. The Army brass saw no further use for it.

Postcard featuring the Baldwin Dirigible. It is part of a set collected in a scrapbook entitled Album Gravures et Cartes-Postales: Vieux Paris Types Petits Métiers et Cris De La Rue (1909).

Meanwhile, in Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented his plans for a rigid airship in 1895 and the first working model, the LZ-1, made its maiden flight in 1900. By 1912, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin had built 14 hydrogen airships, one in use for passenger travel and another in the Kaiser's navy. More were on the way. When the Great War began in September 1914, Germany wasted little time in sending zeppelins LZ-3 and LZ-4 on a Jan. 19, 1915 bombing raid over Yarmouth and Norfolk. Four dead on the ground and 16 injured. It was the first aerial bombing of civilians in modern warfare. 

A note on language: According to Wiktionary, Dirigible comes from the French  ballon dirigeable (“steerable balloon”). Zeppelin comes from the last name of Count von Zeppelin and his manufacturing company, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.  

Voting is easy at the permanently closed Korona Fire Station

The Korona Fire Station has seen better days.

It’s no longer a fire station. Chris and I received a notice that it was permanently closed but it would be open for primary voting on Aug. 18. Good news, as that’s our polling place here in unincorporated Flagler County.

As we left my Ormond dentist’s office (good news on teeth!), Chris called the election office just to make sure we were headed to the correct polling place as we are new to this neighborhood. Mark, Office of Supervisor of Elections, answered. “Yes,” he said, “the Korona station is permanently closed but open for voting.”

We drove east on Grenada to U.S. 1 and headed north. Korona sounded familiar but I didn’t know why. Once we reached the white cinder-block building, memory took me back to road trips in the ‘60s, driving Daytona to Bunnell for basketball games. Driving north to Jacksonville before the interstate opened in 1967. Korona was a blip along the way, a tiny town with a tiny fire station.

Still tiny. But open for business this election day. An election judge motioned to the handicapped parking spot, I grabbed my rollator, and we rolled and walked  inside.

The interior is about the size of a two-car garage. Election judges greeted us. They are paid, these good citizens, but not much. Trained, too. I served as one during many elections in Cheyenne, Wyo. I asked for electronic voting as I need the big screen to read tiny type. They showed me to my seat. I voted. I knew the candidates for the major offices. I was clueless about the local school board candidates. Are they right-wing loonies out to keep books from the minds of our youth? Or are they moderate GOPers or Democrats? I just took a stab at it.

I printed out my ballot, placed it in a “Secret Folder” and brought it to the judge at the tabulator. The ballot then comes out of the Secret Folder to be fed into the machine which is monitored by a judge. He can see my ballot as it’s sucked in. So much for secret. But unless he had special high-tech glasses equipped with a camera, there is no way he could see my ballot and report that there’s another commie in the neighborhood.

I sat in the SUV as Chris went back inside to use the restroom. In the station’s fenced backyard, the weeds are getting a bit out of control. A concrete basketball half-court stands empty. I imagined the firefighters out there playing three-on-three, shirts off under the oaks. Good-natured in-your-face taunts.

More voters arrived as we left. We were stopped at a traffic light at the entrance to Plantation Bay, one of the many housing developments that have skyrocketed the population of a rural county we used to refer to unkindly in our youth. Palm Coast didn’t exist. Bunnell didn’t have a massive new city/county building. Flagler Beach was not becoming another Daytona Beach. Aging World War Two veterans played ball outside the Korona station, awaiting the latest barn fire or fiery collision between liquored-up teens.

I awoke this morning to good news. Democrats made impressive showings in Florida. In Wyoming, 14 members of the Freedom Caucus went down in flames, bested by more moderate GOPers.

Here’s this morning New York Times headline:

“A Stunning Win for the Left in Florida: 6 Takeaways fromTuesday’s Primaries.”

And this from Wyoming’s WyoFile:

“Wyoming Freedom Caucus loses at least 14 incumbent lawmakers.”

Maybe, just maybe, “the times they are a-changin’.”

For some background on the community of Korona, founded in 1914 by Polish immigrants from Chicago and Detroit, see the late Sisco Deen's entry at the Flagler County Historical Society 

Just who is the Batman in this old photo?

The older you get, the more photos appear. Brothers and sisters drop by with a few boxes, say they were cleaning out their closets and would I want these. Before you can answer, they are off in their Kia and the boxes remain. So you bring them in and put them next to other boxes and swear you will get to them someday.

I went through one of those boxes yesterday. It was stifling outside, the Colorado Rockies game wouldn't be on until 4 our time (they won!) so I pulled out a box and sorted through it. There are moments of nostalgia, moments of joy mixed with sorrow. Most are moments of confusion. Who are these people? It seems that not labeling photographs is a family trait. 

I include the above aged and torn photo because it is so puzzling. At first glance, it seems as I am looking at a dapper Batman (note the dapper hat) in the foreground and his offspring in a carriage pushed by his mysterious spouse. But no, because the pic is in with others from my father's family, I peg the foreground figure as my grandfather Raymond Shay, the woman is my Grandmother, Florence, and the baby in the buggy is my father Thomas, their first-born. 

The location has to be the fringes of Denver, looking out on the wide prairie. When Ray and Florence built their first house, it was on the eastern fringe of their City Park neighborhood, so close to the new airport (not much of one in the mid-20s) they could see Eddie Rickenbacker or Charles Lindbergh take off. Rickenbacker cracked up an aeroplane north of Denver in the 1920s and lived to tell the tale. Lindbergh was an airmail pilot flying love letters from Omaha to San Francisco through Wyoming with stops in Denver. He also cracked up a few times but lived a long and complicated life.

