In Memoriam: Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

Rest In Poetry, Wendell Berry. He died Aug. 31 and
this is a bit late in coming. But I liked this image by
Theo the Catholic Worker. It says so much. 

A good time for historical novelists to get on holiday shopping lists

Research is the best part of writing a book such as my novel Zeppelins Over Denver. On second thought, the best part of writing a book is a reader buying it and saying: "I loved it." Even better is when  the book shows up in a New York Times reading list or another outlet putting you on "Ten Best Books for the Holidays!" or "Ten Best Historical Novels With Zeppelins." Experts tell me to get on holiday lists before the appearance of pumpkin lattes (oops -- too late).

A friend in Virginia read the book and said it should be a movie. I agreed, asked him if he knew any Hollywood Movers and/or Shakers. He said he knew a guy in Santa Barbara who worked on craft crew serving sandwiches and snacks to actors. That may be as close as I come to the silver screen.

Thus far, I've received three reviews on Amazon. Editors say that upping the algorithms increases your visibility. I went to Amazon's Alexa for Shopping and, feeling frisky and wearing shades to mask my identity, asked if there are actual zeppelins in this novel. Here's her/its/their reply: 

That's a great question! Unfortunately, my web search didn't turn up specific plot details about actual zeppelins appearing in Zeppelins Over Denver. Based on the 1919 setting, real zeppelins were very much part of the cultural moment — Germany had used them extensively in WWI for bombing raids, and they were still a symbol of both wonder and threat in the public imagination at that time. The title likely refers to that era of airship anxiety and fascination rather than a literal zeppelin flying over Denver — but it could well feature them as a plot element or symbol. Since you've purchased it multiple times, you may know better than I do! 

Snarky Alexa AI knows my buying habits! Yes, I have ordered a couple copies for friends and also to keep an eye on the layout that went astray in the first printing with Ingram Spark. It’s perfectly readable now, thanks to my publisher, The Ridgeway Press of Michigan. Feel free to look it up.

But all is well. From this point forward, I will order copies of my novel when someone goes to Venmo and replenishes my publishing account: @hummingbird-minds. I would also be pleased if you bought a copy from bookshop.org or via Resistance Books in Jacksonville. Yes, I admit I am in cahoots with Amazon and received last night at my darkened doorway a shipment of Biotene lozenges, Dude Wipes, and all-occasion greeting cards. I also am part of The Resistance (see the sidebar) and, if you care about Florida in particular and the USA in general, you should be too.

I am contemplating a Substack site. There are so many 'stackers out there that I could get lost in the shuffle. I found an old colleague's Substack and subscribed. The site belongs to Leslie Petrovski and it's called NAKEID. I had one heck of a time explaining the debit to my wife who keeps track of such things. Here's Leslie's description of her site:

A weekly newsletter about knitting, style, and ripening into a new life stage. The not-so-young one.

I liked Leslie's Sept. 6 cross-post by Lindsay Sword because it opened this way: "Someday I want to publish a novel." Lindsay goes on to say she wants to be a romance novelist. I will let her explain the tie-in between romance writing and fashion. You should read it. I have been in writing groups with successful romance writers and they all write better (and dress better) than I do.

Check out NAKEID. Support your favorite writers.

Find out how the Een Sisters got from Pomeroy, Ohio, to the pages of my book

Agnes McDermott (left) looks at you from Eden Park, Cincinnati, Sept. 22, 1913. Her sister, whom we called "Auntie," is beside her. This is the  look Grandma Agnes gave me when I wore my ballcap into her house or messed with the doilies on the armrests of her couch.

Three 1913 photos of Agnes and her sister in Eden Park. "Zeppelins Over Denver" rises in the background.

I am a big fan of the Writer's Guides written by the WPA's Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s.
Most attention has been paid to the state guides but some cities also got the same treatment.

I was researching the scribbled handwriting on photos of my grandmother, Agnes McDermott, taken of her and her sister in the city's Eden Park. The ink has faded but I could read "Cincinnati Ohio" but what I thought was Edeu Park was Eden Park (thanks Google), one of the city's oldest parks. Someone crossed out part of the date but I found Sept. 22, 1913 on the middle photo (see above). A search brought me the Cincinnati Guide, "compiled by workers in the Writers' Program of the Works Progress Administration in the State of Ohio." Pub date shows 1943 which isn't an oddity as some didn't make it to print during the Great Depression. 

