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.

Watching surfers the day before my 74th birthday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we were friends

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

We got trouble, trouble, right here in Beach City

Chris and I are looking forward to our April trip to Florida. Both of us did some of our growing-up on Florida's east coast, Daytona Beach for me and Ormond Beach for her. Daytona was (and is) a beach town with all of the trappings: beachside motels and souvenir shops, lots of bars, and a very nice beach. Daytona also has the speedway for auto races. 

Ormond begins just north and it was looked at as the more genteel neighbor. We went to the Ormond beaches when Daytona's were crowded. The beach sand was deeper and less drivable, but most of it was open to surfers with the main destination the Ormond Pier. If you go further north, there is Ormond-by-the-Sea which is a bit redundant and then Flagler Beach, named for the robber baron railroad magnate of the 19th century. 

Flagler used to be a funky little beach town with a good surfing pier but growth has changed it. Palm Coast development is in Flagler County and it replaced thousands of acres of wildlands. For one of my jobs, I used to drop by city and county offices to get lists of building permits and then rush over to Orlando to type all of it into The Construction Report, printed and distributed each Friday. It wasn't really writing but kind of fun.

In case you didn't know, construction is big business in Florida. Big, big business. Florida's big challenge, besides its dingbat governor and legislative troglodytes, is people trying to find affordable home insurance. They could be cast into the homeless by the next climate-change-caused hurricane which can't possibly exist due the state's GOP-heavy legislature banning teaching anything like it in school. I grew up by the beach and we had sand dunes then, created by the Lord Almighty to blunt the impact of big storms' tendency to wash tons of sand back into the ocean. 

The so-called peninsula I lived on is a barrier island. It is supposed to serve as barrier to tropic thunder. It did for many millennia before promoters decided they could make beaucoup bucks by selling plots of sand to Howard Johnson's and Steak-n-Shake and Americans bent on living the dream. I lived that dream and it does seem dream-like to me now, a retired bureaucrat in Wyoming. 

It was a beautiful place to grow up. We surfed by day and waited on tourists at night. Me and my eight brothers and sisters grew up freckled and barefoot, one of the wandering tribes of Daytona. We had a home to go to but, as time passed and my parents got older and more frazzled, we were turned loose to have fun but not get into trouble. We mostly succeeded.

If I sound sarcastic in my Florida appreciation, I sound like this all of the time. Chris has a whole different set of beachside stories. Most involve teens getting fake IDs at 16 and going into tourist bars. They had fun but didn't get into too much trouble, or so she says. 

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."

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 4

Fate had other ideas. We couldn’t sell our house in a down market as hundreds of other Apollo pioneers were trying to do. My father reported that he hated Cincinnati. He took a job with NASA which still needed space accountants and returned to Daytona just in time for the new school year. School chums asked me to return their going-away present but my dog had chewed up the nice Frisbee they gifted me. I made the varsity in my junior year and started dating a girl who drove a Canary-yellow GTO but she liked driving my rusted little car so we switched up often.

Over the next two years, I attended my first rock concerts in Jacksonville and in December 1968, my buddy Rick and I took our military draft physicals downtown and his lifer Chief dad arranged for us to spend the night aboard his ship. In March of ‘69, our b-ball team went to the state tournament in the Jacksonville Coliseum where we lost in the semis. Thus ended my basketball career.

In July 1969, as I pondered an uncertain future, our family huddled around the TV watching Neil Armstrong on the moon. The day before, my girlfriend and I were making out on the beach in my little car. The rain came down as the news came on: “The Eagle has landed.”

Two weeks later, when the Apollo astronauts were back in the U.S., our house burned down. No casualties except... 

As the day faded into history, my mother went to work as a nurse and my father got a job crunching numbers with the State of Florida and commuted to the Jacksonville office. Dad still didn’t know how to swim but the rest of us did. We were water people, for now.

Bio: Michael Shay did some of his growing up in Florida but now lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with his wife and two grown children. He graduated from Daytona’s Father Lopez High School in 1969, Daytona Beach Community College in 1974 and University of Florida in 1976. He applied for reporter jobs at every newspaper in Florida but none would hire him so, like Huck Finn, he lit out for the territories. He gets to Florida as often as he can to visit family and friends. His story collection, “The Weight of a Body,” is available on Amazon. His novel, “Zeppelins over Denver,” is due out later this year.

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 3

Hurricane Dora hit a couple weeks into the new school year. The lead story in that morning’s News-Journal featured an illustration of a swirling Hurricane Dora with an arrow pointed right at Daytona. Still, our parents sent us to school. Midway through the day, the nuns made us pray for Dora to hit somewhere other than Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church/School/Shrine/Nunnery. They finally sent us home. 

My father evacuated us to the mainland. We went as far as a motel along U.S. 1. I spent the night listening to WROD 1340 on my transistor radio and tracing Dora’s progress on the tracking map I ripped out of the morning paper. At the window, I watched the gusts batter the palms.

The storm brushed by Daytona and moved on to St. Augustine and Jacksonville. We returned to our modest house in an Ormond Beach community designed for middle-class vacationers and now was temporary home to the migrating hordes of engineers, technicians, and accountants planning the moonshot. The hurricane had turned our house into a white cinder-block island surrounded by murky water. We turned our picnic table upside down to make a raft and poled across the backyard.

