Halloween 2025: Lobsters roam the neighborhood

A big lobster walked down our street last night. He/She/It accompanied kids dressed as characters from kiddie shows I don't watch because no more kiddies. But they're in my neighborhood, swarms of families doing what we did with our kids, getting them into costume, grab a bag, panhandle for candy. Chris dressed as Smart Cookie and my son Kevin was Spiderman. They staffed a table by the sidewalk, prepared for the kids. Other neighbor did the same thing. The young marrieds across the street broadcast seasonal tunes. Decades ago, Chris stayed at home as candy-giver and I marched the kids around the neighborhood. One night it was just my daughter and her pal. Indian Summer day gives way to blustery afternoon and sundown rain. The snow came when we finished the first block. Snow crusted their outfits but they ignored my pleas to head home. Halloween! Candy by the bagful once a year. Lights and costumes, family together. My Mom used to dress us up, hand us each a pillowcase, and send us on our way. Kids stream from every house on the street, a mass of post-war boomer babies move as one, parents hold their own bash, peer out the window just to check. No concern about razor blades in candy bars. We brought home apples, oranges, Milky Ways popcorn balls, nickels. Candy canes. The usual Tootsie Rolls. The stars were out here last night; a gentle breeze blew. A lobster strolled by.

I came of age during the JFK years. The grief is personal.

How do I tell my grown-ass children about the life and times of JFK? How I was nine when he was elected and 13 when he was assassinated? That I was the oldest son in an Irish-Catholic family in Middle America who idolized the man? That his killing tore a hole in my heart that remains. That all of the stuff that’s come out about Kennedy’s affairs and bad judgement has not dimmed my memories?

I’m a grouchy old man. I am a writer who takes a jaundiced view of most things. I was none of those things during JFK’s presidential run. My parents seemed entranced by the news reports on our black-and-white TV. So handsome, my mother said. So Catholic, my father said. I love Jackie’s hair, Grandma said. All the adults in my life were on board with Kennedy, saint and war hero.

I yearn for those days. How I want them back. As a family, we listened over and over to Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” records on Dad’s stereo. My father made his first hi-fi as those things were called back in the day. It’s no surprise as he built crystal radio sets as a boy in his basement and served four years as a radioman with the U.S. Signals Corps during the war. He also admired JFK’s war record; Nixon’s paled in comparison. Little did we know, we hadn’t heard the last of Tricky Dick.

Kennedy was central to my coming-of-age years, 9-13. I read “Profiles in Courage.” I knew the PT-109 story by heart, the public one. Our family was on the verge of being cut adrift by the aerospace age, influenced by the Cold War and The Race to the Moon.  At 9, we lived in a new house in a Southwest Denver suburb not far from the Fort Logan Induction Center my father signed on to fight the Nazis in 1942. At 10, I attended the second half of fourth grade near a missile base in Washington State. I went to fifth grade in Moses Lake, sixth grade at College Hill Elementary in Wichita. We moved closer to Wichita’s Air Force base for the first half of St. Francis seventh grade and was there when Kennedy was shot. I was 14 when we returned to Denver and I went to the first half of seventh grade at a public junior high in Denver crowded with Boomer kids. And then we landed in Florida with a mission: send men to the moon because JFK said so. I was in Our Lady of Lourdes Grade School in Daytona Beach. I didn’t know it then, couldn’t even have guessed, that last Sunday I was back at OLL in Daytona attending mass at a spacious new church presided over by a justice warrior priest. I was a white-haired senior, disabled, pushing a walker. Still looking for answers.

And today I contemplate JFK because my daughter wants to know. She reads this blog. Read on, Annie. And keep reading.

Remember all those great songs about getting a letter, or not getting one?

The Letter

Wait a Minute Mr. Postman 

Return to Sender 

P.S. I Love You

Take a Letter, Maria

A Dear John Letter

Just a few of the pop songs about the good and bad of mail. Youthful memories, from a time when getting a letter meant getting A LETTER. Might be good news such as a letter from an old friend, birthday card from grandpa, or fan mail from some flounder, or not-so-good, say a missive from Selective Service, the IRS, a fed-up girlfriend. 

And yes, this is grousing from a Baby Boomer. Mail has lost its cachet. But mail still gets delivered, or not, depending on who's doing the delivery. Our postal delivery in Ormond Station has been dismal. Mail sent to us in June that was supposed to be forwarded to our new address was never forwarded. I got a call from my former employer in Wyoming that asked for my new address. She said mail sent to our address on Ocean Shore Drive was not forwarded to Melogold Drive but just returned to sender, as in the song. Somehow it missed a step. We put in a forwarding request before we moved. I dialed in my new address to address change sites for credit cards, car payments, payees like Dell and Lowes, and often it responded that there is no address. It was odd, since I was living in this new address and as far as I knew, it existed as did my wife and I. Now, houses in our Groveside neighborhood were still getting their finishing touches and some had yet to sell, but it seems like the P.O., a very large and respected organization, would have the Internet, GPS, drones, even printed maps at its disposal, the combined knowledge of thousands of postpersons, and they could figure this out. But they did not.

I have great memories of the mailman, as that person was known in my youth. They walked routes in those days. They had tales of ferocious dogs and snarling customers. They told of days cold enough to freeze your keisters and hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. 

Our woman delivery person in Cheyenne was the friendliest person I know, always with a greeting and mail that might mean something or might mean nothing. She wore arctic gear in January and plowed through snow-packed roads in those funny little vehicles. My brother Tim delivered the mail in Daytona Beach until a brain tumor took hold. I shared cardiac rehab with a woman younger than me that sometimes arrived at rehab in her uniform. One day, both of us on treadmills, chatting, she had a follow-up heart attack and quick response by rehab nurses brought her back. 

The U.S. Mail meant something. Lots of great songs. The Beatles, of course, and Elvis. 

I was 16 when "The Letter" by the Box Tops climbed the charts to number one. I viewed it on YouTube and I would post a link here but I never know if it will work down the line. Go watch it. The band members look high. A flashback to 1967. Vocalist was the great Alex Chilton. Joe Cocker had a big hit with it too. 

"A Dear John Letter" was a hit in 1953 by Ferlin Husky and Jean Shepard. In it, a young woman writes to her boyfriend under fire in Korea that she is dumping him for his brother. I'd like to think the song spawned the term we use now, but I've heard World War 2 soldiers talk about Dear John letters. Maybe it goes back even farther than that. What say, history buffs?

Word Back: Let’s Make America Again Again

Again.

Make America Great Again

I’ve been exploring this phrase as it has taken over conversations, rallies, bots, blather, mind games, etc.