The day of the photo: What was it like? It wasn't summer, judging by Florence's big coat and the winter bat cape worn by grandfather. The baby, my father, is wrapped in his swaddling clothes, whatever they are. The fields look bare with harvest long gone. It was just a walk in the neighborhood. The sun is behind the photographer. In the afternoon, it would be heading toward the mountains. Grandfather is probably using a viewfinder camera, which he has to look down into to frame the shot and click the clicker. 

These new parents have been off to war. They met at the army hospital in Aurora where she was a nurse and he was an officer with lung problems. The army sent the lungers to Denver and points west for the dry air and sunshine. Colorado was famous for its TB sanatoria. 

My father, a toddler in the photo, went off to war in 1942 and returned. He met my mother, a Navy-trained nurse in the late 1940s and I was born in the middle of the century.

My wife Christine and I met at a keg party in Daytona Beach and lived our working and procreating lives in Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C. We retired in Florida. We have a cabinet filled with family photo albums, many of them labeled. We have boxes in closets that our kids will inherit and eventually try to pawn off on relatives. That's the way of the world. 

A young Irish lad awaits his ship, any ship, at the Liverpool docks

The Mersey River at the Liverpool docks. Credit: "Merchantmen-at-Arms: The British Merchants' Service in the War" by David W. Bone, 1919. Illustrator: Muirhead Bone.

Baba, Unsinkable, 1915

Short creative nonfiction by Michael Shay        `

A young Irishman looks up at the mighty S.S. Cameronia, unsinkable. He is my grandfather, father to Anna my mother and Baba to me. I hung the name on him, my toddler-self trying to say Papa I guess. Grandfather “Baba,” all his belongings in a canvas sack, leaves the Liverpool docks and walks the gangplank to the ship’s deck and down to steerage.

This motherless boy is bound for America. He left Roscommon at 12, three years before, cast out by his stepmother, his mother dead at childbirth, father a wayward drunk, older brother and sister already in America. Roamed Dublin streets. Peelers grabbed up boys and sent them to England and the mines. Donkey boy, he was, guiding the animals that hauled the coal. Later, he grew so big, they handed the Irish boy a shovel and lamp. He and the boys replaced the men being pulled from the mines and sent to trenches along the Somme. 

He saved his wages and walked to Liverpool. Along the way, he found a picture postcard of Lusitania and claimed her as his ship. Such a ship. Unsinkable. He waited at the dock with rootless boys, farm families fresh from the dirt. They waited and waited for Lusitania. Heard the news it was sunk. Now he’ll never get to the States. He had saved enough for passage and spending money. He got in the queue for another ticket. The clerk announced that too had been sunk. He waited for the next, the stalwart S.S. Cameronia. Unsinkable. 

Grandpa boarded Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, so said the Anchor Line of Great Britain, flew the 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. 

America, at last. Almost two years later, grandfather lived with his brother’s family on the South Side. Worked on the Chicago El with his brother. He swept out the cars, picked up the trash, a man now. It was April; spring slowly arriving. Wilson declared war. Grandfather was stateless, an invisible man. Undraftable. 

On April 15, 1917, just a week after America declared war, the unsinkable Cameronia, loaded with 3,000 English troops, was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean. Survivors rescued by destroyers Nemesis and Rifleman. Its final moments were recreated by mariner David W. Bone who had a fine name for a historian. 

This prose writer shall construct a poem of his words, his exact words, now sailing in history's public domain:

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.

Grandfather lived to 90. Died abed 1990 in Denver, Banshees in the burbs. Never again crossed the ocean. Or flew it, no yearning to return to Ireland or England. Preferred his growing American family. Loved his grandkids and ice cream that he first tasted on crowded New York City streets. Baba the Irishman, motherless child, donkey boy, train car sweeper, postman, family man, ice cream man, blessed, lucky.

Loss of a Liner, 1917. Credit: 

"Merchantmen-at-Arms:

the British Merchant Service at War" by David W. Bone, 1919. Illustrator: Muirhead Bone.

"Zeppelins Over Denver" lands on The Florida Writer magazine "Celebrations" page

My novel landed on the "Celebrations!" section in the latest issue of the The Florida Writer magazine. Congrats to all the FWA members with new books. Some good summer/fall reading ahead.  

Wyoming Public Radio: "Good morning Wyoming and Central Florida!"

I listen to Wyoming Sounds almost every morning. It's on Wyoming Public Radio. It used to be aired just mornings during olden times prior to 2016 when I retired and began spending mornings writing my historical novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver." "Throwback Thursdays" was my favorite, most of the show dedicated to musicians and bands celebrating music milestones. Wyoming talent was showcased. Grady Kirkpatrick live-casted from Cheyenne Day July 22 at Cheyenne Frontier Days with special guest Jalan Crossland from Ten Sleep who performed that week at a special 250th U.S. birthday bash on the state capitol grounds.

I opened up the WPR site while still abed this morning and heard Grady's interview with Tom Owens. He's a Kansas City author who's written a trilogy on the Kansas/Missouri border wars prior to and during the Civil War. His first volume, "The Chimney," covers the U.S. Army's order to evacuate four counties on the Missouri side of the border so Quantrill's Raiders and Bloody Bill Anderson would have no way to resupply their raiders. The army used a scorched earth policy to move the settlers, kill the livestock, burn the fields and the houses, leaving only a burned landscape of limestone chimneys, thus the title. If this tactic sounds familiar, read about Sherman's March to the Sea, U.S. tactics during the Vietnam War, or Russian tactics during the Nazi invasion of World War Two. 

