Think of Florida, and sprawling tourist venues like Walt Disney World spring to mind. But there was a time when Disney and its imitators didn’t exist, a time when quirky mom-and-pop tourist attractions dotted out-of-the-way places. One of them rose today from the recesses of my long-ago life. Maybe I thought of Dog Land because […]
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My forty-year high school reunion in September didn’t make me feel old. In fact, I felt young again surrounded by my long-lost friends. It’s always that way when I’m with my two brothers. In a way, we never age no matter how many lies the mirror tells and how far our attitudes diverge. How could […]
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My fascination with boxing began as a boy. Never the fighting type, I liked the drama. But as youth passed I no longer cared. Many years later, I missed the rise of the cable-TV phenomenon Ultimate Fighting. Then in 2003, a Willamette Week ad touted a night of brawling. I attended to fulfill a graduate […]
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Selective memory erasure, coming to a doctor’s office near you! Such a treatment option appears inevitable based on accelerating medical research into how to manipulate what we remember. Imagine the possibilities: even in my fifties, as age slowly blunts the pain of life’s low-lights, I could enjoy not remembering anything about events I choose. Who […]
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I’ve written recently about finding a long-lost friend in an unlikely way, via his son’s photo on a Facebook page. Now comes word that the son — singer, songwriter, and aspiring actor — will soon release his first CD. His father and I have exchanged emails since making contact in September and pledged to meet […]
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They say that after death people live on in others’ dreams. But I rarely dream about my mother, dead for five years. I much prefer how she materialized last month at my forty-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Florida. Several friends told me how much they liked my mother. Who could blame them? She […]
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I’ve made it halfway through a movie that uses my childhood home on a Central Florida lake as a main setting. One of my brother’s bought the DVD after I learned of the film and wrote about it. So far it’s like glancing around a museum I visited a long time ago, a familiar building […]
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Thirteen years ago, a mountain lion looked at me. I still see clearly its long sleek body, two hundred yards away on a bare hilltop. Suzame and I were hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore in California and had reached the highest point, Mt. Wittenberg. At first I thought the mountain lion was a big […]
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I have a high school friend named Jim. I haven’t seen him in nearly four decades. In fact, none of our other friends have seen him in years. This protracted absence gives Jim a leg up on the rest of us: he’s frozen in our minds as he was back then, young and good-natured and […]
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In late August I was three thousand miles from my Portland home, back in the Orlando area where I grew up, left, and returned to work for seventeen years. My wife and I were enjoying a notable meal at a new restaurant in Winter Park, The Ravenous Pig. I heard a familiar voice at a […]
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What will the boy remember of yesterday? Years hence, is Atticus, my son of three, doomed to never recall his first day at the new edge of his known world, the Pacific Coast? As I watched him run toward and away from tiny advancing and retreating waves, I realized how fleeting the moment probably was. […]
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I’m living vicariously through two high school friends since spending time with them last week in Florida. Charlie and Danny are civilian pilots who fly extraordinary jets, sometimes to exotic and far-flung places. We had less ambitious expeditions in school, including one I’ve written about before. And on Friday, Charlie and I reminisced during a […]
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A few years ago I wrote a lousy short story. The main character, based loosely on me, carried a burden of regret for wrongs committed in his youth. Although decades had passed, he decided to make amends and began a quest for redemption. Yes, the premise was cliched. But I was writing based on personal […]
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