It’s a work of genius, really. It gets everyone on the same page. It does, if you are a true believer in Trumpism. That’s what 70-some million people voted for, right? America is no longer great so we needed to fix it. And we will put in place a supervisor who really has never done anything I could call great. But let’s pretend he has and see what magic time in our recent history he wants to return to, revisit, make great again.

So many T voters were elderly as am I. They remember a time when a middle-class suburban lifestyle ruled lives and airwaves. Our Southwest Denver neighborhood was mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP. Not the kind of WASP who grew up in suburban New York City or Chicago. Our Dads made less money than yours. I say Dads because that’s who left the house to work.

Mom was a housewife or householder – she held the place together. Dad was a contract something-or-other for the Martin Company in Lakewood. I never really know what Dad did for a living. Martin eventually merged with American-Marietta and then Lockheed to become part of aerospace and defense work. Martin got his start building airplanes and so did Lockheed. Martin ranked 14^th among defense contractors and built the B-26 Marauder bomber and the B-29 Superfortress that dropped The Big Ones on Japan. Lockheed was most famous for building the P-38 Lightning, the twin-tailed warplane that all of us kids bought in model kits.

We knew our warplanes in the fifties. We were fed by movies, TV,  and comic books. We heard some stories from our fathers but nothing of great import because that’s the way it was. Dad was an infantryman, a Signal Corps radioman who marched through Europe with the rest of the grunts. His unit was lost in the Ardennes during the Bulge but eventually made it back to American lines. I wondered what it was like, being lost in a war zone, but he never elaborated on it. I saw the fellow vets huddled around the patio bar at or the grill during parties and knew they were telling war stories but we were never invited in. So we had to read about them in books or imagine them.

Most of the neighbor men were soldiers and sailors. No fighter pilots on our street and we would have known if there were any. The dad of the kid next door was a plumber. The kid’s name was John and last name Lennon. He went on to become famous as one of the Beatles. Just kidding. I don’t know what happened to him. On our other side lived an older childless couple. They were nice enough. What I wonder about is what they thought about living next to us, one of the largest families on the street. We were a rowdy bunch. Loud. They complained when Dad installed a set of monkey bars in the backyard. It was perilously close to the older neighbors’ fence and it apparently gave them nightmares about one of us swinging wildly on the bars and breaking our backs on their fence. Looking back, we think it hilarious but, older now, we have our own nightmares about injured children and grandchildren.

The man who lived behind us was an army mess sergeant. An FBI agent lived down the street. Across from, him was the only Hispanic family on the block and Catholics like us. One of the boys was the age of me and my brother and we rode bikes together. He took a spill and was impaled by his handlebars. They rushed him to the hospital. When he reappeared, he showed us his stitches and said his spleen was removed. A spleen? Who knew we had one?

We rode our bikes to Bear Creek and played war. Firecracker wars! No danger there. The creek tumbled from the high peaks but was tame by the time it reached the flatlands. Our father once pole-vaulted across the creek and we thought it amazing. Dad showed us how to skip rocks. We rode our bikes down steep hills and crashed in a cloud of dust and rocks. We explored the mall digs, daring each other to ride down into the holes.

We walked to school four blocks away. It was rare, even when it snowed, to see Moms bundle the kids into station wagons and shuttle them to school. I drive past my local elementary school at the end of the day and there is a traffic jam of SUVs idling on the street. Maybe that’s what MAGA people want? Make schools close enough to walk to! Well, that would mean more schools and more taxes to pay for them and the school library might have a book about two dads or a boy who wants to be a girl and all hell would break loose at PTA meetings.

Why can’t we go back to the days of PTA meetings where the only squabble was how many cakes to bake for the Halloween Walk? You remember that, right? Kind of like musical chairs but if you win you get to take a cake home and hope you are there early enough, dressed in your Popeye costume, to win a chocolate one and not one of those yucky coconut ones. A coconut cake! That mom must be a commie!

Ah, those good ol’ days.

Note to my son: Thank you for sending me the book “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story: A Father’s Guided Journal to Share His Life and Love.” I will fill out some of the pages but most memories can be found on these pages which I’ve been keeping for 20 years. Most stories are true, although I have been known to take liberties. If I still covered high school sports for A Major Metropolitan Newspaper, I would be much more careful in my reporting. I would take time for better fact-checking and less snark. Enjoy!

Word Back: In America, We're All Bozos on This Red-White-And-Blue Bus

Part 2 of Word Back: America

I explore word choice in "Make America Great Again."

What was America like in my youth? Was it all fun and games?

Yes and no. 

The Wayback Machine takes us back to my collegiate years, 1969-1976. Yes, I was on the seven-year B.A. Plan. 

I remember the legendary Firesign "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" Theater perform at the UF Gator Growl in 1975? And wasn’t I there physically although my mind was wandering due to cannabis? I looked it up. Yes, Firesign Theater performed at the ’75 Growl. As I looked up the event's history at the HardyVision Institute of Pop Culture, I found this header: “Frequently Asked Questions: Gator Growl’s Stand-up Comedian History.”

Wow. That was my question. Thanks, WWW. Sometimes hummingbirdminds are glorious. I scrolled down to this:

When did Gator Growl start hiring big-name stand-up comedians?

In 1970, UF alumnus Buddy Ebsen (of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame) was invited to be the Gator Growl emcee. Of course, he’s not a stand-up comedian, but he did show up and lent a celebrity flair as he told showbiz stories and talked about how nice it was to be back.

In 1974, the musician Jim Stafford was the emcee. The Independent Florida Alligator reports that the Winter Haven native opened the show with his song “Wildwood Weed” blaring over the loudspeakers, and later in the show “he sang his big hit – ‘Spiders and Snakes,’ accompanied by six dancing girls.” 

In 1975, the show was emceed by the comedy duo of Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theater.

But it was Bob Hope in 1976 who was Gator Growl’s first nationally known stand-up comedian headliner. He would return to headline Gator Growl in 1979 and in 1983 at age 80.

I was right about Firesign! Jed Clampett was a UF grad – who knew? And Bob Hope hosted three times, once when I was allegedly in the crowd in ’76?

Instead of continuing my research into Firesign, which was the day’s assignment, I scrolled down to a video: “The Bob Hope Collection at the University of Florida.” Really? The Smathers Library has a huge Hope collection willed it by the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, most of it previously displayed at the World Golf Hall of Fame Museum at World Golf Village off I-95 west of Ponte Vedra Beach where they do a lot of golfing. The new World of Golf Museum is now in Pinehurst, N.C., near swanky Pinehurst C.C. Its largest display is a women’s locker room with more than 160 lockers of famous women golfers.