Owens' follow-up novel, "The Great Wide Open," features members of the Duncan family from the first novel as they travel to locales in the mountain west, including Fort Laramie. I admit that I downloaded both novels for free on Kindle Unlimited. That happened with my novel on its release in May. A mixed blessing. It might get you more readers. It also allegedly boosts your ranking on Amazon. This morning, "Zeppelins" is ranked #667,407 in the literature and fiction category. I believe it inched up a bit. A few more sales wouldn't hurt. 

I contributed to WPR during Wyoming Gives and will do it again. We creators are lucky these days as we can tune in almost any music on our PCs while we write and revise and revise some more. I am doing that this week as I plow through the "Zeppelins" sequel, "Patrick of the Mountains," set in 1922 Colorado, in Denver and in a mountain town adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park. The sequel is due out in 2027. The Ridgeway Press of Michigan published the first book and it is enjoying some modest success among friends, family members, and devotees of historical fiction. 

Ridgeway Press is currently upgrading its web site with a little help from me. Ridgeway was co-founded by poet, performer, and Wayne State University prof M.L. Liebler. It's published some intriguing books, including the collected poetry of John Sinclair, war resister, pothead, and manager of the Detroit band MC5 best known for its call from the stage: "Kick Out the Jams, Motherf**kers!" It also features some of the Trump Sonnets by traveling troubadour Ken Waldman and poetry by Zilka Joseph. Take a look at the upgraded Ridgeway web site. There is no bookstore on the site but links send you to Bookshop.org and to Amazon.

The press appreciates those who request the book from your local bookstores, such as Novel Tea Books or Fern & Fable in Ormond Beach, or asks your local library to feature the books in its "Local Authors" section. Find my novel and story collection in the Ormond Beach Public Library. The reading room looks out on the bridge that straddles the mighty Halifax River. This 25-mile long tidal estuary was once called the North Mosquito River for obvious reasons and probably had a name from the local Timucua Tribes before "Arrival." It was renamed during the British occupation of Florida (1763-1784) after the Earl of Halifax, George Montagu-Dunk, who served as head of the British Board of Trade and Plantations; his name was hung on Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Florida river.

History holds many surprises, does it not?

Buy on Bookshop.org

On the banks of a meandering river in Colorado

Mike near the headwaters.

This photo appeared on a new post on my publisher's web site. Not sure where it was captured but I do thank M.L. Liebler and his staff at Ridgeway Press for finding it. I was just reading about this stretch of the river in Witness to Water: One Photographer's Mission to Defend the Colorado River by Peter McBride. He and his experienced waterman friend kayaked the river from the Continental Divide to the muddy goo at its mouth in Mexico. I never kayaked it. I did camp by it and hike by it and skip rocks on it and, stashed snugly in my sleeping bag, listen to its soothing sounds.

I camped many times at Timber Creek campground in RMNP. It used to be a first come-first served campground but might not be any more. You could cruise up from Denver, travel over Trail Ridge Road, and still find a place to camp at dusk. We also liked the Long's Peak site. Because it was the jumping-off point for climbers of Long's Peak, I sometimes was awakened at 2 a.m.by the shuffle of Raichle boots on gravel as climbers moved out to be up and down the peak before afternoon storms. One thing you learn in Colorado is that hikers best be up and starting down the peaks by noon to avoid the daily lightning barrage. This was brought home when I read Denver Post headlines yesterday about a teen that was struck and killed and four others injured by lightning on the summit of Mount Blue Sky (formerly Mt. Evans). 

I love my birthplace of Colorado. I just could not figure out a way to stay there. I lived there through birth and part of fourth grade and then Dad's jobs took him to Washington state and Kansas and back to Denver and then on to Florida. I attended school in four different states from fourth through eighth grades. Educators would tell you those are crucial years in a kid's development. All that disruption could lead to a career as a writer or worse. That's exactly what happened. 

I returned to Colorado for work after I graduated from University of Florida and applied to every newspaper in Florida with no results. I met a girl (THE GIRL, as it turned out) who grew up in Africa, Europe, and Georgia (the state). We decided to traipse off together, and found gainful employment in Denver, 1978-88, and then grad school at CSU in Fort Collins, and finally found a career as an arts administrator and editor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now I'm back in coastal Florida.

I am glad for my 23 years in Colorado and 33 in Wyoming. Both states are in my blood that now, on summer afternoons, moves turgidly like that sticky mess at the poor dying Colorado River which no longer reaches the ocean.

Watching The Longest Day with my wife

My wife Christine didn't see The Longest Day when it premiered in 1962. She still hadn’t seen it 64 years later. She watched it with me last night because the World War Two docuseries with Tom Hanks had incited her curiosity.

I did see The Longest Day in a movie theater in November or December 1962. My father took me, my brother Dan, and some of our friends to see the blockbuster either for Dan's birthday (Nov. 25) or mine (Dec. 18). Or maybe it was both birthdays since the two dates were close (as were Dan and I) and it got us out of the crowded house. Dan was turning 10; 12 for me.

I have seen the movie a half-dozen times since.  I loved it as a kid and hated it as a young man and now feel nothing but nostalgia for it. Almost all of the cast is long gone. Normandy is now a tourist draw. But, during that one moment in history, it was the center of turmoil.

Chris doesn’t watch war movies. The violence disturbs her, as it should, and she gets sidetracked due to her ADHD. When I was a lad, the details of World War Two were important. My father was a veteran as were many fathers of the time. His basement den was filled with war souvenirs, medals, photos. His parents had saved every Life magazine from early 1942 until spring of ’46 when he finally arrived home. I devoured those magazines, mostly for the war coverage. I no longer have them but they are readily available online and at your local library. They’re a treasure trove of photos and news stories and period ads for cigarettes (many cigarettes) and toothpaste -- lots of brushing to banish that two-pack-a-day habit.

