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.

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.

Finding a home for Grant’s tome

I’m having a hard time deciding which books to keep and which ones to give away. Why this comprehensive shelf-cleaning now? Is it time for the retirement home and everything must go because the young ones are not interested in any of our treasures? Not exactly. Chris and I are moving and selling our house. It is filled with 18 years of accumulating. I have bought and traded for many books in this time. I would put the count in the hundreds but Chris puts it in the thousands because that’s what it seems like to her.

Some might say I have book clutter. Chris is a reader (she just finished the second Abraham Verghese novel which is even longer than the first). So books are not the problem but their arrangement in the household is up for debate. I have swept clean three bookshelves, keeping only those volumes dear to me. We have moved out most of the bookshelves so the books have nowhere to go except out. Hey, I’m doing my best..

The other day, I filled a plastic bin with the section of the presidential library my father willed me in 2002. In the bin behind me, I see titles about JFK (“One Brief Shining Moment” by William Manchester, FDR (“Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War” by Eric Larrabee, and USG (“Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: Volume 1”) with Ulysses S. Grant holding the 1885 copyright and published by the Press of J.J. Little & Co., NY, NY. I also have the trade paperback on Grant’s memoirs (volumes 1 and 2) printed in 1952 by Da Capo Press. 

Buried among these was my slim paperback “JFK: Boyhood to the White House” (Crest Publishing, 50 cents). JFK and this book meant a lot to me. I was 10 at his inauguration and 12 almost 13 when he was assassinated. I had a tween crush on JFK and the whole Kennedy clan. It’s still sad to remember those times.

I am taking the presidents with me. It’s a darn heavy bin because nobody writes a slim biography of a U.S. president. Most are hardcovers which weigh in heavier than paperbacks. It will take a strong back or someone with a hand truck to carry this to our moving trailer. I estimate I will have ten of these monsters to take with me cross-country. My son will drive and I will be on one of those flying machines, you know, the ones with the extremely comfortable and spacious seats. 

I love to fly.

In Florida, I will reveal my presidential cache to family members with the hope they will put them on their shelves because I won’t have room in my new place. They are a legacy, after all, and deserve a place of honor and it will be up to my siblings’ children or grandchildren to decide where they go next. That’s the plan anyway.

We Young, at Hospital

We young orderlies, CNAs, techs, nurses fresh from graduation. Voices blared from loudspeakers: code blue ortho, code red ER, code pink nursery. We razzed each other, lunched on cafeteria burgers, one fragment of attention listening for our color, our next emergency. The call came. Chairs abandoned, lunches half-eaten. We reveled in the action. Legs flexed in sprint, adrenaline pumped. We ran the corridors, took the steps two at a time, spurned the vators those were for old people like the ones in trauma. We aged as we ran, furrows formed on faces, arms and legs, brains. By the time we reached the coded sites, we were the elders in crisis who needed rescue by the summoned helpers, who ran to us, strangers who helped strangers. They ran, abandoned lunches, wondered will I ever stop running?  It awaits you around the next corner.

To the barricades – patiently, part one

Antiwar protests on college campuses are in the news and it’s no longer 1970. In the spring of 2024, young people are objecting to Israel’s handling of the war and the ensuing mass casualties. They also are upset that their universities may be funding Israel’s excesses through investments and other business ties. There are also protests by those who support Israel objecting to a 19-year-old getting involved in politics and saying bad things about Israel. It’s as ridiculous to say that criticism of Israel is antisemitic as its is if you decry Hamas you are Islamophobic.

You don’t have to know every single thing about this war to go out on the streets and check it out. Young people gather for events all of the time. It’s exciting. Their friends are there. The police look amazing in their U.S. Army castoff riot gear and their giant riot trucks once used to quell disturbances in Fallujah. That’s a lot of adrenaline surging through demonstrators’ bodies and things happen. Still, most protestors have been peaceful. I cannot say the same thing about NYC and Boston cops.  