So comedian golfer Bob Hope’s collectibles are now at the UF Library? That is something. This is the same library where I spent hundreds of hours learning how to be a writer. I read through the reading list former radical Nelson Algren handed out in my creative writing class. I read Harry Crews' Esquire column because I couldn't afford my own subscription. I read it all. I wrote thousands of words in my journal. I wrote and wrote. 

And now I remember. In my youth, Bob Hope was my favorite comedian. And I wasn’t alone. As quoted in the 16-minute library video, Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel said he admired Hope’s “rapid-fire patter” and “as a kid growing up, I thought he was terribly funny as did most of the nation.” Me too. He and Bing Crosby were hilarious in their “Road” pictures. I loved how they broke the “fourth wall” to comment right at the camera, right at me sitting in suburbia. He had his own TV show. He traveled the world entertaining our troops fighting fascists and commies or just confused about why they were so far from home. He cracked me up. At one point, he was a starving artist in Vaudeville. The photo of that hopeful kid is in the UF collection.

I became a know-it-all college kid and Hope was out. He was part of the establishment. He was buds with Nixon and supported our foray into Southeast Asia. He was going to get us killed. He wasn’t funny anymore. I threw Bob Hope under the bus (the Bozo bus) because he was too establishment. 

Bob Hope tear-gassed me. Not him but him and his pals at Honor America Day on the National Mall on July 4, 1970. I return now to the American I was that day, a 19-year-old confused U.S. Navy midshipman on leave. I told the story in a 2019 blog post:

There were lots of fireworks at the July 4, 1970, event, not all of it in the sky. American Nazis attended to protest Vietnam War protesters and the Yippies staging a smoke-in at the Washington Monument. Police tried to maintain a DMZ between the protesters and Silent Majority picnickers. When that failed, park police fired tear gas at the rowdy hippies and gas clouds drifted over the multitudes. This led, as one reporter wrote, to a "mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes." At the same time, the U.S. Navy Band played the Star-Spangled Banner from the Lincoln Memorial stage.

I was in that mad stampede. I picnicked with my buddy Pat's family. When the fumes reached us, Pat and I scrambled to lead his grandmother and younger sisters to safety. Pat and I had been tear-gassed several times that spring at the University of South Carolina during protests of the Kent State killings. It was no fun for young people but could be dangerous for the elderly. We made it out of the gas cloud and, when the hubbub died down, we returned to our picnic. Later, we listened to Honor America Day jokes from Bob Hope and Jeannie C. Riley's version of Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me." Then, despite the chaos or maybe because of it, we admired the bitchin' fireworks display. 

So this is America, all of it, all of us, me and Bob Hope and you. We're All Bozos on This Bus.

Word Back: America, Part 1: More a circus than a country

I began to write this Word Back column as Memorial Day weekend began. I was making fun of what America has become in 2025 but forgot about what America has been in my lifetime. I kept hearing the voices of all of those departed family members who served their country. They are gone but not silent. Their voices still ring out in the bardo.

If I attached no value to my lifetime on Earth, 1950-present, how could I value the present or maybe what the present should be? If I let the Trump years define my view of my country, well, then I will be stuck with that the rest of my days. That may be the source of so much anger among my Boomer friends. We remember a different country.

Really, though, what is the America I am mourning? Some of that is one forged by the family, the church, the Boy Scouts, and Catholic school. I can bore anyone of the younger generation with tales of the ‘burbs. “I remember when…” Not a conversation starter at a holiday gathering. MEGO! It’s just a part of our transitions along life’s timeline. We are forgettable and boring. Not to all. There is always one person who is curious about times gone by. I can see it in their eyes. The crowd will thin out and there’s one little person left, high school or college kid. I mention something that makes him/her think. A book, a film, an event. Maybe it’s my life as a writer, my career as an arts worker. It sounds more exotic than it really is but it’s my life, my truth. It is being destroyed daily which really give it a nostalgic feel.

What to make of America? Strangely enough, it may be Bob Hope. He was America’s comedian, a stand-up before stand-up was in the dictionary. I was looking for a list of performers at University of Florida’s Gator Growl, a homecoming ritual at Florida Field. I had been looking for a comedy skit that featured a chorus of “God Bless Vespucciland,” a satiric take on “God Bless America” substituting Vespucciland for America or Americus Vespucci, namesake of Americans North and South.

I thought: that sounds like something Firesign Theater would do. Remember them? Of course you don’t. They were part of a wave of satiric performers who emerged in the late-60s and early-70s as part of the counterculture. They were the stage-version of National Lampoon, a less druggy Cheech and Chong, a more buttoned-down version of Saturday Night Live and Second City. Firesign’s skits were edgy and brainy.

To appreciate “God Bless Vesapucciland,” you have to know America’s origins which you knew from school, home, and Scouts. You might ask here: what version of American history are you referring to? Is it Lynne Cheney and Newt Gingrich version or is it Howard Zinn’s? Is it the Christian Nationalist version wherein Jesus rode his dinosaur to an all-White private school? Or a world that’s millions and billions of years old and The Big Bang gave us the building blocks of homo sapiens with a few hiccups along the way?

Read Part 2 Friday

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Nostalgia

Artwork courtesy Dean Petersen

My friend Dean Petersen in Wyoming is a talented writer and filmmaker. He once joined us at Jeana's Dining Room Table Writers' Group in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He has many stories to tell, as he showed in his novel The Burqa Cave. We critiqued each other's work with other members and sipped tea and gnoshed on baked goods. It was helpful and civilized and almost all of our members, past and present, have multiple published books. 

Dean always has a new project, his latest is an intriguing podcast, "That Doesn't Happen Every Day." He has profiled sand sculptors, Laramie's lone ska band, WYO nukes, and this hitchhiker. I imagine myself as the guy with my thumb out in the illustration, although it's been awhile since I hit the road in the 1970s. Dean is from the generation younger than mine (Gen-X?) and he notes in the episode that in school and at home they were lectured often about not getting into cars with strangers. 

Boomers received the same warnings but thousands of us ignored them as we hit the road to see America and Canada and the rest of the Americas and Europe too. My sister-in-law hitched around Europe with a woman friend in the '70s. My brother Dan hitched around Florida and the East Coast before he got a haircut and joined the USAF. My wife Chris ignored all warnings as a teen and hitched A1A from her house way north in Ormond Beach to party with friends in Ormond and Daytona. 

It was a great way to get around especially if you had no car or motorcycle. Go to Dean's podcast and check it out.

Daytona Bike Week has passed but we all have motorcycle memories

Daytona Bike Week goes for ten days each March. It’s an extravaganza for motorcycle buffs from all over North America and even all over the world. It’s a loud week, Harleys in full roar beginning in late morning t about noon and lasting well past midnight. 