Chris grew up overseas with her U.S. Army lifer dad, Jack. Their family lived on military bases from Ethiopia to Germany, Virginia to Georgia. By the time her father  retired, he had three wars worth of stories and the crusty demeanor of a Chief Warrant Officer. He and my father belonged to the same Knights of Columbus chapter. We were not introduced by them. That’s a whole other story.

I don’t know exactly what she felt while we watched. She was only two feet away in her recliner (a match to mine) but with a whole different set of experiences. Now we share those experiences, and have for almost 50 years. But we bring our own selves to each shared experience.

I have seen the movie many times. There are almost no plot surprises. They came, they saw, they conquered. Some new things happened though. The segments showing the German side were the most interesting. Will Der Fuehrer be awakened from his sleeping-pill-induced sleep to release the Panzers? Only Hitler can summon the Panzers due to his paranoia and need for control. Waking him is verboten, risky too. So his very experienced generals are at a loss and will lose, but not right away. The soundtrack also got my attention. The theme song played in the background on several occasions as did the dot-dot-dot-dash of “V for Victory.” And marching band snare drums announced the German scenes. Damn, here come the Nazis! Attention!

Chris was impressed with the scale of the battle and enjoyed some of the quirky scenes, like the last vignette with downed RAF pilot Richard Burton and Airborne paratrooper Richard Beymer marveling at the dead Nazi who had put his boots on the wrong feet. Also, the cricket clickers that the paratroopers carried to sound out who was friend or foe. 

It was clear that John Wayne and Henry Fonda had to get in the most scenes – their stars still shone brightly. Sean Connery was in some crucial scenes on the British beachheads. Comic relief, as when he when he hears the Scottish army piper and says that “only the Irish can play the pipes.” Connery was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and did his first stage play (South Pacific) in London. And then Bond, James Bond. Dr. No with Connery premiered in October 1962 in London. As Dan and I watched him cracking wise on the beaches, Connery was already getting famous in Dr. No in its U.S. debut in May of ’63.

I bring all my years to anything I see and hear and read. Chris does too. I can continue retirement without watching The Longest Day again. I think of viewers of the future watching it. In what form of media will they see it? What will they think of the generations who lived in the mid-to-late years of the 20^th century? I hope they are not cursing us. I hope to see that we were striving too, that we spent time with our loved ones while it thundered outside.

Time to take a long look at the "Local Authors" section in the public library

Just a small slice of the Local Authors section

The photo shows just a slice of what awaits readers in the Ormond Beach Public Library's Local Authors section. Some of these writers have a long tenure in the area. Some are sort-of newcomers, former residents and library patrons who moved on to other jobs in other places but returned to the area recently.

I am one of the latter. 

Pleased to be here. In 1964, my father moved us from Denver to Central Florida to use his fine accountant’s skills to achieve what JFK said in '61: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade."

This wasn’t our family's first move. Our tribe had wandered the West while Dad double-checked the figures on nuclear missiles that lurked in many silos. I was set to enroll in my third school in my third state (KS, CO, FL) in one year. I attended Our Lady of Lourdes eighth grade then moved on to four years at Father Lopez Catholic High School, the old campus that's now a weedy vacant lot at Mason and Nova in Daytona.

After a few years at a non-Florida university and traveling, I returned to Daytona and graduated from DBCC (Daytona State) and earned an English degree from UF where I first took my writing seriously. Then I lit out for the territories.

It takes time, this writing biz. Some times you're an overnight sensation. Other times it takes decades until you publish your first novel. That's me -- 75 when The Ridgeway Press of Michigan published my first novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver," now available for free on the shelves of your local library. Ridgeway is a small press so it doesn’t feature on-line shopping. You can buy a copy on Venmo (see the sidebar, find @hummingbird-minds) or Amazon or your local bookstore. It's your choice. You can write me a check and I will sign the book, put it in a plain manila envelope, and take it to the local P.O. 

Buy "Zeppelins" on Bookshop.org

"Zeppelins" joins my first book of stories, "The Weight of a Body," on the Local Authors section. Select "Weight,” settle into one of the comfy chairs, and read a story inspired by my formative years in Daytona. It's called "Raymond Custy's Garden of Worldly Delights." It is set in the 1960s beach town of Tomoka Beach which is located near Daytona. It may or may not be based on real-life characters. You just never can tell with fiction. 

First up on my To-Do List: Find my Photo Idaho

My podiatrist sent an e-reminder to my Pixel. I have an appointment tomorrow where the techs cut my toenails I can't reach and the doctor comes in and gets an update on the state of my feet. Footcare is important to the elderly, even if your walking time is limited due to not being able to walk on your own and sometimes roam around on an e-scooter. 

The e-reminder asked me something I hadn't heard before. "Please bring your Photo Idaho." 

I like ID almost as much as I like WY, MT, CO, and UT. I was born in CO, spent 33 years working in WY, ands have traveled extensively in UT and MT. But no physician's e-assistant has ever asked me for my Photo Montana. 

This AI-generated message may have been powered by big Artificial Intelligence barns they've been building around the West, the ones bringing so much prosperity to small towns, even fairly big spots like Cheyenne, WY, the capital city, where I once worked. I hear that Microsoft wants to build a huge AI barn in Cheyenne with promises it will not slurp up all the snow melt and will provide a gazillion good-paying jobs. 

Before tomorrow, I will have to find my Photo ID. First stop, the potato cellar. Must be down there with the spuds.

In the mood for a Bulgarian gardening book?