During the next couple years, we bought a house in Daytona and stayed put. The ninth kid was born. We visited the Jacksonville zoo and marveled at the city’s new shopping mall. In January 1967, right in the middle of Father Lopez Green Wave basketball season, my father announced that the need for accountants on the Apollo Moon Mission was coming to an end, at least in Florida. He could stay with G.E. but only if he agreed to be transferred to Cincinnati. He had a big family to feed. Other G.E. employees who declined to move to Cincinnati or Schenectady or Boston now were pumping gas or checking in Georgia tourists at beachside motels. 

The good news about him leaving is that he didn’t want to drive his 1960 Renault Dauphine to Ohio during the winter. Since I had conveniently passed my driving test in December, he was leaving me his car and chauffeuring duties for the ten people remaining at our Hartford Avenue house which was going up for sale on Monday.

Next: Cincinnati or bust?

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 1

Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Program. – From the end credits of Richard Linklater’s Netflix film “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood”

My father was one of them. Unlike’s Linklater’s Houston-based father, mine worked closer to Cape Canaveral, in an office in Daytona Beach, Fla. Thousands joined the Moon Mission, most of them answering JFK’s call although he was no longer around to cajole and promise. Lyndon Johnson would be president when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969 after being launched from the Cape on July 16. Johnson was glad for a bit of good news after the battles of the 1960s which weren’t over yet. Camelot a distant memory. On this hot July day in Florida, hundreds of thousands of space-age lunarnauts and millions more around the world rooted for U-S-A!

July 20 always brings footage from the lunar event. It seems like yesterday that I watched it in black-and-white telecasts beamed from the lunar lander. I am 72 and retired. I look through veils of nostalgia. I sometimes share my memories with my two 30-something children. They are mildly amused. At least they believe that we landed on the moon. I think they do but it’s difficult to know for sure. All of us carry different memory-loops through life and they change as time passes.

What do I remember from this time? Some things I know for sure. Others are a bit foggy so I conjure what seems closest to the truth. I have not made up anything that follows but I may remember it imperfectly. That’s life.

I was 13.67 years old in August 1964 when our family of 10 moved to Florida. I was not pleased to be moving to the third state I would live in during the past eight months. In January, I’d been yanked out of St. Francis Grade School in suburban Wichita in the midst of basketball season and the wooing of classmate Patty Finn. In February, I was walking to the bus stop in snowy Denver to attend the split session at a junior high packed with Boomer kids and the site of at least two knife fights and a teacher mugging during my short time there. In June, my father came home from work to announce his new job with G.E. and our Florida move. He had finished the task of hiding nuclear missiles among the sagebrush of the West. The space program needed his accounting skills and our family was going along for the ride. Dad moved immediately. We sold our house, packed our goods, said goodbye (again), and off we went.

Next: Night Swimming in the Sunshine State

Hair stylist at the Cancer Infusion Station

Lorna of the luxurious brown hair. The first time I saw her. Not a streak of grey in it. I knew it wouldn't last because she's right here in the Cancer Infusion Center waiting room. This is where hair goes to die so the patient can live even if it's a little bit longer. Lorna hasn't yet stopped at my station to talk about styling options or maybe a wig; we have orange and blue ones. Stylin' scarves too, and caps with funny sayings, funny to all of us anyway, women of the lost hair -- yeah me too, and mine grew back curly and seal brown with silver tips. "Kissed by the sun, I said. "Touch of grey" said my husband, a Jerry Garcia fan. "I will get by," the song goes. "I will survive." As the weeks went on I missed seeing Lorna and wondered if she'd given up. She finally came by, hair strands sticking up in a topknot and tied in a bow. Reminded me of Zippy the Pinhead from those days when hair meant everything. Lorna walked by alone, as always. "Like my hair?" She tended it with her right hand, twirled around so I could get a good look. We both laughed. I saw her weeks later, head shiny as a baby's bottom. "Just a comb-through," she said. I held up a bare hand. "Got my comb right here." For the first time, she cast her burden aside and sat in my chair. I massaged her scalp with some feel-good ointment that smells of lavender and vanilla. I feel the ridges of her skull beneath the hairless skin. Cancer started in her breasts -- they've been banished the damn troublemakers. Lorna and I reminisced about the touching that went with them. When done right, it lit us up. My touch on her bald head is one small thing, a tiny pleasure. Small things are what's left when the big things go.

"For All Mankind" shows what the U.S, space program could have been

As I move on to the second season of “For All Mankind” on Apple-Plus, I keep asking the same question:

What happened to us?

By us, I mean U.S. as in US of A. The show posits a vigorous space program motivated mainly by the Soviets beating us to the moon in 1969. One member of the Soviet crew is a woman cosmonaut. Down on earth, Americans with hangdog looks are watching this on TV. They can’t believe the Reds beat us to the moon. Didn’t President Kennedy promise us that we would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade? We did, in fact, land a man on the moon on July 20, 1969, well ahead of the Russkis who never managed it.

The genius of this show is showing how the U.S. took the Soviet challenge, recruited women astronauts (Nixon’s idea) and landed one on the moon to claim a spot on the rock. The astronaut was a chain-smoking blonde, Jerrie Cobb, who was one of the first choices back when NASA tried to match the Mercury 7 men with a female contingent. The Cobb in the series (Molly) goes to space while the real Cobb, an accomplished aviator who passed all the NASA tests, did not. Season 1 Episode 4 is dedicated to her.