You get the full treatment along Main Street in Daytona and out by the speedway where the races, concerts, and big-time vendors are. Chris and I ended up surrounded by bikers on Thursday when we went to lunch after a medical appointment and wandered by a famous tattoo business on U.S. 1 that hosts beer and autograph sessions with Playboy models, strippers, and assorted women in skimpy outfits despite the un-Florida chill. If you go further north on U.S. 1, you pass biker bars aplenty.

For us Ormond-by-the-Sea dwellers, we hear bikes all day and night. We’re located between Hwy. A1A which promoters now call the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway and John Anderson Drive which locals call the street where the rich people live. The bikers ride A1A along the coast to Ormond, Flagler, and St. Augustine. They can find nice beaches if they want to dismount but more likely will end up at one of the many saloons and tourist attractions that line the way. Bikers also use that route to go to the Highbridge Exit which will take them to the Tomoka Loop, a favorite winding tree-lined route. John Anderson also takes you to Tomoka along a winding tree-lined route by riverside houses you can't afford.

BTW, you do have to have some cash and credit worthiness to buy a new motorcycle. They start at about $25,000 and goes up to $40,000. You also need a good pickup and a trailer to haul the bikes that once zoomed freely on I-95 in the 1970s and now old bones and joints need a little assistance to get to the hoopla. There’s still lodging and food and such to buy. And don’t forget your two- or three- wheeled vehicle's maintenance costs. 

Guys like my old Wyoming neighbor worked on his own Harley. He had the technical skill, tools. and big garage to do the work. One night he blasted down the street before he rolled to his driveway. Then came a knock on our door. My neighbor needed my help. I walked with him to behold the downed bike. He seemed embarrassed that his Harley was this helpless thing lying powerless on his driveway. Drunk and high, he needed my aging muscles to get the machine upright. I helped of course, the neighborly thing to do.

I have plenty of friends with motorcycles and many that used to have motorcycles. When attending Daytona Beach Community College in 1973, I shared a house in Holly Hill with a roommate who fled the north country to Florida. He helped me rebuild the engine in my 1950 Ford truck. He was a biker without a motorcycle which he had to leave behind for a reason he wouldn't talk about. He did talk motorcycle. He dressed biker too. Probably dreamed it. He moved to Orlando and the last I heard, he was riding again. 

My brother Dan rode a Harley until leukemia took him away. An air traffic controller, he ran an Internet biker-oriented side business, Daytona Gear. He loved his motorcycle. When he and our friend Blake trailered their bikes to Sturgis, Dan invited me up to ride bitch on his bike and I did. Our daughter Annie has a treasured Biketoberfest photo with her and her Uncle Dan on his Harley. She even bought me a Biketoberfest T-shirt which I wore proudly around Wyoming and I often was asked how I liked Biketoberfest and said, “Just fine, I liked it just fine.” I had Sturgis T-shirts too.

In the 1960s and '70s, I rode dirt bikes through the Florida woods and on the beaches. They belonged to friends, little Hondas and Yamahas and Husqvarnas. I covered motocross races as a correspondent for the Denver Post. A girlfriend once dumped me for her old boyfriend, a motocross racer. I responded by mailing her a verse about love and longing that I pulled from Kahlil Gibran. Didn’t make me feel any better but I hoped she read it and thought about me for a little while.

I guess we’re all motorcycle people in America. Daytona has a special claim on big motorcycles so I guess I can claim a little slice of that. Still, I like the quiet.

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)

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.

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

Orderly disorderly orderly

Jerry Lewis played a hospital orderly in “The Disorderly Orderly.” In it, he’s a bumbling idiot with a heart of gold, a type he’s played before. I am not a Lewis fan but did laugh at some of the “Orderly” hijinks on YouTube film clips. He mixes up two skeletons bound for the research lab. His supervisor warns him not to mix them up. He asks his supervisor how to tell the difference. Her reply: “You don’t know the difference between boys and girls?” He makes a goofy face,. “Yes, but I like my girls [wait for it] upholstered.” Laughed here and shook my head. Let’s face it, not a bad joke, good enough for a laugh. Typical Lewis humor, one which he parlayed into many films, Vegas stage shows, and TV specials.

You don’t need orderly experience, disorderly or not, to appreciate Lewis’s shenanigans. But, with a little research, you find all sorts of info under the topic of “orderly.” Merriam-Webster Online cites two meanings for orderly the noun: a soldier who carries messages and performs services for an officer; a person who waits on others, cleans, and does general work in a hospital.

I have never been the first variety and don't even know if they exist any more. You can find orderlies in war movies especially those focused on the British army. "Orderly, get me a cuppa. Sorry sir, the Huns have blown up all our teacups. Blast." Orderlies in the world wars provided all sorts of services at The Front. In WW1, orderlies often were stretcher bearers and spent some of their time under fire rescuing wounded from No Man's Land. Very dangerous duty indeed. Some were COs who resisted shooting other people and wound up being shot at anyway. A very interesting and readable memoir of this side of the war was written by a member of Evacuation Hospital No. 8, Frederick Pottle, who taught in the Yale English Department after the war. "Stretchers: The Story of a Hospital Unit on the Western Front."  Published by Yale University Press in 1929 and available to read at https://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/Stretchers/PottleTC.htm

I have worked as the second kind of orderly, although my duties went beyond those described. Hospital orderlies are now classified as nursing assistants and you get training for that. There still exists men and women in medical facilities who wait on others, clean, and do general work.  

During college years, I worked as an orderly in a succession of three different hospitals. I think of the patient populations I served in this way: one for dying old people, one for critically burned children, and one for the crazy drunks who also were dying slow deaths.

I was young, 23 at my third and last position minding alcoholics at a county hospital. I could be irreverent with my coworkers while still doling out empathy for patients. Face it, I was never going to grow old, turn into a homeless alky, or get caught in a raging fire. That’s the joy and curse of youth, ignorance of what’s waiting down the line. Blessed, blessed, cluelessness. I dated nurses, went to some wild parties, and made friends. Because I could not envision old age, I couldn’t fathom the fact that some of my youthful experiences would be forever burned into my memory. Therein lies the joy and curse of old age: there is no forgetting.

