Some photos haunt me. None more than this one. It was taken behind our house in Nashua, New Hampshire, circa August 1958, seven months before our family moved to Florida. My two brothers and I posed for our mother, and judging from our expressions, we hadn’t yet reached the stage of reflexive smart-ass resistance to [...]
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Nearly a decade ago, a sudden medical problem made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. What had I done to deserve the infamy of croaking in Costco?
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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, [...]
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