That’s the cool thing about the series, imagining what could have been. It resembles the “Hollywood” series on Netflix which imagined a post-war Tinseltown that appreciated its gay actors and didn’t demonize them. Also, in the dystopian TV world, the U.S. lost World War II and was divided up between Nazi Germany and Japan. Or you can see an America which is now the Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Also, zombies. Zombies everywhere.

I ask again: what happened to us? What happened to the U.S. space program? My father worked for the space program from 1964-69 in Daytona Beach. We kids watched all of the launches. We were happy when July 20, 1969, came around and showed the U.S. what we were made of. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Ran into trouble with the balky shuttle, losing two crews and our sense of adventure. Vietnam kicked our ass as did all the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

We get to see what could have been on “For All Mankind.” I am only on the second episode of the second season so I do not yet know what ultimately happens. But I do know what has not happened during my lifetime. And that’s very sad. 

Nukes in the news -- again

Not enough people have seen "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

It's satire, sure, with a concept that a loony nuke base commander could trigger a nuclear war. General Jack D. Ripper is obsessed with Commies poisoning "our precious bodily fluids." His executive officer, a British captain, comes close to derailing the general's plans but, as we all know, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and mega-kiloton atomic warheads.

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Dr. Strangelove's closing lines, sung by Vera Lynn as the Russians' Doomsday Machine causes bombs to go off all over the world.

That's all, folks!

The movie's over. We laugh. Shake our heads. Punch the remote to "Bridgerton."

The premise seemed ridiculous to moviegoers in 1964. It seems ridiculous again. But not quite so. There is an unhinged megalomaniac in Russia threatening to use nukes if the West doesn't stop arming Ukraine. 

"Dr. Strangelove" got its start with a novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George. It's a thriller. I read it as a teen, that and "Fail-Safe," co-written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Also, Nevil Shute's "On the Beach." I read about nuclear Armageddon. It seemed so far-fetched. At the same time, I was reading the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. They sparked my imagination, turning me into a lifelong fan of fiction. Tom Swift's dirigible/biplane hybrid ("Tom Swift and His Airship, or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud") seemed as real to me as nuke bombers and missiles that could incinerate the planet. I was lost in a fantastic world that I never really grew out of.

At the same time, my father worked on installing Atlas missiles in hardened silos from Washington state to Kansas (Wyoming too). He was a contract specialist, an accountant with Martin Co. (Martin-Marietta). He was charged with making sure that the missiles and their underground homes were built correctly and within budget. We moved around with Dad and his work. I never really thought about how his job might lead to a cataclysm. But he did. He recommended that I watch Strangelove and read World War III novels. He didn't talk much about his work but I know he wanted me to be a reader and an informed citizen. 

Our family got a lot out of the Cold War. It never was a hot war, as some predicted, but it shaped me. 

So now, when Putin mouths off about nukes, I hear General Jack D. Ripper. I should take the guy more seriously as I live in the crosshairs of Nuclear Alley here in southeast Wyoming. If MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) arrives, I will have precious little time to worry about it. I never really stopped worrying nor did I learn to love the bomb. 

I revel in its absurdity.

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Vera Lynn's singing takes us back to World War II. When Vera sang, British soldiers listened. They were in the fight of their lives around the globe. At home too, as Hitler waged a saturation bombing of a civilian population. Putin now saturates Ukraine with rockets and terror tactics. 

My father, a World War II G.I., liked Vera Lynn. Later, when I had a chance to think about it, I wondered if he minded that Vera Lynn's song had been used for a fiery conflagration that ended the world. He was especially fond of "The White Cliffs of Dover" which he must have heard many times in England as he trained for the Normandy invasion.

This:

There'll be bluebirds over/the White Cliffs of Dover/tomorrow,/just you wait and see

And this:

There'll be love and laughter/and peace there after,/tomorrow,/when the world is free

There may be a song like this for Ukraine. There should be.  

420 Day in Wyoming feels a lot like Wednesday

Happy 420 Day. 

Stoners in Boulder, Colo., used to treat this day as a smoke-filled holiday, known for one of the biggest 420 fests in the U.S. Legalization arrived via the voters in 2012. There now are hundreds of  marijuana dispensaries in the first state to start selling legal recreational weed. 

Wyoming, on the other hand, well, Wyoming is Wyoming. It will be the last state to approve it. Meanwhile, liquor rules the land. Prohibition (1920-1933) was a joke in this state while the temperance types in Colorado got an early start by prohibiting booze in 1916. Ah, Colorado, our sober southern neighbor.

Bootleggers abounded in WYO border towns for thirsty Coloradoans, Utahans, Nebraskans, Dakotans, Montanans, and Idahoans. Moonshine was an export commodity long before fireworks and fresh-faced UW grads. You can visit museums around the state that feature well-preserved stills from the 1930s. Museum volunteers lecture school groups on the bad old days when everyone was stewed to the gills with illicit hooch. Look how far we’ve come! Wyoming has a huge alcohol abuse problem. It also had the second-highest number of teen drug arrests in 2016, topped only by neighbor South Dakota and a bit more than neighbor Nebraska. Here’s a recent headline from the Cowboy State Daily: “Fentanyl Deaths in Wyoming Increasing; Federal, State Officials Worried.” 