I am a Baby Boomer who saw his first antiwar protest in the spring of 1970. I was a ROTC midshipman and I went to the demo instead of the annual Navy Ball. My dorm friends were going outfitted with gas masks and scarves to take the sting out of tear gas and pepper gas. I went with them to campus where all the action was going to be. Tear gas flew and the S.C. state cops rushed the demonstrators applying their batons to longhair’s heads.

We fled into the dorm complex and ended up in a restroom being used as a first aid station. Men and women were jammed in and those with even a tiny bit of first aid experience helped administer to those with cracked skulls, eyes blinded by gas, and asthmatics struggling to breathe. One guy had been a medic in Vietnam this time the year before. Others like me had been Boy Scouts and knew enough first aid to patch broken scalps.

An ambulance arrived outside and I was drafted (Hah – drafted) to pick up the wounded in makeshift stretchers and carry them outside. One was my buddy Pat who’d sliced off the top of his index finger when picking up a broken bottle to throw at the cops. Yes, there were young people on this night of nonviolent protest who threw broken bottles at cops and picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back.

We were demonstrators once, and young.

End of part one

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. 

We were readers once, and young

Chris, Annie, and I took in “Dune 2” at the Capitol City Digital Cinemas LUXX Studio Theater. It’s new. Not quite as fancy as the ARQ Theater and a step up from one of the boring standard spaces. We sat in handicapped seating in the second row. There’s a first row but you have to recline and bend your neck to take it all in. The place wasn’t packed although there was a chatterbox who sat a few rows behind us. We took him out with one of those wicked Fremen bazookas. I enjoyed the movie, thankful that the story moved along quickly and I didn’t notice the passing of 180 minutes. Long movies used to have an intermission. That’s gone the way of Ben Hur’s chariot. I plan to write a nasty letter to someone about this.

In my youth (early 1970s), I was a Frank Herbert fan and read “Dune” and “Dune Messiah.” Many of my friends read the books. We were readers, absorbing Vonnegut, Heller, and Tolkien, even Heinlein. My roommate was a former outlaw biker from Milwaukee who had to leave his hometown for some reason he didn’t want to share. My landlord was a friend who lived next door in a matching concrete block house. He worked in construction. His roomie was my brother who also worked construction – there was a lot of it in Daytona Beach those days – and he eventually got fed up with banging nails and joined the USAF. I worked as an orderly in the county hospital by night and attended community college by day. We all were readers and enjoyed talking about books over beer and weed. On weekends, we were in and on the water.

“Lord of the Rings” was probably the favorite. Fantasy and adventure, cool characters like the Ents, Orcs, and Gandalf. We really had no sense that Mordor was created from Tolkien’s war memories. We knew about the war origins of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” because he writes about it in the introduction. War had been on our minds quite a lot those days. I had not yet read the great novels by Vietnam vets as they didn’t yet exist. I had no concept of what war could do to the psyche. Tolkien fought in the far-off Great War and Vonnegut (and my father) were in the now-ancient war against totalitarianism. Those battles may loom large as this election season approaches.

“Dune” was a favorite because of the turmoil of Paul Atreides and the giant sandworms of Arrakis. That was the part of “Dune 2” that thrilled me and I could watch again. The Fremen and Paul ride the sandworms! Amazing special effects. Our seats shook. This was also my favorite part of the novel, Paul and the Sandworms. Herbert did a great job creating them and Denis Villenueve and crew recreated them wonderfully. These characters and creatures invented by writers and recreated on the screen became a part of us, a part of me.

One other result of all of this reading. We were steeped in satiric humor and (I haven’t yet mentioned “Catch-22”) the ridiculousness of being human. Billy Pilgrim reacts (or he doesn’t) as he time travels through absurdity. Yossarian does everything he can to cheat death. He is flummoxed at every turn. Paddling in a small boat from a small island in the Med to neutral Sweden may seem crazy until Yossarian finds out his tentmate Orr has accomplished it. He ridicules Orr throughout, wants to bonk him on the head for his endless fiddling with the tent stove and his absurd stories. He won’t fly with Orr because he crashes all the time. Turns out, that was Orr’s way of practicing for his desertion. Yossarian runs away in the book and sets out on a tiny dinghy in the movie. I thought it was unfortunate that in the last episode of Hulu’s “Catch-22,” Yossarian flies off on yet-another mission in a B-25.

