Today is World Water Day, an event intended to draw attention to serious problems but for me evokes nostalgia. That’s what happens when a childhood is spent immersed in a Central Florida lake back when the water was clear and clean. Some days my brothers and I would swim so long that I imagined gills forming below our ears. We and our friends also spent much time in other waters, too: springs and swamps and ocean surf. With little effort, I can still feel the sensations, still smell the smells, of living in a world of tropical waters.
These photos from The Big Picture tell a larger story about world’s water. They’re worth lingering over. My humble offering below (click to enlarge) from a family vacation on the Oregon Coast last summer, makes me want to drift away on the next outgoing tide.
In the 1980s, I tacked up a poster in my newspaper office. It promoted an exhibit at the Smithsonian: “Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s: Past Visions of the American Future,” which I never saw. The poster gripped me in ways I didn’t understand. Maybe it was the fanciful and futuristic scene from a world that never came to pass. Or my childhood love of Tom Swift books. Or the deeper idea that whatever we believe the future holds for us collectively and individually is always wildly wrong — except death.
Then the other day I stumbled upon a movie serial I had watched on TV as a kid, probably in the late 1950s. It had enthralled me like no other film. Made in 1935 and featuring Gene Autry in his first starring role, The Phantom Empire was a 12-episode science fiction western. A technologically advanced people from a sunken continent lived secretly 20,000 feet below the Earth’s surface. They watched the outside world via hidden cameras. When they ventured to the surface on horseback, they thundered into view through a camouflaged stone door in the side of a mountain. They had ray guns and robots, along with an aura of moral and intellectual superiority. Read More
Few blog posts for many months means I’ve been crushed with work. But that’s a good thing in these trying economic times. The heaviest load has come from serving as guest curator for a just-opened exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, called “Tall in the Saddle, the Pendleton Round-Up at 100.”
In May 2009, I began tracking down artifacts and other items for the 3,000-square-foot exhibit. What I thought would be the most challenging part of the project — persuading people and organizations to loan roughly 500 things — proved to be the easiest. The most gratifying part was meeting so many people who were so eager to help. The most difficult was crafting the story for a medium that was foreign to me. Read More
News that Farrah Fawcett died this week at age sixty-two conjured a memory. I was a young reporter in Thomasville, Georgia. It was 1975 or thereabouts. I wrote a story about a boy afflicted with a terminal disease, a boy whose only source of joy was his obsession with Charlie’s Angels. Read More
In 1978, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Melbourne, Florida, I covered a protest march by a few dozen Iranian students. Carrying placards and shouting slogans, faces flush with anger, they looked as if they had wandered onto the wrong movie set.
I didn’t know much about the target of their rage: the Shah of Iran and his hated secret police, SAVAK. Passing motorists gave the group confused looks. Nobody was paying attention to the unrest in Iran, of which these Florida Institute of Technology students were a distant part. Nobody could have guessed that the rich and powerful Shah would be overthrown the next year, or two years after that, in 1981, Islamist revolutionaries would seize fifty-two American hostages, ensnaring the United States for decades.
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When I was in college, my roommate and I often drove back roads deep into the Georgia woods. The roads would narrow to little more than rocky rutted paths. With no idea of our whereabouts and not caring, we’d then walk until the forest enveloped us. It was aimlessness with purpose, a meandering quest for serendipity. I miss it. Read More
Showing my age, I remember when teenagers called AM radio stations at night to dedicate songs to girls or boys they liked. The lyrics communicated things they couldn’t say face to face. In junior high school, I was one of the them.
Sometimes we masked our identity but made clear whom the song was intended. Or we identified ourselves and left people guessing about the recipient. If we were lucky, our dedications would air live rather than get read in the DJ’s hyper parlance. What was said would be the source of giggled chatter at school the next day. Read More
When my wife and I were dating, I went to her apartment. She greeted me with an enigmatic smile. Smelling faintly of perfume, she led me upstairs to the bedroom. On the floor was a chalk outline, like those drawn around a dead body at a crime scene. It was me, she said.
Today I remembered that moment and the insight it gave me into her macabre sense of humor. Triggering the memory was finding “The Great Slumber a.k.a. The Blood Puddle Pillow.” Read More
Reading about this descent into sexting hell reminds of simpler times. Never thought I’d get nostalgic for mooning, the worst offense involving nakedness from my school days.
One of my younger brothers was suspended for a week from junior high for flashing his bare butt at a girl during phys ed class. He claimed she had mouthed off. My mother, a secretary at the school, was mortified. Long after the transgression she kept carrying on about the “shame of it all.”
If there had been YouTube and cell phones with video cameras, I no doubt could watch the event all these decades later, along with the rest of the world. Then again some things are better consigned to imagination.
Never has apocalypse looked so beautiful. That was my first thought today upon seeing four photographs from a 1970 French nuclear test. Then I thought of my childhood and pilot friend, whose Army adventures included flying helicopters to a radiated and cratered South Pacific atoll to help repair what an atomic bomb had wrought.
Then came the flash of another high school classmate whose house in the 1960s had the only fully functioning backyard bomb shelter I ever saw. It was also the site of romantic encounters — none mine. Read More
When I say “album,” some young people look as if I’ve uttered a foreign word. Thus this headline touting the top 25 theme or concept albums caught my eye.
Cohesiveness in these works is lost in today’s random-shuffle world. My favorite (not that I’ve heard them all) is Sufjan Stevens‘ Illinoise. His “John Wayne Gacey, Jr.” makes me want to weep.
And surely someone has compiled another list of albums, albums forever linked to an experience, enshrining them in memory’s Hall of Fame. Read More
Growing up on a lake in Florida in the 1960s, I got to know the family next door. It took awhile, maybe because a vacant lot studded with orange trees separated our houses. Three generations under the same roof, they mainly spoke Italian, making them exotic curiosities. Read More
When I was a kid in the 1960s and lived in an old rented house (old by Florida standards — 1930s), I was convinced it had hidden spaces.
Off the living room was an alcove we called the library. One wall had a love seat and window looking out onto an orange grove. The other two walls had built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books. The books belonged to the original owner, who had died.
Many times I removed books and searched the wood behind them for a secret button or other devices. I was sure there was a way to reveal a mysterious room leading who knows where. This mania stemmed from watching mystery movies, including The Phantom Empire, and reading Hardy Boys books. Read More