Ormond Beach Osteopathic Hospital was across the street from a nice beach break. When I got off my 7-3 shift, I checked out the surf. If it was good, I would borrow one of my brothers’ boards and go out. If not, I’d call one of my friends and we’d get high while driving along a usually deserted wintertime beach. I was killing time, waiting for my draft notice to arrive. I was 20, just the right age for Vietnam. I’d lost my ROTC scholarship and dropped out of a university I could no longer afford. At the hospital, retirees kept coming in and passing away. They were my grandparents’ age, born at the turn of the century, now in their 70s. A Mr. Fanchon came from Montreal to bask in the sunshine and now was bedridden and developing bed sores on his back end. He moaned all the time, announced his pain in French. My fellow orderlies and I were tasked with turning him every two hours. His moans came from a deep place, a place that me and Jim and Sharon and Marlene had never been, not yet. We said calming things to him in English and he moaned and then barked out a French expression. We were kind. During smoke breaks (we all smoked), we parodied Mr. Fanchon’s French, made up our own expressions. The nurses came in the break room and asked what was so funny. We told them. They jumped right in with their own fake French lines. There’s something about working around the dying and near dead. We needed humor to keep the dreads at bay. Mr. Fanchon was on his way out but we were not. There was a morning when I came in and Mr. Fanchon’s room was empty, already made up for a new patient. I asked about him at the nurses’ station. “Old folks home,” they said. I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. I worked my shift, went home to see what was in the mail.

During my six months working the graveyard shift at a Boston children’s burns center, two patients died. The nurses and doctors worked frantically to save them but could not. We orderlies and nursing assistants were on the periphery, going about our appointed rounds. We knew. I brought water to the boy who had been messing around and fell on a downed high-voltage cable. He now had just one arm and no penis. Electricity has to find a way out, it seems. I brought ice cream for a little boy with bandaged hands. I sometimes changed his dressings when the nurses were busy. The burns on his small hands were in concentric circles. I asked a nurse about the burns, asked if he climbed up on a stove and fell, or something. She grabbed my hand, told me to spread my fingers, then she pressed my hand on a table. She released my hand. “His mother,” she said. “His mother.” I was never the same after hearing that. On that death night, staff waited until the unit was quiet and the other kids were asleep. That’s when they moved the body. A few weeks later, the nursing supervisor took me aside , said the hospital would pay for me to get my nursing degree. I was flattered. It was good to be far away from home and wanted. I turned down the offer, and thanked my boss, told her I wanted to be a writer. A few months later, I was back in Florida with new plans, thoughts already fading of my live-in girlfriend, the one to whom I’d plighted my troth but would only see twice more before she called it quits via long-distance telephone.

The 1200 Ward at the county hospital housed people the cops peeled off downtown sidewalks and brought in the sober up. It was a locked ward, staffed by one orderly of sufficient bulk to corral anyone in DTs and ring the buzzer for help. That was me. The orderly. I took temps and filled water pitchers. I carried a soft plastic tongue depressor for those times when patients suffered seizures. Scar tissue on the brain, that’s how it was explained to me. Again I summoned the nurses and they gave the patient something to settle them. The usual cocktail was paraldehyde mixed with orange juice. Paraldehyde is a relative of formaldehyde and was, into the 70s, used to treat DTs. Nurses demonstrated its power by pouring a shot of P into a Styrofoam cup. It always ate its way through the cup, pooling on the nurses’ station counter. “Orange juice first!” Mrs. D was tiny and weathered but had been a nice looking women in her youth. I worked in 1200 for a year as I eased my way through community college. During that time, Mrs. D was inside the locked doors three times. As we gathered in the break room to play cards, Mrs. D told the best stories, the most disturbing stories. They were funny too in a twisted sort of way. She’d been married and divorced a couple times. She traded sex for booze. Slept in crash pads or on the beach hidden behind hotel seawalls. A week before I quit to go off to the university, she came in with a black eye and broken finger. “You should see the other guy!” When I walked out the locked doors for the last time, she wished me well. “Be good, hon.” Well, Mrs. D, I haven’t always been good. But I did OK. And I remember you."

You will forget things, micro-essay

You will forget things. As you age, that’s the mantra you hear from people who think they know better. Nobody tells you this: you forget how to forget. The past rolls in like the Florida East Coast waves I once surfed. That’s me on my long board walking the nose on a wave spawned by a tropical storm. I am 16 and my shoulders already are scorched by the sun. I will be riding this wave as a 71-year-old living in Wyoming’s high prairie as my dermatologist burns off a rough patch birthed that day at the beach. I am 28 making love with my girlfriend in a Colorado mountain stream. The water so cold, our skin warms from the friction of our bodies. Do you remember… starts my wife, 66, the one from the stream, and I say I cannot forget and it seems like the right thing to say but what I really mean is there is no way that I can forget, that even if we had split up during the awful times that we want to forget I could not forget how, in the shade of quaking aspens, the sunlight vibrated across your skin, your blue eyes on me. My last thoughts will be of waves and water, you and me. I will not and cannot forget. That’s old age, the truth of it.

Micro-essay: Denver

Denver

When you’re gone you’re gone. That first house you bought on South Grant Street, some kids you don’t know slide down the driveway on skateboards. A stranger sits at your desk in the Broadway brick building, never heard of you, the building is a different business now, has nothing to do with the fan-belts and radiator hoses they make in the spooky factory across the street that’s now a condo complex. That dive bar where you got shitfaced after college hockey games is a fashion boutique next to a pot shop. Those softball diamonds all over town, you can watch twilight games in July with players your kids’ ages or maybe your grandkids’ ages. On one of those diamonds, you played in January’s annual Sno-ball tourney and froze your ass off. Your favorite bookstore moved across town. You and your girlfriend walked down Fillmore to the old place, it smelled of books and not coffee and the two of you found books and a quiet place to read for hours. Fourth of July at your aunt’s and uncle’s house you and your cousins almost burnt down the wooden fence with Wyoming fireworks. A procession of strangers have lived there and they keep on moving out and moving in and you don’t recognize any of them when you drive by. Camping near Grand Lake, we skip rocks in the shallow creek that grows into the mighty Colorado as it tumbles down the Rockies. Concerts at Red Rocks, you can see where you sat in the middle seats, surrounded by those with their own memories, the Eagles and The Dead, full moon coming over the mountains, lights of Denver down below. You’re not there. Days and weeks, months and years. Memories orbit like planets, find you where you are now. At the old Stapleton airport named after the KKK mayor of the 1920s, you drove to down Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard to get there. You linger outside the boundary fence, stand on the car hood to almost touch the arriving planes, hear the blast and feel the whoosh of the engines. It was 1978 on that July afternoon you first flew into Stapleton for a new job. On that day, you didn’t know it yet, but you were already gone.

Jane Campbell explores the "persecution of remembering" in her Cat Brushing story collection

The cover of Jane Campbell's story collection, "Cat Brushing," shows a ringed hand sweeping across the fur of what must be a very large cat or maybe the gorgeous gray locks of one of the author's elderly women characters. It could be both as you will discover reading her 13 wonderful stories in the POV of women in their 70s and beyond. This is her first book, published in her 80th year, as it says on the book jacket. I'm nine years younger than her which puts us, approximately, in the same age cohort.  