I really liked “Masters of the Air.” I did wonder in one episode what Yossarian might make of the Bloody Hundredth. On one mission to Munster, only one of the unit’s planes makes it back to base. Earlier, we see others on fire and many airmen in their chutes trying to escape. The novel’s Yossarian spends three years in combat on 55 missions. His commanding officers want to make pilots fly 80 missions which means Yossarian may never get home. He runs.

Flying 80 combat missions may seem outrageous. Rosie in “Masters” flies his 25 missions and is cleared to go home. He tells his C.O. he will stay on to lend his experience to the new, untested pilots. The C.O. then tells him that the men will have to fly more missions and keep flying. They will be targets, a lure to bring up the Luftwaffe to get shot down by our swift long-range fighter planes like the  P-51 Mustang. The C.O. says something like “we plan to sweep the Luftwaffe from the skies for the coming invasion.” Rosie flies 52 missions and survives.

They were brave and many died. It does remind me of Yossarian’s observation: “The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

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."

When you see glowing footprints on the night beach, it means I was there

When I moved away from Daytona Beach, Florida, the beachside still had sand dunes and you could drive the entire World's Most Famous Beach. I drove the packed sand many times. At night, I drove and then parked between high-tide-line and dunes to discuss the state of the world and Catholic doctrine with my girlfriend. Sometimes, the whitewater was lit up with a bioluminescence provided by nature. Sometimes I was the one who was lit up.

The Florida I loved has become joke fodder for late-night comedians. I will give you this: the governor is a joke as are his right-wing minions in the legislature. 

I've been reading interviews with people who have moved to Florida from other places. They are asked whether they are fine with the decision or regret the choice. Some love the Florida they discovered during a family vacation and vowed to return for some old people fun in retirement. Some have had it up to here with the likes of killer hurricanes, retiree-chomping alligators, and nitwit politicians. They are decamping to other warm-weather beachside communities in the Redneck Riviera, Texas, or the Carolinas, both the North one and the real one in the South. 

I just read an online article on Max My Money with this header: “Boomers – Florida Doesn’t Want You” 10 Places In Florida Where You Won’t Survive On Social Security. Gosh, it’s tough the be unwanted. These 10 snobbish Florida locales include Miami, Naples, Palm Beach, and Sarasota, none of which have surf. I grew up surfing in Florida and that's how we graded the livability of any place. Key West is on the list. It also has no surf but it does have Hemingway’s house and Tom McGuane used to hang out there when writing “92 in the Shade.” In 1982, Christine and I honeymooned in the Conch Republic following our May wedding at St. Brendan the Navigator Catholic Church and the Ormond Beach Knights of Columbus Hall. In Key West, we drank at Sloppy Joe’s, counted the toes on Hem’s cats, snorkeled offshore. Tourists! 

My Florida is a large triangle from Daytona to Gainesville to Orlando and back to Daytona. That’s the Florida I know best. When this Baby Boomer retired from my 25-year career with the Wyoming Arts Council, Chris and I looked at retiring in Florida. Too expensive. Not enough choice in dwellings. Crackpot governor. We stayed put and watched from afar Florida’s human comedy.

My youthful encounters with Florida retirees were from a distance. We surfers gathered at Hartford Approach and watch them walk the beach. You could tell the long-termers by their leathery skin and hip bathing suits. Many were daily walkers, on the beach early like surfers. Better rested than most surfers, up until 2 a.m. and jolted out of bed at 6 a.m. by friends shouting through the window to get your ass up. We knew a lot of these old-timers, men and women both. New Yorkers under Yankee caps, Canadian accents. 