I stumbled upon Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. His latest book is “Death of the Gardener.” I’d been reading books about gardens. First, I listened to the memoir “In Kiltumpur: A Year in an Irish Garden” by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Then I read on Kindle “First waiting for the impending frost on a North Carolina garden. It features an Frost,” which is a magical-realist YA romance by Sarah Addison Allen about apple tree that blossoms in winter and throws its apples at people he/she/it doesn’t like. Allen also wrote “Garden Spells” which is on my list of Books I Discovered On Kindle That Surprised The Heck Out Of Me (BIDONKTSTHOOM). Allen’s new book will be out in the fall. She writes on her web site that she’s been battling cancer. Cancer comes into a household and changes everything.

Gardening is more than a metaphor for me. I am, or was, a gardener, with Sungold tomatoes and pole beans out back and petunias and four o’clocks in the front. I once tripped and fell head-first into the front garden. It was getting toward autumn and I might have been there until the first frost arrived if the local preacher hadn’t been walking his dog nearby. He is a small man, a cardiac patient too small rescue me from the garden. He roused my tiny wife and she roused our burly neighbor Marco and they set me upright on the porch. My wife asked the obvious question: “What were you doing?” My reply was typical: “Getting a closer look at the coneflowers.” At the time, she was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. She needed a laugh, or so I thought.

But back to Gospodinov’s book. It’s magnificent. A short book about the death of his father the gardener in the town of Y is Bulgaria. It is rich with empathy and sadness but laced with humor. Wit, you might say, humor that doesn’t call attention to itself. The best writers have the gift.

I cried, though, as his father faded away. G is unrelenting of the portrait of his father, a young man who went to the Balkan War and then was a failed entrepreneur and then an aging magnificent gardener at his modest house in Y. The writer gets me to care so much for this simple human who lived a dynamic family life despite his many failures during life under the Bulgarian commissars. There’s no pity here just plenty of attempts to understand. The writer attaches no blame to his father’s stern ways. Most importantly, there is no exploration of how this complicated man completely fucked up his life. You know, those Tales of a Dysfunctional Family that once filled the U.S. book charts.

There are plenty of those in the U.S. In my 21 years of writing and blogging, I may have written some. I apologize, Dad and Mom, as I had yet to have the grumpy wisdom of an aging father.

What does it take to write like Gospodinov of Bulgaria  and Williams of Ireland? I had to write a million words before I had the skills to write with any sort of wit and wisdom. Just to understand what propels their writing took me seven-and-half decades. I am so sad sometimes about my status as a disabled old man, a man who survived a widowmaker heart attack at 62 and a bout with septicemia at 73. A few months after I fell into the petunias, I underwent a spinal fusion that was supposed to help me walk again but did not. I still require a walker or scooter to get around. Poor pitiful me, as the ironic Warren Zevon song goes. Woe, woe, woe is me.

As I read Gospodinov, I kept thinking of my family members, ones that I had criticized in my mind and in print, usually in fiction. The fog began to clear. I thought about the richness of people’s lives, the sorrows and the joys.  Why are we what we are and what imprint do we leave? What can I write about that only I can grasp? My purview is mine alone.

I ponder all of these things. And write.

Gospodinov’s appreciation of his parents’ generation was summed up in James Woods’ New Yorker review of the book (11/10/25 issue):

In 2023, [Gospodinov’s novel] Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize. In the new book, that good fortune is autofictionally transformed into this: “In May the novel I had dedicated to my mother and father won a big prize. On that London night, one of those few quickly jotted-down phrases in English was about the two of them, now quietly crying with joy in a little south-eastern town, I said, ‘Indeed, our pretty phrases stand upon their stooped shoulders.’” 

Stooped shoulders? That’s on my mind as I write today.

Irish Catholics have been holding the line against Nativists for a long time

I read some Irish-American history this morning on Michael Fox's Substack. "The Irish Catholic 'Rock of Erin' that held the line at Gettysburg" tells this story: 

"The Irish Catholic immigrants who defeated Pickett's Charge and held the Union line at Gettysburg were the same people American nativists were burning out of their churches and deporting as paupers."

This speaks of the earlier iteration of MAGA as the Nativists of the Know-Nothing Party. A well-written account by Fox that I haven't fact-checked but will in due time. It's a rousing tale, made me proud to come from a long line of Irish-Catholics from Roscommon and elsewhere. I've been blogging about the Know-Nothings past and present for awhile now and Trump has added fuel to their fire that never went out just went underground like those fires that burn in old Pennsylvania coal fields. 

Read it yourself. A good way to celebrate this Fourth of July weekend that belongs to all of us.

In case you missed it, June was Nuclear Family Month but just in Tennessee

Amongst all of the semiquincentennial bashes in June, the big beautiful Algae Deflecting Pool hoopla in D.C., the U.S./Israel vs. Iran matchup in the Persian Gulf, and big FIFA goings-on across the norteamericano continent, I missed an important announcement.

June was Nuclear Family Month. So said the Tennessee Legislature, the GOP part. Irked by all the nonsense about Pride Month, the LGBTQ+ Pride Parades and the colorful Pride crosswalks (the ones that goon squads paint over in the dead of night), I neglected to celebrate my nuclear family.

According to the Tennessee Lege, lawmakers of a certain stripe signed off on a resolution that says “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” are “God’s design.”

According to a June 6 article by Anita Wadhwani I just read in the Tennessee Lookout, Tenn. Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill in April and it carries no punch to ban anything with rainbows or men wearing eye shadow. It carries the “symbolic weight” of a “government endorsement of only one type of family unit despite a wide diversity of families living in Tennessee including single-parent, grandparent, and LGBTQ+ families,” wrote Wadhwani.