These tales are quite personal, erotic in spots. Am I surprised that women of a certain age have erotic thoughts and sometimes more than thoughts? No, but as a person in this age group, I am impressed by the directness of the stories. It challenges the idea that women of a certain age must be handled carefully lest they fall and break a hip or leave a pot burning on the stove. It's the "I've fallen and I can't get up" woman sprawled on the kitchen floor who would be lost without her handy Medic-Alert bracelet and her male rescuers. Old and helpless.

Fuck that.

In "The Question," the narrator gulps down a dose of morphine and describes the rush that results. I figured she was a goner, in the last stages of cancer, but she's actually a feisty woman who chased after her cat on a winter night and fell on her porch's icy steps. The idea that she likes the buzz of the morphine helps us get to know this woman in a rehab center who has no intention of staying abed. Tests surprisingly reveal she has no broken bones and only sustained a few bumps and bruises. When released, she asks her male nurse if she can have a to-go portion of the opioid. He genially refuses but as we read the interaction between patient and nurse, we find that she knew him in the past and knows his dark secret. 

The writer has a sure touch in turning tales on their head. In "Kiskadee," a woman lies by a pool in Bermuda and hears the melodious song of the Kiskadee, a predatory tropical bird with a big beak designed for killing. Interspersed are memories of her "special relationship" with her father. She recalls years of touching and cuddling, sleeping together, syrupy words from the father. Story's end has a horrible twist which I won't spoil here.

Most of these women recount loves gained and loves lost. The memories are clear and immediate, no brain fog here.

I reread Campbell's second story, "The Scratch."  Nell wonders how she scratched herself, a cut that bled profusely. 

What drawers had she opened carelessly, perhaps knives rearranged, had she handled scissors?

She forgets about phone calls with her grown children. She forgets things even though she writes everything in her diary.

But it's not the forgetting that concerns her most. 

The old barriers behind which she could once shelter... they all tumble down as the years pass. Just as running upstairs becomes a lost art and skipping down becomes impossible, so the capacity to forget is lost. There is a persecution of remembering. Remembering so much. Those midnight hours, dark nights of the soul, where remorse bites hard and the past presses against you.

Nell, in her 70s, forgets how to forget. 

I too, in my 70s, have forgotten how to forget. Memories become crisp and clear, even those I want to forget. This hit me so hard. Since retirement, I've been wondering why old memories come flooding back to me. As an old person, aren't I suppose to forget things instead of them rushing back to me with incredible force? It's not like I'm bored, lazing about in a tepid pool of nostalgia. 

Still, the memories flow. 

As you climb toward retirement, friends and family urge you to be busy when work ceases and you have all the time in the world. People get bored, get sick, get careless. But that's not it at all. Memories can overwhelm your present if you are not busy making more memories. They don't tell you about the "persecution of remembering." We have to leave that up to Campbell and her fictional characters. 

"Death Cleaning" is as pleasant as it sounds

The April 9 New York Times op-ed section featured a piece with this heading: " 'Death Cleaning': A Reckoning With Clutter, Grief and Memories." There were letters from more than 500 responses from the paper's request for personal stories about getting rid of a lifetime of possessions or those of a relative.

Responses were interesting and heartbreaking. Chris and I, both retired, have decided to clean out the clutter of our own lives as we contemplate a move to a retirement community. Her approach is "everything must go" and mine is "almost everything." This reveals the difference in our backgrounds. She is adopted, an army brat with one sister (also adopted) who had to help her mother purge much stuff for many moves. I am the oldest of nine. During our childhood, we moved quite a few times and, in adulthood, we've moved more that Chris's sister and her Navy lifer husband. We've done some purging over the years. Yet, now, we still have an entire household of stuff. We've lived here for 16 years. I look around my writing room and see photos of my kids at various stages and family photos of relatives. Books and papers are piled on every surface. And this is the tip of the iceberg. I have bookshelves filled with books and boxes upon boxes of books in the basement. 

When Chris retired a year ago, she embarked on a cleaning binge monumental in scale. Everything must go! And much did. A local nonprofit removed most of the furniture from the basement. We donated three sets of china to Goodwill, sparing boxes of teacups and saucers that went to the local botanic gardens for its Mother's Day teas. We remodeled our upstairs bathroom and redid the kitchen floor. Chris called the junkman who came and removed old lawnmowers and tools from the storage shed, even had them remove an old storage shed that was home to items dating back to the previous owner. She ripped up all of the carpets and exposed our very nice wood floors. 

Since I am partially disabled, I was tasked with sorting through books. How I sorted. Our daughter hauled a dozen boxes out the door to the library sales room where she volunteers. Still, many books remain. 

I also have two large plastic bins with dozens of journals dating back to 1972. I was going to donate them to my kids, both dedicated readers who like to write, and hope they would find some lasting value in them. I lasted one day reading through my life, gave up, and put the bins back in the closet. It's quite sobering to contemplate a life. Most entries are mundane, even boring. Some are embarrassing. I decided that the journals have to go but not yet, as I have more reminiscing to do. How long will I procrastinate? Until I am unable? Not exactly what I had in mind for my kids. And not what they had in mind either. 

I did not have to sort through my parents' goods. I lived far away at the time and my siblings took care of it. My mother died at 59 of ovarian cancer and my grieving father called in my four sisters to go through her things and they did it cordially. I inherited a third of my accountant father's library and all of his clothes as we were the same size. I still wear his Aran Islands sweater. My father bought it in Ireland and rarely has occasion to wear it in Central Florida. I live in Wyoming so the sweater is my friend most times of the year. I wear his sport coats and they will undoubtably go to Goodwill when the time comes. 

The books and the journals -- those are the sticking points in our Death Cleaning saga.

Humans -- can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!

In the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still," versions one and two, an intergalactic diplomat comes to earth, tells humans they are a clear and present danger to the universe and must be destroyed. That gets put on hold once the space envoy experiences the kindness of its people. But it's only a temporary hold. As Michael Rennie (Klaatu) tells humankind at the end of the 1951 film: "Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer". Then he and his big-ass robot Gort fly off in their saucer. A similar warning is repeated by Keanu Reeves in the 2008 remake.

But in English author Matt Haig's 2013 novel, "The Humans," earthlings get still another chance. Hotshot Cambridge physicist Andrew Martin unlocks the secret of prime numbers, a discovery that will kick humanity's future into overdrive. The Vonnadorians find out about it and send an hitman from a galaxy far, far away to kill the scientist. Earthlings can't be trusted with big secrets, only small ones, such as nuclear fission and the formula for Kentucky Fried Chicken. If the prime number mystery gets solved and humankind experiences the Great Leap Forward, the universe is doomed. The Vonnadorians are an advanced peaceful race and kill only when necessary, much like Gort does when threatened by the U.S. Army. The alien replaces the scientist in his body. Also, he must eliminate anyone who knew anything about the discovery. That includes Martin's colleagues, beautiful wife, and troubled son.