My drugs of choice these days tend to be heavy on the Zs: Prozac, Zyrtec, Mirtazapine, Zestril. This is what happens when you have depression, get carted away with a heart attack, and sneeze your head off from May through October. These meds are prescribed liberally by physicians and pharmacists. Drug company reps hand out free samples. They need to be used with care as they carry a list of side effects (some alarming) listed on the three-page printout you get with each prescription. Oxycontin and Fentanyl carry similar warnings which nobody reads.

I’m pleased that the medical establishment gives us info so we can make decisions about what to take and what to jettison. No such lists were issued with the recreation drugs of the 60s and 70s. Our parents knew nothing nor did any adult we depended on for advice which we readily ignored. I was thinking about this the other day. KUWR’s Wyoming Sounds’ Throwback Thursday featured Grady Kirkpatrick playing songs on the forbidden list issued by an Illinois state law enforcement agency in 1971. The songs allegedly encouraged the use of illegal drugs. They included PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON (Peter, Paul, and Mary), HI-DE-HO (Blood, Sweat, and Tears) AND LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS (Beatles). 

The list was probably inspired by Nixon’s War on Drugs. "Puff" was targeted due to the fact that marijuana cigarettes needed to be puffed in 1971 (no edibles or ganja-infused beer). Too many puffs and you saw magic dragons. Lucy was obviously an abbreviation for LSD which, if you had the good stuff, you would definitely see magic dragons, sea nymphs, and Jesus. I have it on good authority that some frat boys saw our savior after imbibing too much Purple Jesus punch, a once-popular grain alcohol/Hawaiian Punch mixture.

I don’t get why “Hi-De-Ho” is on the banned list. Some lyrics:

Hi de ho

Hi de hi

Gonna get me a piece of the sky

Gonna get me some of that old sweet roll

Singing hi de hi de hi de hi de hooooo.

I looked up the song, originally sung by Dusty Springfield. I don’t see the drug references. Sure, some druggies may be reaching for a piece of sky. And stoners might satisfy a craving with sweet rolls such as the frisbee-sized concoctions served at Johnson’s Corner truck stop in Colorado. But it’s a stretch.

Hi-De-Ho was a phrase used liberally by Cab Calloway. He may have smoked weed as musicians seemed to like their drugs in the Roaring 20s and the Pretty Exciting but Impoverished 30s. The police noted that hip musicians tended to be African-American and their music was enjoyed mostly by jitterbugging minorities. Go to YouTube and watch jitterbugging clips. You could be stoned making those moves but I have my doubts. The fast-paced dance featured jittery music and lots of throwing around partners’ bodies. One false move and your date could end up a bleeding and broken thing on the bandstand.

The dances I remember from high school were not complicated but needed a bit of sobriety to carry off. The dances I remember from 1970s rock concerts were as groovy and free-flowing as a 20-minute Grateful Dead jam.

Hi-De-Ho.

Remembering The Great 1972 Rainbow Family Scare in Colorado

The Colorado Sun reposted this piece by Jason Blevins in the Outsider newsletter:

The Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes plans to return to Colorado this summer to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The weeks-long confab that draws tens of thousands of hippie campers to public lands announced this week that the national gathering of possibly 30,000 would be returning to Colorado. 

The group’s national bacchanal was last in Colorado in 2006, with about 10,000 people camping on Forest Service land in north Routt County outside Steamboat Springs. Before that, they were 19,000-strong outside Paonia in 1992. The first national gathering was near Granby in 1972. 

My girlfriend Sharon and I hitched through Colorado during the summer of ’72. We weren’t card-carrying members of the Rainbow Family but your average observer couldn’t tell. My hair was long, my jeans scruffy. Sharon wore braids, a halter top, and jeans that were definitely not scruffy.

We wondered why we got flipped off as we stood with our thumbs out on the side of the road. We were both just good-natured college dropouts on a spree. Why don’t people like us?

You dirty hippies!

I took a shower yesterday.

Me too.

Can’t please some people.

When we arrived in Denver, we found out about the Rainbow Family Gathering of Tribes soon to descend on Colorado. The citizenry was up in arms about hordes of longhairs in scruffy jeans invading their mountains. The interlopers allegedly were going to smoke lots of illegal weed the quality of which would pale in comparison with the mind-blowing cannabis now grown all over Colorado and sold legally at your corner dispensary. Colorado newspapers raised the alarm that Rainbow Family members were going to trip on LSD, now the favorite micro-dosing drug of the techie who built your VR headset. The citizenry feared that Rainbowites on magic mushrooms might swarm their city, recruiting Colorado young people to psilocybin. Thing is, in the last CO election cycle, psilocybin was decriminalized by your grandmother’s pickleball group in Longmont.

My, my.

Colorado was a different place in 1972. My Uncle Bill sold insurance and Aunt Mary played bridge with her pals every week. They voted for Republicans and cursed hippies. Thing is, when Sharon and I turned up on their front porch in Denver, they took us in, fed us, and housed us -- in separate rooms, of course. We hung out with my cousins. Uncle Bill wouldn’t let them go full-hippie but they smoked pot with us anyway. Went with the cousins to Elitch’s Amusement Park, the old one in West Denver. We played miniature golf and drank a lot of 3.2 Coors. Went to a Red Rocks concert. Their friends didn’t care that we were dirty hippies as we were all young together, having fun. On the Fourth of July, we traveled up to Estes Park to watch fireworks from a friend’s lofty cabin.