My role as eldest in a large family led to my office becoming repository of family lore. I like being surrounded by family. Photos await sorting as do books and military medals and souvenirs such as Lieutenant Shay's gas mark and flare pistol from his service as a cavalry officer in The Great War. I write on his desk, where he wrote many MONY insurance policies and is wooden filing cabinet where they were stored. My sister Molly sent them to me as she sorted through a life in a two-story family home in Tallahassee to an apartment in Decatur, Ga. We also got her silverware including tiny little forks that I hand to friends and family when they ask for a fork which tickles me but doesn't always get a similar response. I am surrounded by books. Some are mine, others are from my father's presidential library which he divided among his five sons. I have books upon books from a life as a writer, reader, and literary arts administrator. Should one of Elon Musk's spaceships go awry at the Cape and wipe out Ormond Beach, nobody will know our history.

I write this because my grandmother with the steely gaze and her sister inspired characters in my historical novel. In "Zeppelins," they become the Een Sisters (Colleen, Pegeen, and Ireen) of Pomeroy, Ohio. Looking for adventure, the Eens get in their Model T and head West. Grandma and her sister and two friends did the very same thing in the year after the war. Grandma Agnes and sister stayed in Denver; their friends returned to Ohio. I often wondered what inspired the trip. Agnes was nearing age 30 and her sister was older. She had been postmistress in Mason, Ohio, in the years before the war.  They drove mostly unpaved roads to Colorado. We have photos of the Ohio women and their Model T in the Rocky Mountains. Agnes met Martin, married, and had three strapping children, the middle one was my mother. 

The Een Sisters play a pivotal role in my book. Check it out. They appear in Chapter 10: Road Trip: The Een Sisters of Pomeroy, Ohio. Here's how it begins:

When the EEN sisters -- Colleen, Pegeen, and Ireen McCarthy -- decided to drive from Pomeroy, Ohio, to the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1919, their adoptive parents were aghast. 

"You'll be attacked by highwaymen," said Uncle Mike. He and Aunt Sara had looked after them since their parents died in The Great Ohio River Flood of 1910.

"But Uncle Mike," said Colleen, who often served as the mouthpiece for the girls as she was the eldest, "there are no highwaymen in Ohio."

"Indians, then," said Aunt Sara. "On the prairies of the Wild West."

Pegeen, the middle sister, laughed. "The Indians are on reservations -- or dead from smallpox."

"Smallpox!" Aunt Sara put her hands to her mouth. "Disease, too?"

Ireen, the youngest, barely nine months behind Pegeen, said, "Diseases have all been wiped out. Except for the Spanish flu, of course."

Aunt Sara made the sign of the cross. "Blessed be. We're all thankful to be here."

Hit the link on the sidebar to find out what happens. You can order an ebook at Barnes&Noble.

I read my book for the first time

After a brisk PT workout and breakfast, I picked up a copy of “Zeppelins Over Denver” and read the first two chapters. That wouldn’t be big news because I imagined and wrote this historical novel. I’ve read, revised, and proof-read every word. It begins this way:

Patrick Michael Hott pulled his cap down on his forehead and slumped into the seat on the east side of the southbound train.

It goes on like that for another 403 bound pages. It’s a good story, even great at times, or so I’d like to think. Today’s reading is new in one way: it’s the first time I’ve read the actual softcover book published by The Ridgeway Press of Michigan and assembled at Ingram/Spark. I wrote the text, read it a dozen times at least. During the past year, as the manuscript went from proposal to acceptance and publishing, I was reading it on my PC in large type on a high-contrast screen. To read the printed page, I had to print it in 18-point Times Roman boldface. My sporty little printer had its hands full.

Cataracts muddied my sight. Everything looked fuzzy. I got prescription glasses but still couldn’t read typescript on the page. Early in the year, my ophthalmologist suggested cataract surgery. I ignored his advice. The book came out in May and I looked at the opening pages, beheld the muddy gray type, and sighed.