Should Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decide on something similar, he will have a big problem. Not with me but with thousands of others. I know DeSantis works overtime to please Bubba and Bubbette voters. Mr. Harvard Grad posits himself as one of them. But right now he’s busy executing a backlog of criminals in the state prison system. His Alligator Alcatraz did not go over well and he’s mightily pissed. Rumor has it that he plans to make every Floridian walk around with the “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” banner tattooed on their foreheads. Might look nice on some people.

But GOP state governors have nothing to fear from me. I happen to have a nuclear family right here in the wildlands of Tomoka Station, Fla. One husband (me), one wife (my wife), one son (son) and one daughter (daughter). We can check those boxes. I also come from a nuclear family with the appropriate credentials. My grandparents were all Nuke Family types and so were my descendants going back a century or two possibly all the way back to Adam and Eve if there were such a nuclear pair that parented sons Cain and Abel. Cain slew Abel, becoming the first murderer featured in The Good Book that the Christian Right demands students read instead of Fahrenheit 451.

It’s now early July and I haven’t seen any statistics what the Tennessee bill has wrought. Not much, I suspect. Christian Nationalist blowhards are just that, their efforts filled with much sound and fury, signifying nothing. They hurt people, the ones they hate, with a furor that brought us Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. Haters.

BTW, “nuclear family” is an odd term. My father built silos for nuclear missiles in the West. I lived 33 years next to the biggest nuke base in the U.S. I have strontium-90 from 1950s nuclear tests in my bones. There are lunatics out there with nuclear capability. There have been nuke plant meltdowns in Ukraine and Japan and the U.S. to contemplate.

Nuclear is nothing to imitate.

The return of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging (thanks Daily Kos) w/update

UPDATE: I am working on my Substack. I got sideways on the site with confusion over my real name and email address. Be patient!

I now am on Substack. I did it on accident. One day I was roaming around the web, checking out sites, and suddenly I had my own Substack. You can reach it here.

I'm new on Substack but have been blogging on Blogger for 20-plus years. I say 20-plus because I registered with Blogger in January 2001 but didn't see a reason to use it until 2005 and then regularly in 2006. I was Wyoming's designated blogger at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. I was politically active in person and online in those days. I lobbied John Dean (Howard's bro) to be Wyoming's pick in his search for a liberal political blogger from every state. It wasn't a hard choice as there were so few bloggers of the liberal stripe, so few bloggers of any stripe, that the pick in Wyoming was pretty easy. I knew a great prog-blogger in Wheatland, about 50 miles north of Cheyenne, and in the university town of Laramie; heavenly Jackson had a few. You can read my blogs from what now seems like The Good Ol' Days if you search August 2008 on my site. 

And now, Substack. I like the name. It has sort of an undersea feel. I like the term blog, too. It comes from weblog as in a log written on the worldwide web. My first contacts with fellow bloggers turned up a lot of young people writing about their high school and college hijinks. I was long past interested in hijinks. When I returned the the blog in 2005, the political wars were in full flight and I joined in. Was it fun. And hairy at times. Many of my fellow bloggers in the West were of the Rush Limbaugh stripe, fans of the late Breitbart whom I met when he tried to crash Netroots National in Minneapolis in 2011. On my blog sidebar, I once listed the blogs I followed, many of them in the West. It would be instructional to look at that old list.

My blogging was only interrupted by ennui and two brushes with death -- a Widowmaker heart attack in 2013 and an almost toxic septicemia in 2024. The heart attack was the worst. A terrible surprise that caused me to not read a book for almost an entire year. I had never been an invalid before. All that rehab. People treated me differently, as if I now was made of glass and could shatter at any moment. But that was more than 13 years ago and I'm still here. 

Many of my prog-blogger colleagues have given it up. I haven't checked out my favorite rabble-rouser site Daily Kos for many moons. I just did and it's still kicking ass and its home page is stylin'. Have to get there more often. I clicked on a link to the Saturday Morning Garden Blogging group and spent too long reading about the tomato harvest and swooning over tomato photos. Let me repeat some tomato varieties listed by correspondent VerdantC: Gourmandia, Sweet Apertif, Heartbreaker Vita, Ochre Heart, Pink Stella. SMGB goes back to 2011. I stole the title for my blog that same year, back when I was a blogging gardener. Something so sensual about tomato blogging. I miss it, both the selection and growing and harvesting and blogging. 

I have photos of me and my wife Christine posing on the summit of Trail Ridge Road around that time. I am wearing a Daily Kos T-shirt. I once was a correspondent. Those were the days. I can still log in. The guidelines for submissions have changed. It's more formal. I may just have to get back on board. 

Does Daily Kos have a Substack? It does not. It maintains its own platform on WordPress. Sometimes you see Daily Kos blogs reposted on Substack. I will look for them. 

P.S.: Just found that the next Netroots Nation conference will be in Denver, July 8-10, 2027. I may have to return. 

The new Know Nothings tell the same old story

Read an excellent op-ed today in America The Jesuit Review, "The new know-nothings? Anti-Catholic political rhetoric is making a comeback." The writer is Anna Keating. Under a big photo of Secretary of War and Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth, she begins this way:

President Abraham Lincoln once said of the Know-Nothing Party, founded in 1844 and dissolved in 1860: “If the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read all men are created equal, except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.”

As she notes, the Know Nothing Party shriveled up and died in 1860  but its attitudes have not. 