Sharon and I eventually hit the road for points west. Many adventures along the way. Saw the sights. Swam in the Pacific Ocean. Went to some concerts. Met a lot of cool people. Visited a high school pal at Berkeley. At summer’s end, we hitched to Boston where we lived and worked for awhile. The relationship ended and I headed back to Florida, worked and went back to school.

Never really got close that summer to Strawberry Lake near Granby where the Rainbow Family was rocking out. They were doing their thing. Now their kids and grandkids are coming back to Colorado to rile the populace. I’m old enough now to curse the damn hippies but I know better. Besides, I live in Wyoming, the live-and-let-live-state. The Rainbow Family has gathered three times in Wyoming. Not sure about any casualties. It’s 2022 but all the good drugs are still illegal in The Equality State. While here, you will have to buy your weed from some shady guy on the street corner. Bring your own is the best bet. WYO is flanked by pot-friendly states Colorado and Montana.

According to the Marijuana Policy Project:

Wyoming is one of just a few states that continues to criminalize adults and patients for possessing and using cannabis.

My guess is that the Rainbow Family will choose any one of the weed-friendly states for future get-togethers. Besides the two already mentioned: California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona. Millions of acres of forestland await you. Be careful with fires, though, as it doesn’t take much to start a conflagration. Edibles are a better choice.

Happy trails.

A salute to those books that taught me humor, satire, and the absurdity of being human

All this book-banning makes me think of all of those books I read that might meet disapproval now from the GOP Know Nothings. 

When I was in the fourth grade, my father told me I could read any book in his library. I tackled the war books, first, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, Brave Men by Ernie Pyle and Up Front by Bill Mauldin, which included his Willie and Joe cartoons. He had some boys' adventure books from his childhood, Treasure Island and Ivanhoe. But I was more interested in the WWII books, as my father had been a radioman with an infantry unit in France, Belgium, and Germany. They seemed like boys' adventures to me. I read all of the Life magazines that my grandparents had saved for my dad while he was overseas. I watched war movies with my dad, as did my younger brother. We played war with our friends. 

None of my teachers ever assigned books on 20th century wars. They reached into the heroic past. The Revolutionary War had spawned books such as Johnny Tremayne and tales of Paul Revere and George Washington. The Civil War was acceptable reading as we all grew up knowing that the Yankees were the good guys and the Rebs the bad guys. This was way before we moved to the South and heard the term War of Northern Aggression. So many of the books I read as an English major and later were by writers of the American South. Their Southern Gothic tales owed their existence to the region's tortured history which included the Civil War, whatever you want to call it.

Now in my 70s, I look back on my reading as nostalgic. I also know more about the workings of the world. War can be heroic. It's also nasty, brutish, and final. Soldiers carry their experiences into old age, if they make it that far. There are brilliant antiwar books told from the warrior's POV. And books by observers, such as Red Badge of Courage and Dispatches, Michael Herr's wild book about life among the grunts in Vietnam (Herr got writing credits for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket). 

Just about every book I ever read could be fodder for the book banners. My non-authorized reading at my Catholic high school included three oft-banned novels that influenced me more than anything I read in class: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They are now considered classics and are read in some high school classrooms when Know Nothings are not disappearing books like Dunbar. They were telling me a truth that I barely knew at 18, that the world is a strange and terrifying place. 

Humor, satire, and sci-fi are great vehicles for getting at the truth. I passed Catch-22 along to my Class of '69 pals and we laughed at the absurdities. The dead man in Yossarian's tent. Major Major Major's name. Orr's pastime of ditching his bomber into the ocean to practice for his escape from war. Hilarious. We only felt a small tremor of the earthquake beneath. We could have watched the absurdity of televised military reports from Vietnam. Body count, Vietnamization, destroy the village in order to save it. It was all right there in front of us but we didn't know. 

Reading good books gave us a bit of a head start on adulthood. Still, you have to live it to really know. You can be an absurdist and still be an engaged human. You can love satire but also fall in love. Humor makes the ride fun even when it's challenging. 

I'd have none of that without the reading.

Meditation after another trip to the dermatologist

Angel Kisses

The sun’s first ray taps the crown of my head. I’m the tallest creature on the ocean, me, a young man bobbing just outside of the breaking waves. Light from 93 million miles away cascades over my torso, lights up the many colors of my surfboard, paints my body with freckles that will only become visible when winter comes. Soon all the surfers will be illuminated, their multi-colored boards, the stripes on their baggies. The sun will crawl over the beach and the early-bird walkers and houses perched on the dunes and the town and Florida entire. It will unleash the heat, fire up the humidity of a July morning.  Decades later, a Wyoming dermatologist talks about his family’s Colorado ski vacation as he scoops skin from this young surfer turned old man. Cancer may have been there all of this time, a remnant of the sun’s touch during hundreds of mornings in the semi-tropical sun. My crown, my nose, my ears have all been biopsied, scraped and sown. Nothing awful, nothing like melanoma that killed my brother. I wonder if the dermatologist slaps on sunscreen before he negotiates Steamboat runs named High Noon, One O’clock, Two O’clock for the prime meridian times that January sun reaches the west-facing mountains. If sunscreen had been a thing in 1967, I would have used it. Maybe. I know one thing – I would never trade one second of those mornings for blemish-free skin. Every scar a dance with sun and ocean, every freckle the kiss from the heavens. “Freckles are angel kisses,” my mom told me when I believed in angels. I now know the science behind melanin and derma, ephelides and solar lentigines. But during my seventieth year on the planet, angel kisses seem exactly right. Just perfect.