At first, Martin thinks of the humans as hideous with grotesque features and habits. The more time he spends with them, the more he finds to appreciate: their dog Newton, Emily Dickinson's poetry, songs by David Bowie and the Beach Boys, love, and wine. Through his eyes, the reader gets a chance to see the world anew. It's funny at first -- must humans wear clothes? -- but grows more serious as Martin the Alien abandons his quest and goes over to the other side. There's a hefty Godfather-style price to pay and I won't spoil it by spooling it out in detail.

It's a wonderful novel. I was ready for something humorous and hopeful after reading a series of serious books. Make no mistake -- this is as serious as it gets. Who are we and why do we do what we do? 

Klaatu barada nikto! 

Klaatu issues these orders to Gort. As a kid, I thought it meant "If anything happens to me, kill the human scum." It really meant "if anything happens to me, come and retrieve me and I will decide what to do next." Gort does his duty and Klaatu is freed to issue his warming to Earth. Then they fly off.

Martin the Alien receives telepathic orders from Vonnadoria. He does eliminate the scientist's collaborator. It's just a simple matter of putting his hand on him to make his heart stop. In his left hand are "the gifts," those powers that allow him to travel and communicate vast distances, speak with animals, and accomplish his mission. He briefly contemplates killing the annoying teen son, Gulliver, but saves his life instead. He befriends the dog and takes a liking to Mrs. Martin. Then all hell breaks loose.

Haig caused this reader to look anew at my humanity. Strange creatures we are. Loveable and awful. But it's all we got. For now.

That summer day in Wyoming, that was some wonderful day

One of my favorite loop tours for visitors is Cheyenne to Saratoga via the Snow Range. And then back again. For me, this 300-mile round-trip is no big deal. During summer, the obstacles on this route are construction, poky RVers, and hailstorms. During winter, you have to add in "slick in spots" hazards along I-80s Elk Mountain route. 

My wife Chris and sister Eileen joined me in my car. Brother-in-law Brian, daughter Annie and sister Mary rode in the rental. We first drove to Laramie. Annie wanted to show off her future campus. We parked in the War Memorial Stadium lot. Our visitors were impressed with the "breaking through" monumental sculpture and the big motto writ on across the stadium wall: "The world needs more cowboys." I really didn't want to get into some of the blowback the phrase caused. What about cowgirls?  Will this turn off Native American and other minority students? And what cowboys, exactly, are you speaking of? Cowboy Joe? John Wayne? The drovers in "Lonesome Dove?" The thousands of UW grads who couldn't find jobs in their home state and fled to non-cowboy states such as Illinois and Florida? Who? What?

We toured the big welcome center named for a rich donor. This is how it is on college campuses and I have no problems with it. Inside, I saw names of patrons who also support the arts and that made me happy as UW has great arts facilities and faculty. 

I noticed the library in the fireplace room and settled in to read through some of the old UW annuals. I was taken with the 1954 volume. Its first eight pages were photos of campus and Wyoming scenes that looked like blueline prints of 3D film. There is a pocket in the book's inside front cover that once held 3D glasses. How fun is that? 3D movies had hit the market in the early 1950s and they were all the rage when UW students assembled the annual in 1954. "It Came from Outer Space" (1953) and "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954). I was also surprised by some of the other 3D titles listed on IMBD, "Kiss Me Kate" and "Hondo" among them. I don't have a real good feeling about Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor and The Duke coming at me in three dimensions. "They called him Hondo -- hot-blooded as the Plains that bred him. silent as gunsmoke, a stranger to all but the surly dog at his side." OK by me, but the dog better not die.

We ate lunch under the trees and toured the UW Art Museum, one of my favorite places. Some exhibits were closing down to make room for the fall crop of artists. But the ones still up were fascinating. I really got a kick out of  David Bradley's 2001 panoramic and satiric painting of the Santa Fe Indian Market (going on now). I was entranced by Collin Parson's "Light Ellipse" at the entrance to the galleries. The 12-feet-high ellipse is made of PVC panel and backlit by LED lights and changes colors as you watch. Parson's exhibit is one of the museum's fall highlights which includes visits and talks by the Denver artist. "Blind" by Holly Roberts was part of the museum's horse exhibit. This was one of the more experimental works in "The West on Horseback" exhibit that included paintings by Hans Klieber and black-and-white ranch photos by Elsa Spear Byron.  

After a quick tour of downtown we headed for the mountains along Route 130 through Centennial. The high prairie seemed very green for the first week in August. It's usually lightly-browned as beach sand, sometimes as brown as the Wyoming Brown you see all across the UW campus. A summer squall cut into our sightseeing. Also, there was that brown cloud that has found its way here from Oregon and California. The rain let up when we reached Lake Marie so we released our visitors into the wild, now with that fresh post-rainstorm scent. Lake Marie probably one of the most photographed site in Wyoming outside our national parks and the country's first national monument. Sometimes you can catch it as still and mirror-lake and, if the light is just right, you can shoot a fit-for-framing reflection of the surrounding mountains. Laramie's Doc Thissen once showed me such a photo, one of his.

On the way downhill we passed Brush Creek Ranch and I thought about C.J. Box's novel "The Disappeared" in which some nefarious goings-on happen at a guest ranch eerily similar to Brush Creek. Other fictional nogoodniks are haunting the Wolf Hotel in downtown Saratoga, a place where Game Warden/Sleuth Joe Pickett bellies up to the bar on a frigid winter evening and sips a Black Tooth Saddle Bronc Ale. Eileen, Brian, and Mary toured the Wolf and the rest of the town. 

"So who lives here?" I've asked myself that question many times, usually when passing places such as Hanna and  Jeffrey City. I know writers from Hanna and people in Jeffrey City who kept its arts council alive even when the town was dying. These towns also house coal-miners, wind-farm workers, retirees and meth heads. Just like any place in the Rocky Mountain West. As I drive back to Cheyenne, I look out on the landscape and marvel that anyone can make a living in this place. It inspires -- I think of Linda Lillegraven's wonderful landscape paintings -- and it also causes people to lose their minds, as happens in real life and in Annie Proulx's short stories (Proulx spent many years in WYO and once lived in Centennial). 

The setting sun ignites the clouds over the Laramie Range as we drive the last miles to home. It occurs to me that nobody in our two-car caravan sees Wyoming as I do. We all see and experience life differently. Some of us translate it (or try to) in the work we do. For others, it is memories and stories, a photograph that they unearth decades later and remember that August day in Wyoming spent with family. 

That was some day. 