We are seeing a resurgence of anti-Catholic outbursts in the U.S. with the rise of the Trumpists and the outspoken nature of Pope Leo, an Irish-Catholic priest, then cardinal, now pope on the world's billion Catholics. Read Keating's article for the details. She writes about how fundies would stop her when she was growing up in Colorado Springs "and try to 'save' us." There also was this:

In fact, the Klu Klux Klan targeted my Catholic immigrant ancestors in the panhandle of Texas by burning crosses in their yards.

My grandfather, Martin Hett, an immigrant from County Roscommon, told us how the resurgent KKK burned crosses in his Irish-Catholic Denver neighborhood in the 1920s. My mother, Anna Marie Hett Shay, told us how she and her sister, dressed in their St. Francis Catholic School uniforms, had to run away from the South High School kids who chased them calling them "dirty Catholics" and "Catholic rednecks." This latter one was a new one on me. Grandpa explained (in his droll Irish way) that immigrants from Ireland were prone to red necks due to their fair skin and most jobs they could get in America were harvesting crops, digging ditches, and building railroads. Grandpa did not seem to bear any ill will toward these Know Nothing shitheads. But he had already been through hell and considered Colorado public school kids "small potatoes" when compared to his life as coal miner, railroad worker, and big fella who could take care of himself. 

I've written a bit about American Know Nothings. This has pissed off a few Republican friends who insist they are not Know-Nothings who get all sorts of news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. 

Know Nothings and the KKK play a role in my new novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver.”

For a look back at one of my blog posts, see Donald Trump's Know-Nothing attitude would have doomed my Famine Irish ancestorsere.

Note the images that go along with it, cartoons of Irish immigrants as apes and drunkards. Those depictions tell a story that is as old as America.

P.S.: One of my first published stories was “REV,” about a fundamentalist Christian army marching across Arabia to whip an army of fundamentalist Muslims. I will see if I can dig it up.

In the local library stacks, find a book or two by Shay

Several weeks ago, I dropped off two of my books to the Volusia County Library in Ormond Beach. My favorite library now than I’m a Volusia County resident again, this time in Ormond Station in Ormond Beach. During my early years in the area, 1964-78, I lived in Ormond Beach, Holly Hill, and various locales in Daytona. I asked the friendly woman at the desk if the library was interested in stocking copies of my two books. I am a local author now, have been since August 2024 when Wyoming got shut of me.

The Ormond branch does such a great job of featuring local authors and now I’m part of the collections. It includes my historical novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver,” and my first collection of short stories, “The Weight of a Body.” Several of the stories are set in a place a lot like Daytona (Go Green Wave!) and there’s also a scene in another story set in Gainesville where I graduated from UF in 1976 (Go Gators!). The others are set in Colorado, Wyoming, and Maine. I spent decades of my working life in the Rocky Mountain states and visited Maine a few times.

I naturally did a library search for myself and came up with my books and mention of a few others with “Shay” in the listings. I have met several women during the last decade or so by the first name of Shay. I don’t know if it’s a thing or not. I doubt if I would recognize a thing if it was staring me in the face.

There was one listing that caught my eye. From the Harlequin Western Romance Anthology 2017 comes this reference to a romance with a Shay in it:

THE COWBOY'S TRIPLE SURPRISE The Hitching Post Hotel by Barbara White Daille Bachelor cowboy Tyler Buckham is stunned to learn Shay O'Neill is pregnant with triplets. Even though he wants to do right by Shay, the thought of being a daddy has him running scared.

That’s a pretty good teaser and I may check out the anthology to see how it ends. I also am intrigued by the title. In Cheyenne, where I lived and worked for 31 years, there was a landmark hotel called the Hitching Post Inn. It was a cross between an old roadside motor inn and a sprawling bunkhouse. It was a big gathering place, a local favorite for weddings, arts events, and political rallies. If you wanted to catch one of the state legislators on neutral ground, the Hitch saloon was the place. I wondered: does the author have Cheyenne roots? Probably not. The term “hitching post” is very western and I’ve probably been in a dozen places with that name during my travels in the west.

I looked up Daille and she lists her home as “the Southwest” so that probably means Arizona and there is a Hitch out in the desert somewhere and probably doesn’t refer to my Hitch which was torn down a few years ago and replaced with an extended stay hotel.

I encourage local readers to check out my books from the library and write a review on the site if you’ve a mind to. Now excuse me as I go out and prowl the Local Authors and Large Print sections at my favorite library.

Journey into "Raymond Custy's Garden of Worldly Delights"

This is the opening of a story included in "The Weight of a Body," my first story collection. It was first published by Ghost Road Press at its tiny office on Evans Avenue off I-25 in Denver.  I dropped by on a summer day in 2005 to pick up the first copies hot off the press. I was dying to show off the books. I delivered the first copy to my uncle. I owed him a visit. His reading was mostly focused on the Denver dailies sports pages -- he was an athlete and a coach -- but he congratulated me and said he'd read it. I then drove back the 95 miles to Cheyenne to share the news with my family. My favorite story is set in a Florida beach town where I spent some of my youth. It has some basis in fact. I did grow up as the oldest kid in a big Irish-Catholic family. My brother and I walked to the beach to surf. My father was a reclusive sort but who can blame him?

I share this as a teaser to my story collection. I have another one in the works but the first one still has some zing. That's the author speaking. Anyway, to read more click on the cover image in the right sidebar.  The collection goes for $14.99 but if you're as dedicated a Kindle reader as I am, you can get a bargain. Check it out.