Joan Didion and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

I was a bit shocked to find out that the Saturday Evening Post was still alive and celebrating its 200th anniversary. I know the Post from my youth, when it arrived in the mail with a new Norman Rockwell cover. My grandparents has copies of the Post and Life and Reader's Digest all over their houses. Required reading, and encouraging in an all-American sort of way. In 2021, for $15 a year, you can get six issues of the print magazine, a digital subscription and access to the online archive. I'd love to dig into the online archives -- that alone is worth the price. I will recognize many of the covers from the 1950s and 1960s. Display ads tout cigarettes, appliances, and shiny big cars made in Detroit.

I won't always recognize the articles. That was clear to me when Joan Didion's piece "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" appeared on Facebook with the news of Joan Didion's passing. It was a variety of journalism known as the long feature. She was among the coterie of American writers known for "new journalism" which blended reporting with fiction techniques. Some of you may know it as creative nonfiction or, in the case of Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalism. 

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was published during Didion's prime in June 1967 and republished by the Post in 2017. Didion dropped into the Haight-Ashbury scene on the cusp of the Summer of Love. The famous Human Be-in had been held in January at Golden Gate Park with lots of acid, hip speakers, and bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Dead. Word about this Hippie Utopia spread and by summer, school was out and thousands of young people crowded into the city. Media, too, even Saturday Evening Post.

Didion, of course, was no TV talking head who dropped in to marvel and possibly be shocked at the ribald behavior. She was an incisive reporter who dug into the culture and found it wanting. She sets her tone with a quote from W.B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." Yeats' poem is much-admired for its stark symbols. It is also much abused. It employs Biblical Revelations-style symbols to warn humankind of what becomes of society's upheavals. He specifically addressed the Irish "Rising" of 1916 and its after-effects, which included a revolution and a civil war that involved much bloodshed. 

Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" records what she sees. Reading it now, I thank my Lucy in the Ski with Diamonds that I didn't bug out and go to the Haight. Sure, there was drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll, but also addiction, STDs, and poverty. Lots of teen runaways looking for adventure and a place to call home. I was 16, the age of some of the girls in Didion's piece. If I had read "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" in the summer of '67, it would have seemed as if it was happening in another world, which it was. My summer was spent in Daytona Beach. I surfed as much as I could. I worked evenings at the Village Inn Pancake House and KFC outlet. But I also had to help Mom with my eight brothers and sisters. My father was working at GE in Cincinnati. We thought we were going to follow him and move there as soon as we sold our house. My Father Lopez High School classmates even gave me and two of my peers a going-away party. They moved. I did not. We couldn't sell our house in a down market so Dad decided to accept a job at NASA in Daytona and forget about Cincinnati. Such good news. 

But what about the hippies and The Summer of Love? I thought the music was cool but was much more interested in the Motown sound. It was beach music, music to dance to at sock hops. I was keen on dating tourist girls from Kentucky and Georgia down in Daytona on family vacations, just itching to break away from Ma and Pa and meet some of the local hunks, or so we thought. The Catholic Church had ruled that underage sex was taboo and Catholic School girls were the first to take the edict seriously. But we boys didn't know anything either. That mutual ignorance was not a good thing. 

In Didion's essay, a five-year-old girl is high on acid. An older guy is turning a teen girl into addict and sex slave. Everyone is high. I've been on both sides of LSD, the experiencing and the observing. Have you ever been the only non-high person in a room full of acid heads? The experiencing can be fun. The observing, not so much. You might get the idea that this is cool and join them. Didion observed the scene and with a keen and sober eye described it to the world. She wasn't judgmental. She was known to have a good sense of chaos and what she saw was the "rough beast" that lurked within the frivolity. 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

Conservative institutions, such as the Catholic Church, along with cultural critics of the Right, blame the '60s for this blood-dimmed tide. There's a kernel of truth in that. 

I watched "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold" last night on Netflix. A fine 2017 documentary by her nephew, director Griffin Dunne. I went to bed pondering what it takes to be a writer. Didion knew early on that's what she wanted to do. After college, she moved to NYC, worked for Vogue Magazine, met her future husband, also a writer, and spent her life illuminating the universal through the personal. She left a template that many writers have followed, some better than others.  

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.

When your hope shrinks, do a small thing to let the sunshine in

I tried to write a piece about the massacre of 10 innocents at the King Soopers in Boulder. Few subjects make me speechless but mass shootings are one of them. Archivists in 2121 may come across articles about massacres of civilians in the U.S. and thank their lucky stars that sensible gun laws finally were enacted in 20__ and that we would never see headlines like this again. That's as hopeful as I can be, that someday the U.S. will lose its cruel streak and the NRA will be bankrupt and all of our gun nuts will die from natural causes. There's hope in that. I liked these lines from a Naomi Shihab Nye poem I came across on the Poetry Foundation web site: 

When your hope shrinks 

you might feel the hope of 

someone far away lifting you up.

I'll write about the hope of small things. 

I bought a small grow-kit from Amazon. Nothing fancy. Just a metal tray, soil, and three seed packets. The chives and Florence fennel sprouted and are on their way to summer salads and desserts. I stuck some basil seeds in with my pot of Thai basil and still waiting for those. I planted chive seeds from hometownseeds.com but got nothing. I’m going to plant again today in a new pot and see if they do better. I like chives and you can put it in all sorts of dishes. But I can’t get it to grow. Best thing to do is buy some chives that already are far along and try not to kill them.