Remembering my mother on another birthday we can't celebrate with her

My mother's birthday is today. Anna Marie Shay would have been 95 had she lived. She died in 1986 at 59, 11 years younger than I am now. Ovarian cancer was the culprit and it was discovered too late to give her much hope. She was a fighter. I was able to get my family to Daytona to see her in February of that year, less than two months before she died. She got to meet my one-year-old son, Kevin. I'll always treasure the photos I have of the two of them together. She's looking out for him which is a good thing as he's needed a lot of looking-after. My daughter, Annie Marie, is named for her and her other grandma who also was born Anna Marie. 

Anne, Ann, and Anna are all English derivations of the Hebrew name, Hannah. It means favor or grace. English, French and Russian queens have been named Anne. One Anne (Boleyn) met a gruesome end at the hands of Henry VIII. Anne of Green Gables is a wonderful literary character. Novels feature many Annes. The name is featured in three Shakespeare plays: Henry VIII, Richard III, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Almost as popular as Elizabeth, Margaret and Valentine. Valentine?

My mother was a nurse. She mothered her hospital staff by day and her nine kids at night and weekends and in her sleep. I was 35 when she went to the hospital for the last time. That's half-a-life ago. My youngest sibling, Mary, was 20. It was hard on all of us but maybe most on Mary as she was still a kid. 

Mom's birthday always fell around Mother's Day, sometimes on Mother's Day. Chris and I were married on the Saturday after her 52nd birthday which we celebrated with a birthday party and rehearsal party in my parents' backyard. Coincidentally, Mom's2021 birthday is on a Friday just as it was in 1982, our anniversary is on a Saturday, followed by Sunday's Mother's Day. 

The years pass. Memories remain and many are painful. I retired five years ago and vibrant memories are part of every day. I am a writer so I invite those memories but as I write, they appear more real than the event itself. I remember moments with my grandparents, my parents, brothers and sisters, old friends. It's as if they were whispering in my ear. Mike, do you remember this? Your first dog, a surly Chihuahua named Pancho. Your first bicycle, a surprise from your grandparents. Firecracker wars in the neighborhood, the day you blew up all of your Mom's clothespins because Black Cats go so much farther when weight is added. All those great times with your cousins, back when everyone lived in Denver. The long winter drive from Denver to Washington state when Dad was transferred. I'll never forget the view of Wyoming's lonely wastes through the fogged-up window of a Ford Falcon station wagon. My first kiss. My first lonely day at college. My wedding. And now our 39th anniversary.

I remember Mama.

The story of the only 1960 Renault Dauphine in Daytona Beach

An April issue of UK’s Autocar featured the Renault Dauphine in its list of "22 Totally Charming Cars." It showed a still life photo of a powder blue Dauphine parked by the ocean. The car looked as if it had just left the 1960s showroom. I contrasted it with the sad photo of a derelict Dauphine in another issue of Autocar and the article "The Haunting Abandoned Wrecks of Rural France.," It showed a rusty shell of a Dauphine being swallowed up by undergrowth in "a remote field in the French Alps."

This tells the story of our family's 1960 Dauphine. I first saw it parked in our Wichita driveway in 1962. My father needed a car to commute to his job as a civilian accountant at the local air force base. That left our 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon at home with my mother who needed it to get us to school, haul us to doctor appointments and run off to the grocery store. I still can see the look of horror on the faces of grocery clerks as Mom hauled her eight children, two of them babies, into the store. My father went to the Totally Charming Yet Obscure Cars dealership and returned with Renault. It was an oddity in a world of Olds Cutlass Supremes and GTOs. Big powerful rides were the thing. The Dauphine was tiny looked almost the same from the front as it did from behind. The engine was in the rear and looked like something that might power a lawnmower. If it didn’t start, you could wake up the engine with a hand crank.

My father’s not around to ask but I do wonder why he chose such an impractical car when he headed a family of 10. He might have seen Renaults on the streets of Paris on leave during the war. He might have liked the two-tone horn (loud for city, soft for country) and the fact you could wind it up like a toy car if it refused to go. He never said. But they are some of the Dauphine traits I admired when I was gifted the car in 1967. 

The previous year, I had learned how to drive in it on Daytona's deserted winter beaches. I failed my first driving test in it when I arrived at city hall on Dec. 18, 1966, with a bum fuse. The DMV man asked if I wanted to take the test using hand signals or return on another day, fuse replaced. It was my birthday. I had a date that night with a girl I fancied as my girlfriend. I took the test and failed. I did OK with left and right turns but forgot to gesture down for stop. I was devastated. It was a long slow ride home with my father and am embarrassing phone call to my date. 

My father was transferred from Daytona to Cincinnati early in '67. The Dauphine had many miles and he didn't want to drive it north so he put it in my hands. The idea was to take my brothers and sisters to school and anywhere else they wanted to go. My mother still had toddlers and a baby (No. 9) to care for. We would finish the school year, sell the house, and then join our father in Cincy. My brother Dan and I had been most resistant to the move. We were surfers, for God's sake, and there was precious little surf in Ohio. I played JV basketball for the Father Lopez Green Wave and had high hopes of making the varsity in my junior year. And I had a girlfriend, sort of. 

I did OK bossing around my siblings. I was also OK with having a car. It was no prize after seven years of hard use and three years of assaults by rust spawned by the salt air. It had really earned its rusty-red color. My classmates began to know me as the guy with the French car which sounds pretty romantic until you got a look at it, especially after I ripped off a rear door backing out of the garage and could only find a powder-blue replacement at the junkyard. It looked like a high school kid's car but that was OK as I was a high school kid with a car.

I revel in all of the fun we had. We crammed into the car and rode The Loop around Tomoka State Park, turning off the headlights to admire the darkness and tempt fate. I bought a surf rack and we wandered up and down A1A searching for surf. Girls thought my car was cute and liked to ride. Meanwhile, I tried to find a girlfriend with a muscle car so I could feel like what it was like to drive American. I dated Darlene for a year and got to drive her canary yellow Chevy Chevelle SS 396 and later her canary yellow Pontiac GTO. She had a thing for yellow. Her father bought her a new car every year. She didn’t mind riding in my car and but liked it better when my father returned from Cincy and bought a white Plymouth Barracuda that he occasionally let me drive.

During high school graduation summer of 1969, my Dauphine died. Kind of a drag as I worked two jobs getting ready for college and had to bum rides. I sold my car cheap to a guy who planned to turn it into a dune buggy. I imagine my car’s stripped chassis blasting through the beachside sand dunes before they were replaced by condos. I can also imagine my two-toned car with the two-toned horn abandoned in a “remote field” somewhere in the Florida scrubland.

I am 70 now. I am always 16 driving my Renault down The Loop’s dark road. Sometimes the headlights are on and sometimes they are off. I am happy.