Raymond Custy’s Garden of Worldly Delights

            In June of 1967, when I was almost 16, my father checked out for a year. Locked himself in his room. Threw away the key. No messages. No contact of any kind. It was as if he died or decamped to Tahiti, only worse, because I could walk down the hall past that locked door and hear London Philharmonic symphonies blasting from the hi-fi. A cough might erupt from behind closed doors; the whisper of slippered feet. Sometimes a thin blue stream of cigarette smoke escaped from the room and formed a cloud in the hallway. If I was alone, I would stand in the midst of the cloud and inhale, hoping that the smoke might be the bearer of some singular message from my dad, the hermit.

            This hermit lived surrounded by eleven children, one wife, two dogs, a cat and a cage full of hamsters. On the brilliant June day my father bolted the door, the family queued up to coax him out. My mother went first. "Raymond Custy!" she yelled. "You come out of there right this minute!"  She waited, arms crossed, bare feet tapping on the wooden floors. I could hear the cars passing on the street, on their way to the beach. I could even hear the slap of the waves on the sand two blocks away.

OK people, it's all true, every single bit and byte of it

This photo arrived in my inbox on the same day that "Disclosure Day"
arrived in theaters nationwide. Coincidence? You decide.

How a book does -- and doesn't -- get published

Part of my life as a blogger is updating readers as to my whereabouts (I've always wanted to blog this word). Most of the time, I'm in my home office at the PC, typing madly. There are big windows to watch passersby pass by, most of them neighbors in Tomoka Station, Fla. There are lots of kids in my neighborhood, many new arrivals being pushed around by proud parents. Kids on bikes, some motorized but most the old-fashioned pedal kind. Groveside is a new branch of a five-branched development. I see many service trucks: lawn services, fencing companies, contractors building various add-ons: fancy stoves and refrigerators to replace the boring ones the houses came with. Toilets, too, as we got basic toilets  but tall and big and disabled people needed something better.

I have a lot to see, many things to distract me from the jobs at hand. My main job now is promoting my new book. It is no easy task. Best-selling writers have big-time publishers in NYC, companies that handle a book's editing, production, distribution, and publicity. That's what all writers wish for, an advance and a contract for a book to write and revise and then transmit to the publisher. Then it's on to the next book. Or maybe a croissant and a cup of Java. 

That was what the world was like when I first started writing in the 1970s. When I finally penned a sci-fi postapocalyptic novel of my own in the 1980s, I went to a writers conference and sought an agent. I became a pest. Finally, Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency said send me a few chapters and quickly disappeared. The next week, I polished some intro chapters on my manual typewriter and a short plot description and sent it off to Ray. He told me to finish the manuscript and send it. 

I will bet you a chest filled with doubloons (or maybe bitcoins) that he thought I would never finish. Many writers don't, you know, especially when they find out how hard a task it really is. But I had a secret weapon. I was born to write and was always hard at it. I don't know why this is. It's beautiful. It's a curse. I am happiest when writing in a journal or pounding away at my keyboard. I have tried to escape into the military, academia, the corporate world. But I keep returning to writing. 

My novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver," took me ten years to write, revise, and find a publisher. My critique group guided me along the way. I got an M.F.A. in creative writing. My CSU profs and fellow student writers were terrific and brutal. I was on a mission from God, as the Blues Brothers put so well. How else to describe it? In the end, though, that's what it takes., You have to possess a missionary zeal to do this. You have to write and quit writing and write more and despair and then write more. In the end, I finished a found an iconoclastic press in Detroit run by a friend, poet/prof/performer M.L. Liebler.

The Ridgeway Press of Michigan publishes books that others don't and I'm one of them. Thank you Ridgeway and M.L He's published tons of books of poetry and essays. His most recent is a memoir with this title: "Hound Dog: A Memoir of Rock, Revolution, and Redemption" from University of Wisconsin Stevens Point's Cornerstone Press. Did you know that university presses publish many wonderful books? Go buy one today. 

Meanwhile, if you're interested in my book, you will have to go to Amazon and look me up on my author page at http://amazon.com/author/michaeltshay. I am at work on an author's page on BookBub which should be the place to go once I'm finished with the design. 

One more thing: I don't make much money from an Amazon purchase. And Ridgeway is not set up for buying books. But you can find me on Venmo at @michael-shay-28 or 307-241-2903. Send me $35.22 and put the mailing address and who to sign it to in Notes. Then, I will put it in a padded envelope, take it to the p.o., send it on its way and pray that it gets there in these times that USPS seems to run with all the efficiency of the governmental agency in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." Keep your fingers crossed. As you probably know, Amazon is run with the efficiency that we used to expect from USPS. Packages go right to my door. The delivery man even rings to bell and scampers back to his Amazon Prime truck and drives away at a prudent speed. 

I decided to look up Amazon Founder and Blue Origin mastermind Jeff Bezos on Wikipedia. I was surprised to find that he was born in Albuquerque (I was conceived in Albuquerque!) to a teen mom and a Danish unicyclist (my father sold Armour meats and my mom was a registered nurse). During his high school years in Miami, Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, my alma mater (English major, class of '76). A local newspaper reported that in his graduation speech, Bezos "hoped that humanity would eventually move heavy industry and large populations into space while preserving earth as 'a huge national park.' "

Think about that when you order an air fryer at deep discount from Amazon. Or a book.

Readers are beginning to have questions and comments about the novel...

I should have done this a long time ago but today I created an author page on Book Bub under Michael T Shay. The road to writing and editing a book ends with a book that needs readers, surprisingly enough. I thought my blog and in-person marketing would be sufficient. But it's not. While I get the new site up and running, please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments about "Zeppelins Over Denver" here. I can answer your questions on this public forum or via e-mail or by letter. Please ask me to respond via letter! I am a lifelong writer of letters and receive so few these days. Many circulars about metal roofs and new-car sales and restaurant openings. But few letters. Thrill me!