My herbs have taken over the end of the dining room table up against a south-facing kitchen window. The table is Formica laminate and is a remnant of 1950s kitchens. It’s in the mid-century modern (Mid-Mod) school of furniture. We had tables just like it when I was growing up. A perfect match for mac and cheese and meatloaf. I look at the table and see my mother and all of the many Susie Homemaker mothers of the era. My mom also was Anna the Nurse and knew when and when not to patch up our many wounds. When I was 7, our exchanges went something like this:

Me: Mom, I’m hurt! 

Mom: Are you bleeding?

Me: No but… 

Mom (kisses my head): Go outside and play – you’ll be all right.

Sometimes I was bleeding. She applied Mercurochrome to the wound and sent me outside to play. Writing about “Mercurochrome Memories” in ScienceBlogs, dblum writes that the bright-red antiseptic is a mercury derivative of a red dye discovered in 1889. The antiseptic version was developed 20 years later by researchers at Johns Hopkins, source of many of our magic potions and miracle meds. The FDA declared mercury a neurotoxin and it’s no longer made in the U.S. But never fear:

Science tells us that if once you were painted with Mercurochrome, your body has probably stored at least a trace for you. Nothing apparently too dangerous, just a reminder of your chemical past.

My chemical past. As a Downwinder from Colorado and Washington state, I already have some bomb-blast radiation in my body. And traces of lead paint – can’t forget that. I also have mercury in my dental fillings. And then there’s DDT. Damn, if I had known all this, I wouldn’t have lived to be 70 and (I hope) much longer.

I gave up ground gardening a few years ago when a spinal injury prevented bending and stooping. I grow my veggies in containers now. I’ve been successful although gardening at 6,200 feet in a semi-arid region continues to be a work in progress. My seedlings don’t go outside until mid-May. Most insects aren’t a problem but hail and wind and drought are. I keep growing things because it brings joy and I like the challenge of the cherry tomato harvest in August. You can get good ones at the store or farmer’s market. But I like to pick and eat them when they are still warm from the sun. It’s like eating sunshine. We all could use more of the simple act of nurturing a small thing to "let the sunshine in..."

Some blog posts just don't grow into fully-formed stories -- and that's OK

Time to take stock of the year that was.

I wrote 67 posts this year. Published posts, that is. I wrote 10 or more that I didn't post. They just never jelled or I lost interest. The drafts linger on my site but will be banished with the new year.

When family members were quarantined and not working in the spring, we started hauling boxes filled with books up from the basement. I was tasked with separating the keepers from the ones to go to the library store or, when that closed due to Covid, downtown's Phoenix Books. Probably sent six or seven boxes out the door, just a fraction on those remaining. In one box, I saw a tattered copy of "Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by Hunter Thompson. This was before "strange and terrible" morphed into "fear and loathing." I really liked it when I read it in the early '70s during my Gonzo period. I didn't want to emulate Thompson's life but I did want to write like him.

I began to read "Hell's Angels" and got hooked. Read it all the way through in a couple of days. I tried to frame an essay about it but could not. Thompson's style I still liked. But I didn't like the sexism and racism. The Angels were noted for gang rapes and Thompson was cavalier about it. We liked the Angels for their outlaw image, at least we did in our youth. Their attraction has waned over the decades. I don't really find anything constructive about them. In my blog, written before the election, I wanted  to paint members as diehard Trump fans but failed. It's a gross generalization to label motorcycle thugs as Trumpists. It's also a mistake to think that all bikers are gang members. Your local attorney is as likely to ride a Harley as your local mechanic. My neighbor is an IT guy and he rides and works on his very expensive Harley. My late brother Dan rode a Harley and he was an air traffic controller. 

The Angels still exist but haven't been the same since Altamont and neither have the Stones. I gave up and put "Hell's Angels" in the discard box.

My conclusion: Thompson documented a lot of what happened in 1960s and '70s America. But, really, how much fear & loathing can a nation bear?

My next subject that didn't jell was about the Boy Scouts of America and its magazine, "Boy's Life." I was a proud Scouter in Colorado, Washington, Kansas and Florida. The Scouts seemed to be something I could count on to be pretty much the same whether we were snow-camping in the Rockies or avoiding water moccasins in the Florida swamps. I read Boy's Life from cover to cover. It was all boys back then, stories about knots and campfires and lifesaving. There was always a feature profiling heroic Scouts. I liked the cartoon about Pedro the Donkey. 

Girls are now part of Scouts and it's about time. As you probably know, the BSA has been roiled by the same sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. Girls can now be Scouts and for some reason the mag is still called "Boy's Life." I guess an ancient organization such as the Scouts can move only so fast. They have that in common with the church. My youth involved Scouting, the church and basketball. I abandoned one of those when, in the ninth grade, I discovered girls. I do believe I would have welcomed girls into my Scout troop but it was the 1960s which was a lot like the 1950s in Central Florida. 

I just lost interest as I wrote about Scouts, much as I lost interest in becoming an Eagle Scout when I got my first kiss. Reading a current issue of the magazine did not revive my interest although I was oddly pleased that Pedro the Donkey had made it into the 21st century. 