I went back for my next eye appointment and the doctor said the same thing. So I signed on, paid the hefty bill, and last week underwent surgery on the first eye, the second session set for Sept. 10.

This morning, I read the first two chapters in book form for the first time. I can see. My eyesight has improved on the left side, improved enough to put away my prescription eyeglasses and pick up the readers I bought off a Publix rack a year ago. I can remove the readers and see the 12-point TR type well enough to read it.

This is miraculous. Angels sang when I picked up my book and read. The type, which mysteriously turned gray during the past year, is now black on the page. Readable. Enjoyable. I look forward to my next visit to the ophthalmology surgical theatre, the surgeon hidden by drapes, the only thing in my eyesight are two tiny lights, my body numbed with chemicals. I know what he’s doing because I saw the video. Microsurgery with tiny tools. Old lens broken up, removed, and new lens inserted. I’ll spend the next day numbed and a bit sleepy, pirate patch over my eye. And the drops, the constant eye drops.

And then I will get back to reading my book. I may not read much further – I know how it ends. But you don’t. Buy it and find out.

What does a small-town Florida firehouse have to do with a two-story Wyoming outhouse?

On Tuesday, Aug. 18, I voted and got a history lesson. Can’t beat that, especially if you’re a writer and a curious human being which is sort of the same thing.

This wasn’t my first Florida vote. 

I voted by mail from Ormond-by-the-Sea prior to that dreary November day in 2024. 

Trump and SCOTUS are now working overtime to halt mail-in voting. So I ventured to the polls in Flagler County for the 2026 primaries.

At 18, I was not eligible to vote in the 1968 Florida elections. The voting age was still 21.

The 26th Amendment fixed that. It became law on July 1, 1971. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote."

So, in 1972, I was 21 and old enough to vote under old rules and new. I voted in a tiny church on Boston's Beacon Hill. I voted for the man from South Dakota, George McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot and fierce antiwar candidate. I put McGovern over the top in Massachusetts. Alas, Massachusetts is not the center of the universe. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" ruled the day.

I heard the news while working graveyard shift at Shriners' Children's Hospital. Physician from Mass General came on rounds and said. "Nixon won! You hippies are in for it now!" Not sure who he was addressing. Couldn't be me -- I wore a wig to work.

Fifty years ago, when I was a UF student a month away from graduation, I cycled over to my polling place in Gainesville and cast a vote for Jimmy Carter. Chip Carter had come to town and dropped in to rap with the Alligator staff. The Allman Brothers supported Carter and so did Hunter S. Thompson so that was enough for me.

In 1978, I moved to the West and voted there for 46 years.

Now I’m back.

My 2026 polling place was listed as the Korona Fire Station on U.S. 1. I remembered the town of Korona as a blip on the road from Ormond to Bunnell. Its firehouse was a tiny station that you get to before you hit the town. The Flagler County supervisor of elections sent us flyers reminding us that the station was “permanently closed” for firefighting purposes but will be open for voting. My first instinct was the curse the GOPers in charge of Florida for shutting down both fire stations and polling places. I’ve been so depressed since Trump’s 2024 win that I blame first, and then check it out. I’ll have to work on that.

I documented our voting experience in my Aug. 19 post. It was very pleasant. I looked up Korona on Wikipedia (Hey Wiki – I’m wearing my [edit] T-shirt!). It directed me to the Flagler County Historical Society where I looked up their info on Korona. Its history was written by the Sisco Deen, late of Korona. The historical research library at the museum is named for him. I e-mailed the society and thanked them for the info and they emailed back. Here’s some of what they sent me:

So glad to hear from you and your interest in Korona. The town was indeed the first planned Polish settlement in the State of Florida. St. Johns County Commissioner Isaac Moody purchased 40,000 acres in the area of what is now Bunnell in 1906 and hired marketer Thomas Verdenius from Chicago to sell city houses and farmsteads to people in Chicago. Verdenius had all of his marketing information translated into Polish and sent into a community of Polish immigrants outside of Chicago who had been farmers in Europe. In 1913 the first wave came down to investigate. In 1914 the first group moved down. They built St. Mary's Church in 1914 - the church still stands today. For the past month we have been speaking with descendants of the original Polish settlers to expand our knowledge base of the community.