Then there were the sojourners in town for a weekend of a week or maybe the entire winter. They were in couples or groups, mostly kept to themselves. They yelled at us when we drifted out of the surfing area. 

Those seniors of the 1960s and 1970s are all gone now, every single one. Their footprints live on. You can see them glowing late at night on the beach. Their memories of what lured them to Florida.

Naomi Hirahara weaves a murder mystery into a 1940s historical novel and it's swell

Just when I think I’ve read every World War Two-era novel….

“Clark and Division” by Naomi Hirahara brings us into the life of Aki Ito. She’s a spirited young woman, smart and attractive and a bit self-conscious living in her talented older sister’s shadow. She yearns for just the right job and boyfriend, likes to hang around with friends, and knows how to dance the Lindy Hop.

So, she’s just like any other Southern California teen. But you add in the setting conjured by Hirahara and things get serious. Aki is Nisei, born in the U.S. of Japan-born parents. In 1942, her entire family is shipped to Manzanar internment camp, leaving behind their home and property and all-American dreams. Aki spends two years at Manzanar and, at 20, lucks out when selected for the government resettlement program which allows Nisei to move to middle America away from the coasts and start new lives. Aki chooses Chicago because that’s where her sister Rose has resettled. Before Aki and her parents can get off the train, her sister is dead, ostensibly by suicide. She allegedly jumped head-on into an El train and is killed instantly. Nobody knows why. Aki is crushed.

A great set-up for a mystery. Aki is still in shock when she discovers the secret behind Rose’s death and realizes she seems to be the only one interested in figuring out what really happened. She plods along at first but then discovers the strength to take the risks that will solve the case. Along the way, we meet the Nisei of the Clark and Division neighborhood. She has to hide her quest from her very traditional Issei parents. Along the way, we learn about Japanese-American lives, the foods they eat, their jobs, their dreams and fears. The most charming thing about this book are life’s daily details. Hirahara writes the Japanese terms for food, clothes, and many other things. I felt the crushing heat of a Chicago summer. I know how people got around in the city. Some especially good details about riding the El or Elevated Train. I got to see the workings of the famous Newberry Library. I know, the details of a library aren’t exactly high drama. But maybe they are. All this makes the book so down-to-earth and thrilling.

The ending is heartbreaking but also guides Aki into the future. And into the just-published sequel, “Evergreen.” In it, Aki has become a nurse’s aide and returns to southern California where she and other Japanese-Americans have to start from scratch – again. There’s also a murder, of course. While the book is listed under mystery, I’m sure it’s filled with the cultural and location detail that also makes for great historical fiction. Hirahara now has a series on her hands which she’s done before with her earlier books: Mas Arai and Leila Santiago. "Evergreen" is now the second book in the Japantown Series. I’ve ordered a copy. You should too.

Your stories will survive you -- write or record them while you still can

I was thinking about this today as I went through some tests at the local hospital.

I like the idea of a National Service Program for 18-21-year-olds. Not a military draft – that didn’t work so well – but a program that puts youth to work doing good deeds. As a college dropout, I found jobs in hospitals. I was called orderly and not nursing assistant or CAN. I was a guy wearing a white uniform that nurses and patients called on when they needed a strong body to perform various tasks: scoot a patient up in bed or turn a patient so a nurse could get at the malfunctioning part of the body, transport patients to X-rays, take temps and BP and fill water pitchers. 

This was Florida so listening to old folks was also a keen skill. Young folks aren’t so good at listening to old people. Too bad – therein those aging bodies are many great stories. So why not put youngsters to work listening to old people’s stories while they also help them get around. Welcome to the Corps of Willing Listeners! They’d get paid a decent wage to push wheelchairs and hear stories. 

If they want to write some of those stories down and turn them into novels, so much the better. Maybe some of them can be made into memoirs for the family, something to remember grandpa by when you see that old face in a photo but can’t really place him. “That was grandpa: he was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.” “There’s grandma: she raised 10 kids in a house without running water and an outhouse out back.” “There’s Uncle Jack – he was funny when he had a few drinks.” And so on.