This is what happens with writers. Not everything we begin has an ending. I have a two-drawer filing cabinet filled with rough drafts and beginnings. Stored on this PC and OneDrive are many finished pieces and many fragments. What seems like a good idea at the time never grows into a finished product that can be published. And not everything is published in any form, whether as a book or a story in a journal or a post on Blogger. That's not easy to understand when you start out but it becomes clear if you stick with it. I have, for some reason. Writing is important to me and no matter how many setbacks come my way, I stick with it.

1969 moon landing memories linger on the beach and in The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse

I like to think that I was a witness to history during Moon Landing Week in July 1969.

I witnessed the launch from the beach the morning of July 16. The Hartford Avenue beach approach in Daytona is located 62 miles northwest of Cape Canaveral. The Saturn 5, NASA's largest-ever launch vehicle, lit up an already bright morning and its sound waves seemed to ruffle the smooth Atlantic. The rocket arced into the sky and out to sea. It was visible only a few minutes. When it was gone, we went back in the water. Or maybe I was in the water already. I forget, as I saw so many launches during my 14 years in Florida. They merge into one big launch that shows the U.S. commitment to space exploration in the 1960s and into the 1970s. JFK showed the way with his 1961 speech. Congress shoveled money at the program as it took seriously Kennedy's vow of a man on the moon in 1969. An American man on the moon. Take that, Russkis!

It was all about the Cold War. The USSR ambushed us with Sputnik, Laika the Space Dog, and Yuri Gargarin. We fought back with Mercury and Alan Shepard and Gemini and finally Apollo. We won the Space Race with the moon landing. It was important to win something in the mid-60s, since we were losing in Vietnam and young people were lost to their elders and some of our biggest heroes were gunned down by assassins in 1968.

My father was a rocket man. He didn't fly them or test them. But he was a contract specialist with General Electric and later NASA. He worked out deals with suppliers of nuts and bolts and many of the gadgets that went to the moon. He could look at a launch with pride and announce that the big hunk of metal ferrying Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin to the moon was partly his doing. He and thousands of other Americans had worked together to get the U.S. first on the moon.

But all was not well in Rocketland. Workforce cutbacks had started two years earlier. One day, GE honchos told Dad that his services were no longer needed in Florida. He accepted a transfer to Cincinnati where GE was building all kinds of new and wonderful things. He said he would go on alone and the family would join him when school got out in June. Dad didn't like Cincinnati and we couldn't sell our house in Daytona as hundreds were leaving and  it was a buyer's market. This well-educated workforce that had come from New York and Ohio and New England in the fifties and sixties were no longer needed. It hurt Daytona. It was not exactly the Silicon Valley of the 60s. Most jobs were in the service industries that fed the tourist industry. I worked some of those jobs. Busboy, bagboy, laundry pick-up guy for beach motels, worker on a beach float stand. My brother was a gremmie selling suntan lotion by a hotel pool. One of my sisters was a nursing assistant taking care of old people who flocked to Florida's Promised Land. The engineers who made the rockets (and their families) would be missed by local businesses and schools.

But Dad grew tired of city life and found a job with NASA back on Daytona. I was happy because I had just made my high school's basketball squad after a year's worth of practice and visualized a bright future as a power forward.

On the afternoon of July 20 when Apollo 11's Eagle landed near the Sea of Tranquility, I was parked by the Atlantic Ocean with my girlfriend K. The radio news followed the ship's descent which we only partially listened to. When "The Eagle has landed" was announced, we paused our kissing and fondling for several minutes to let history wash over us. It rained heavily and the beach seemed deserted, odd for a July afternoon. Minuscule waves broke on the sandbar 50 yards in front of us. No surfing today. Once the announcers returned to just talking about the landing of the Eagle, we returned to our previous engagement.

I know the exact spot where this happened. When I'm in town, I walk by it and remember that historic afternoon. I see my rusty red Renault Dauphine with the light blue door that replaced the original, sheared off in a hasty back-up from my garage. Two people are inside, at least I think it's two people, as the windows are fogged. The spirit of that day drifts over that spot as does the memories of an eighteen-year-old me. This presence remains at the beach even when I'm back home in Wyoming. It may still be here when 68-year-old me and then (God willing) the 78-or 88-year-old me toddles down the beach, cane poking holes in the soft sand. When I'm gone, will the ethereal presence remain of the radio broadcast and the automobile and the young man and young woman, their thumping hearts and hopes and dreams? I like to think that beachgoers in 2069, parked in the same spot in their futuremobile, will pause their canoodling to listen to the voices of astronauts landing on Mars or orbiting Saturn. Maybe in the background they will hear a faded voice: "The Eagle has landed." 

That night, in The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse, I joined my family to watch Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The video feed was grainy but I could make out Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin cavorting on the lunar surface. We watched on a TV that struggled to pull in signals via antennae supplemented by a coat hanger and a broken channel changer replaced by vice grips. Nine kids are tough on TVs, even ancient ones that received but three channels. We no longer live there, haven't in a long time. My brothers and sisters and I carry around those memories. Fifty years ago, we were plotting our escape. Now, in quiet times, those memories swirl in our aging heads. They also exist somewhere in the house that almost burnt down in August of '69. We could have lost everyone but for the quick actions of my sister Molly. I was on a date and running late so I salvaged one of the cars, the other one burned to a cinder in the garage where the fire started. My memories would be vastly different as a lone survivor.

This all will be on my mind as I watch film of the July 16 launch and the July 20 walk on the moon and the July 24 splashdown.