This is like a gold nugget to writers who incorporate history in their work. The first planned Polish settlement in the State of Florida? Wow! What did those newly-arrived Poles, living in smoggy and crowded Chicago, think of muggy and buggy Florida? Some returned immediately to Illinois, some tried it out and then returned, and some stayed. The ones that toughed it out built a church which still stands today, according to Ed Siarkowicz, president of the Flagler County Historical Society. I plan on visiting the museum in the near future. 

So what is a fiction writer to make of this? First, my always practical wife Chris asked, “So where will they build the new fire station?” The question rolling around in my mind was this: “What would a young Polish kid, one who knew a dozen English words, make of this swampy, bug-infested place?” Some rich writing material there. I also had to wonder what Poles settling in 1914 Florida might think of the Great War about to erupt all around their old homes overseas. If the young immigrant was anywhere near conscription age, he would thank his lucky stars. He might end up fighting in the U.S. Army but his homeland would not be under assault. And should that boy grow up and have his own family, his sons might be in the U.S. Army fighting Nazis who were murdering every Pole in sight and then, later, the Russians arrived to continue the killing. He might have relatives in the Warsaw Ghetto. He might have relatives who were Nazi or Commie sympathizers. Maybe they would return to their homeland to see the first Polish-born pope or get to see firebrand Lech Walesa in action.

I will keep all that in mind when I visit the Historical Society, 204 E. Moody Boulevard in Bunnell. It’s open for walk-ins on Wednesdays, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. You can also schedule an appointment. Mr. Siarkowicz supplied me with plenty of accessibility info and I thank him for that. I love these community museums. Such care is taken to preserve the past and usually funding is scarce.

During my arts and humanities stint in Wyoming, I worked with many of these organizations. You find oddities, like the two-story outhouse in the Grand Encampment Museum in Carbon County. Two-story? The volunteer docent in Encampoment may ask you if you know anything about winter snow totals in the Sierra Madre Mountains? Then the answer will come to you.

You never know what inner fire you may ignite with a story from the past.

I say zeppelins, you say dirigibles

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

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

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

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

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

Voting is easy at the permanently closed Korona Fire Station

The Korona Fire Station has seen better days.

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

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

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

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

The interior is about the size of a two-car garage (or maybe one for two 1940s fire trucks). Election judges greeted us. They are paid, these good citizens, but not much. Trained, too. I served as one during many elections in Cheyenne, Wyo. I asked for electronic voting as I need the big screen to read tiny type. They showed me to my seat. I voted. I knew the candidates for the major offices. I was clueless about the local school board candidates. Are they right-wing loonies out to keep books from the minds of our youth? Or are they moderate GOPers or Democrats? I just took a stab at it.

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

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

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

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

Here’s this morning New York Times headline:

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

And this from Wyoming’s WyoFile:

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

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

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

Just who is the Batman in this old photo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baba, Unsinkable, 1915

Short creative nonfiction by Michael Shay        `

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

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

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

Grandpa boarded Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, so said the Anchor Line of Great Britain, flew the flag, built in Glasgow. 10,963 gross tons, 515 feet long, 62 feet wide. Top speed 17 knots. Two masts and two funnels, steel hull with four decks. Carried 1,700 passengers, 250 in first class, 450 in second class, and 1,000 with Grandfather in third class. Port of departure: Liverpool. Port of arrival: New York City. Arrived with all hands June 7, 1915. 

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

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

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

We are little more than clear of

the settling fore-end when the last

buoyant breath of Cameronia 

is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to

the debarking of the last man.

There is no further life in her. Evenly,

steadily, as we had seen her leave the

launching ways at Meadowside, she

goes down.

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

Loss of a Liner, 1917. Credit: 

"Merchantmen-at-Arms:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History holds many surprises, does it not?

Buy on Bookshop.org

On the banks of a meandering river in Colorado

Mike near the headwaters.

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

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

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

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

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

Watching The Longest Day with my wife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just a small slice of the Local Authors section

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

I am one of the latter. 

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

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

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

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

Buy "Zeppelins" on Bookshop.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the mood for a Bulgarian gardening book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ponder all of these things. And write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear is nothing to imitate.