Young people are energetic and smart and impatient. Old people tend to be tired and smart and patient and sometimes impatient because they know they are on the downward slide to the grave. I am 72 and that’s my reality. I love a good story but I can tell when the listener isn’t listening. Today a tech in his 20s took me to X-ray and took pictures of my chest. He saw my High Plains Arboretum vest and we talked gardening while the machines hummed. We talked about the difficulties of raising plants and veggies in our climate. I could tell he's had mixed results and I suggested he drop by the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens and ask some questions of the horticulturalists. 

Writing skills are a key element in storytelling. It's good to be able to tell a story on a blog or written on paper or told in a podcast or any of the myriad other ways we relate info. I have some writing skills so I can tell stories to those people in the future who see my e-photo online and wonder about me. Who is it? Why is he in the photo? What did he do for a living? Was he nice? Did he love someone and did someone love him? How did his kids turn out? I’ll leave behind some stories to inspire or bore to tears but I won’t care, will I? I will be stardust. I hope a few of my stories survive.

Don't get around much anymore, but plan to change that

My daughter Annie invited me to go on the Friday ArtWalk. I used to go every month when I worked at the Wyoming Arts Council. Then I retired and went less often. Then I hurt my spine and needed a walker to get around. Then came Covid and there was no ArtWalk. Then Covid was over and my wife Chris was diagnosed with breast cancer.

ArtWalk was taken over by Arts Cheyenne in 2022 after a ten-year run in the hands of local artist Georgia Rowswell. It's gone from the second Thursday of the month to a First Friday arts event. It includes visits to local galleries, such as Clay Paper Scissors and new arts venues such as the Cheyenne Creativity Center downtown. There's new art to see, lots to eat and drink, and music by local musicians.

I hadn’t been to a First Friday before Annie invited me. She’s an artist too, you see, and just getting involved in the local art scene. Since most of my professional life was spent as an arts administrator where I did a lot of arts stuff, Annie depends on me for insight into that world. I laugh inwardly, not wanting to think about all of the things I don’t know about the art world. I know just enough.

Last night I realized that my social skills are not as fine-tuned as when I regularly had to schmooze with artists, writers, gallery owners, politicians, just plain folks. I was quite adept at small talk and most of the time I was on hand as a professional from the state arts agency and people expected me to say something enlightening. I tried. More than once I had to say I didn’t have an answer and I would get back to them on it. And I did. That’s how I learned. OJT. There are people born as arts administrators, there are those who go to college for it, and there are those who learn through trial and error. I am in this latter category. While in grad school at Colorado State, I helped arrange readings by writers. I had attended quite a few as a fan and someone busily writing fiction while I tried to make a living in other ways. I had no real sense of what it took to put on a reading. I found out at CSU.

I also did my first try at administering the arts. One of my faculty mentors, Mary Crow, asked if I wanted to serve on the Fine Arts Series. I was trying to get to class, teach a couple sections of composition, workshop my own writing, and find way to spend time with my wife and young son. Naturally, I volunteered. The Fine Arts Series meetings were busy and congenial. Its members included undergraduates and graduate students. Also CSU staff including the director, Mims Harris. I stepped into a semester that featured music and dance performances, an annual poster art show, and literary events. I volunteered for the latter. Thus began my journey.

Last night, I felt detached from that world. Early in retirement, I made a choice to spend time with my own writing and not volunteer for arts events. And then all of those other things happened and I found myself out of the loop. There was a lot I really liked about the loop. Educating myself and meeting new people. I liked that. Paperwork? Not so much. Annie has had a few arts-related jobs and is learning. My son volunteers for the local theatre and he also is discovering the joys and sorrows of THE LIFE.

