No one is happier about Portland’s record December snowfall finally melting than our Irvington neighborhood Gnome. There was more than enough white stuff to fill his tree-trunk abode, so I’m assuming people kept his doorway sufficiently cleared so he could maintain his perpetual southeasterly gaze from our block. Read More
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A newspaper photo published this week shows a “Leave It to Beaver” family posing next to a Christmas tree in 1956. The family includes a boy holding his new shotgun.
Except for his well-coiffed hair and fancy bathrobe, the boy reminds me of what I might have looked like six years later when I turned twelve. I held a gun that Christmas morning but not a shotgun or the .22 rifle I desperately wanted. My father didn’t like guns, so the compromise gift was something smaller and far less dangerous. I hid my disappointment and was eager to shoot my new BB gun. Read More
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A tooth that played a key role in chewing more than 49,000 meals and countless snacks died today in Portland. The veteran molar was 45 years old.
The death of Tooth 31 came after three weeks of intense medical treatment, including two root canals, antibiotics, and x-rays. “We did everything we could,” said a specialist called in to save the tooth. “Sometimes there’s no choice but to pull them.” Read More
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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 swore a lot, was intensely curious about their love lives, and freely dispensed advice on how to attract girls. By the time we were seniors, she let us throw back a beer or two. Better than driving around town and drinking, she’d say. Read More
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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 containing exhibits I don’t recognize. I choked up a bit at the first glimpse of the living room, a room I haven’t seen since 1970, the year my family moved out while I was away at college. But my notion that I’d be sent hurtling back and experience wave after wave of bittersweet nostalgia isn’t materializing. Read More
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It took more than a half-century, but I finally learned why we ended up living on a lake in Central Florida during my childhood. Not one house but three as we moved clockwise around Lake Sybelia in Maitland from the late 1950s to 1970. Read More
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Two dogs and water. Enough to bring to mind my dogs, not in a Portland fountain but following me forever ago as I race off a boathouse roof. A kid leaping toward a Florida lake below, the dogs airborne too. Read More
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Big news about the definitive confirmation of water’s presence on Mars dispatches my mind not to the Red Planet but back in time. Back to a dark hole at the edge of a Florida orange grove.
When we were kids growing up in Maitland, my two brothers and I dug down five feet through the sandy soil. It was behind a hedge in back of our house. We put plywood over the hole, left a small opening beneath the hedge as a door, and covered the plywood with dirt. Instant underground fort. Read More
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I’m stealing a memory. It belongs to my youngest brother.
The memory is about Gertrude, a row boat that Bill found submerged in our lake in Florida when we were kids. He and a friend somehow hauled her to shore, patched a hole in the bottom, and retrofitted her into a floating fort. Read More
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Portland is dog crazy. Walk a dog through neighborhoods like mine (Irvington) and you’ll get more oohs and ahs from passersby than if pushing a cute baby in a stroller. The city reportedly has the country’s highest per capita of canines.
Like many of their owners, some Portland dogs display individuality via bodily adornments. Take Olive’s new hairdo, a henna treatment that sets her apart from other standard poodles. She caught my eye today in the pooch procession past my home office. Read More
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A modest wish for a better world popped in my head Sunday during Portland’s six miles and six hours without cars event (photo slideshow here). I was taking a break on a bench at Arbor Lodge Park, enjoying the people streaming past, many with kids in tow, headed for food or hula-hoop lessons.
But I wasn’t relaxed: my bike, my wife’s, and our little boy’s bike trailer were parked against a tree behind me, sans locks. Paranoia from several bike thefts over the years was desecrating the event’s life-is-great vibe. Then my wish came to me. Read More
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