I plan on attending more ArtWalks, readings, book signings, and the annual Governor’s Arts Awards gala. I miss it. I continue writing – that’s a priority. But all work and no play make Mike a dull boy. My advice: stay in touch with your schmoozing self. It keeps you engaged and the mind working, a concern for anyone over 70 which is where I find myself. I could play Wordle or assemble 1,000-piece puzzles. That would sharpen my synapses. I could do any number of things in retirement. An Atlantic Magazine Online piece this week asked "Why so many people are unhappy in retirement." The subhead: "Too often, we imagine life to be like the hero's journey and leave out the crucial last step: letting go." I could only read the first graf before the paywell clicked in. But I got the gist. Nobody wants to let go. Our entire life is based on beingness. We are not equipped to grasp nothingness. So we rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Or we sulk. Or lurk on social media. Or watch Fox News all day and experience the sweet rush of having our brains sucked from our heads.

I will choose engagement. I feel alive then and can delay thoughts of letting go for just one more day.

Ballad for an old friend

Can you call someone a friend if you haven’t seen him in 40 years?

On Monday, I heard the news of the death of my old friend David. He suffered a stroke and was being transferred to rehab in Daytona Beach when his body gave out. The news came to me on a Facebook post from Dave’s sister in L.A. I was shocked. He is not one of the first to die in my high school class – Class of ’69. We’ve all hit 70 now and the inevitable cohort replacement grinds on every day.

The last photo I saw of David showed him holding an AK-47 which he was using for target practice out in the Florida woods. He had a gun hobby. He also was a dedicated fisherman. He once ran a popular bait shop in Daytona. He could talk your ear off about fishing and often did. We went to high school together and were roommates once on a little acreage we called The Farm. It was anything but a farm. It was an old house on Hull Road in rural Ormond Beach. The road was named after the family who built the house, one of the area’s first human residents besides Native Americans and the occasional Spanish explorer looking for the Fountain of Youth or cities of gold. Our high school, Father Lopez, was named for the priest who accompanied Pedro Menendez de Aviles when he landed in St. Augustine in 1565 to kill French Huguenots. Ponce de Leon had claimed Florida for Spain in 1513 during his fruitless search for youth, something, I guess, many Floridians search for.

Our little house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, a massive fireplace, and an outdoor shower. Our girlfriends hated that shower even though we assured them that nobody could see them as our property was surrounded by forest. Didn’t seem to make a difference. They would take baths in our big iron tub or wait until they returned to their respective civilized indoor showers. Picky, picky.

The property was owned by a group of physicians who had bought it for an investment. This place will someday be filled with houses, they contended, and we laughed about it when we got stoned on the weed stashed on the farm by a friend who swore us to secrecy. Years later, as time marched on, the land was bought by a developer and now is a thriving neighborhood called Tymber Creek. That’s timber with a y as in “some tymber was sacrificed to build these spacious homes.”

I have fond memories of a man who meant so much to me long ago. In 1971-72, David and I were college dropouts. The military draft passed us by. I worked days as a hospital orderly and David worked evenings as a cook at a pizza joint. He brought home the leftover pizza that became our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We could exist on pizza because we were 21 and always on the move.   

Our futures had already started. I wandered the property with our dogs, always alert for rattlers and coral snakes. At twilight, we stopped at an open field and watched the bullbats. As they dive for insects, they make a strange whooshing sound. I’d come back to the house to write, always writing. David was out casting for bass or snook on the Little Tomoka River, looking for something out there on the Florida waters. I hope he found it.  

Anything was possible then.

During the 1970s, I went back to school and then returned to the area many times as I looked for work and finally decided to light out for the western territories. That’s where I am today. Still writing.

David, may the fish be plentiful and feisty in the Beyond.

Happy graduation, Annie. You did it!

Annie Shay, happy graduate (LCCC photo)

Daughter Annie graduates from Laramie County Community College on Saturday.

We are so proud of her. It has been a long haul. She struggled with learning disabilities in elementary school. She was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was eight. During teen years, she struggled in school, the learning part and the socialization part. She began to depend on drugs and alcohol to get her through each day. She was bipolar and we sought help but nobody seemed to understand it. She spent months in treatment centers in Wyoming and Colorado. She was able to complete some of her school work but fell too far behind to graduate. She earned her G.E.D. and started school at LCCC. It was too soon. She decided to major in music and spent many hours rehearsing and singing with the school's choirs. She has a beautiful voice but is not so confident around colleagues and audiences. 

She dropped out and soon was off again to treatment centers, this time in California and Illinois and Utah and finally back to Colorado. The years passed. She was diagnosed with bipolar and personality disorder. Meds didn't seem to be the solution but she kept at it, finally underwent ECT at a hospital in Boulder. She improved and returned to Cheyenne to live with Chris and I and go back to school. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

That's one thing she always wanted -- an education. Through it all, she spoke of that often. She enrolled again at LCCC. She depended on the Help Center for guidance. She struggled at first. Nevertheless, she persisted. She passed her classes and discovered that she liked school, maybe for the first time. That's one thing that people don't always understand about community colleges. They allow all kinds of learners to get a second chance. May be you aren't ready at 18. Maybe you get married young and find out 20 years later that you want an education. Maybe you're a military veteran looking for new directions. 

I was a university dropout, a scholarship student at a big university who lost his way. I worked and traveled. Four years after graduating high school, I enrolled in the local community college and started in the fall of 1973. My classmates had already graduated from four-year universities and were negotiating adulthood. I felt a bit lost. But the classes I took were wonderful. Contemporary American Literature. Public Speaking. Art History. The teachers were terrific and somehow I was interested in each subject. At night, I worked as an orderly in the Substance Abuse Unit at the county hospital. The nurses locked me in with the alcoholics who had been scooped out of the gutters or arrested for raising a ruckus. This is where they came instead of jail. Many had been to jail. We played cards and smoked. They told tall tales, most of which were true, I suspect. I learned a lot. On quiet nights, I studied. On wild nights, we orderlies wrestled rowdy drunks. That was some year. By May, I had enough credits to graduate and returned to a four-year university where I graduated in two years. 

We all have our stories. Annie now has hers. She is very excited about graduating. So very excited. In mid-June, she moves to Laramie to start summer classes at UW.  She will be thirty-something by the time she graduates. She worries about that, wondering if she will fit in with younger students, make friends in the larger context of a university, be able to excel in upper division classes. Chris and I worry. Annie is an introvert with ongoing psychological issues. She likes her time alone but sometimes too much time alone is bad for her mental health. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

Happy graduation, Annie. Enjoy it all!

P.S.: Annie posted a blog today from her POV. Read "How I got here -- graduating from college class of 2022" at WyoGal. 

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.

Boring old college lecturer responds to "The Chair"

Watched the last episode of "The Chair" this week. I laughed, I cried. Various faculty and administrators and students pissed me off.  All in all, a good investment of six Netflix hours. 

I have never served time on a college faculty and I've been an adjunct at community colleges. I was an undergrad English major at one community college and a land-grant university in the Palm Tree South and a grad student at a land-grant university in the Rocky Mountain West. I never got within spitting distance of a small liberal arts college such as Pembroke. 

But Pembroke's people seemed familiar. As a grad student T.A., I experienced some of the same frustrations of Pembroke faculty, those f*cking f*cks referenced in The Chair's (F*cker In Charge) desk sign. Some faculty members were old and stuck in their ways. The Literature, Composition and ESL faculty didn't like creative writing faculty and vice versa. The administration was always targeting the English Department for cuts due to the fact that we all speak English so why in the f*cking f*ck do we need an English Department? Shouldn't it be the  'Merican Department since we all speak 'Merican here? 

All an MFA grad student could do was teach our two sections of comp, keep our heads down and write a lot. We had regular classes to attend on top of writing workshops. And, in my case and some others, I had a family to support. 

One of my favorite aspects of "The Chair" are insights into faculty's families. Dr. Ji-Joon Kim has a daughter who is as argumentative as faculty ("You're not my real mom"). Dobson's wife died and his only daughter went off to college. No matter he gets stoned before and after class, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Dr. Joan Hambling gave up her personal life and career advancement to prop of the fragile egos of male colleagues. She is working on a relationship with a college IT guy who is as much as a wise-ass as she is. Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban) chats with his wife before a college event and we find out that she gave up her academic career to raise three kids. "Someone had to cook dinner," she says as she urges her aging husband to wear his Depends.

My daughter, an English major, is watching "The Chair" but I don't think she's finished. After a couple episodes she was angry at the students, which I thought was interesting since she is a student and a Millennial. I was angry at the students too but possibly for a different reason. They didn't want to learn Chaucer and Melville? I fondly recall my red-haired prof at UF who taught us Chaucer in Middle English. She spoke it like a native and there were times I imagined her as The Wyf of Bathe. 

The Pembroke students just didn't want to learn it the old-fashioned boring Boomer lecture way. They liked the way Moby Dick was taught by Dr. Yaz, a Millennial who approached it in a new way. By the end of the final episode, I was depressed about the state of academia. No surprise -- I was a boring old lecturer and probably still am. Back in my day, etc., etc., and so on. 

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.

"Sing, Maria" gets to the heart of the story

Fast-forward to the 32-minute mark for True Troupe's staged reading for Annie Shay's script "Sing, Maria" based one one of my short stories.

"OK Boomer!" is a good retort. A better one might be "Go, Boomer, Go!"

OK Boomer!

It's a thing now, a quick retort by members of a younger generation when a Baby Boomer rambles on about the good ol' days and why youngsters are causing the USA to go to hell in a handbasket.

First question from a Millennial: What's a handbasket?

Baby Boomer: A basket carried by hand.

Millennial: We don't believe in hell.

Boomer: The hell you say.

We're always talking around one another. That may be the case until every last Boomer goes to his/her/its heavenly reward.

Millennial: We don't believe in heaven.

OK Millennial, what I'm actually pointing out is that the Baby Boomer Death Clock at Incendar shows that a Boomer dies every 18.2 seconds and that already today (as of 11:47 a.m. MST), 4,746 Boomers have died. As of right now, 64,914,430 Boomer are "still alive" and 20,443,571 are "dead." Percentage-wise, this is 23.9503896% of available Boomers. In the world of demographics, this is known as "cohort replacement."

A better Millennial chant might be: Go, Boomer, Go!

Meanwhile, we waste precious time in clashes with each other instead of concentrating on the real threat which, of course, is Donald Trump and Trumpism. We can find common ground here. I am a Boomer Liberal and many Millennials are liberal, much more liberal than their parents and grandparents. This is especially true if you are an urban dweller. Wyoming is much more rural than urban which partly explains Trump's continuing popularity. I live in the state's largest city, Cheyenne. But even here, I am an anomaly. Cheyenne is located on the cusp of blue-state Colorado, but it is almost as conservative as the rest of the state. County Democrats were devastated in the 2016 legislative races. MAGA hats are not everywhere but there are enough of them to make a Liberal pause before launching an anti-Trump tirade in public. Being a blowhard is a Trump thing. But liberals can be obnoxious, too. When I was part of a Democrat/Republican panel interviewed on radio the night of Obama's 2008 win, the radio host said the worst thing about Obama's election was having to listen to remarks from his liberal friends for the next four years. Eight years, as it turned out.

And then came Trump. His diehard fans haven't STFU since.

OK Millennials, listen up. I won't give advice to, or cast aspersions on, your generation if you do just one thing: get out and vote in 2020. If Millennials registered and voted for the Democrat a year from now, Trump would be history. I realize that I am an elder giving advice, and that it's appropriate to roll your eyes and then say "OK Boomer." I can handle that. What I can't handle is another four years of Trump.

Can you?