Kith & Kin

Times Square. ( Creative Commons License , Terabass ) As Milton and I came up the subway steps into Times Square, my head seemed to whirl. It was my first time to New York City, and even though I was almost fifty years old, I was extremely excited. And coming out of that subway into the lights and sounds and smells and people and traffic, I was overwhelmed. I loved it. I was very grateful that Milton was with me on this business trip, because he had been to NYC a number of times before. When I told him, after observing the traffic madness, that I would never, ever drive in the city, he told me of the time when he was a teacher and had taken a group of students to one of the museums. Because he was the bus driver, the students and the other teachers had gone into the museum while Milton—long-suffering, patient Milton—had spent the afternoon circling the building in the bus because there was nowhere to park. Around and around and around in that horrible traffic for hours. I said...

Cindy and I spent the week of September 10 through 17 in San Francisco, visiting Caleb and JR. It was a GREAT vacation — so many beautiful places. I ’ ll probably be saying more about it in future posts. I always said if I ever got out there, I would visit as many of the sites where Hitchcock filmed his 1958 classic,  Vertigo ,   as possible — one of my all-time favorite movies (second only to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — but I digress). I succeeded at that goal, thanks to my family’s patience in running from one obscure location to another. These places may not mean much to you, but they mean a lot to me and it was SO MUCH FUN for me to see them! Photos below compare the locations as shown in the movie (1958) with the way they look today. Brocklebank Apartments, 1000 Mason Street, Sept. 2022.  The Brocklebank was built in 1926 in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco, and it remains a high-end and sought-after location today. In fact, none of its 50 apartments...

 

 

It was September of 1980. Mom and Dad had brought me down from Ohio to South Carolina to start college, and once again Dad was getting on my nerves. A lot of things that Dad did irritated me. His staunch standards and inflexible beliefs. The way he made us boys work on our property whether we wanted to or not. (Oh, those dreaded words on a Friday night: “We’re going to drag some brush tomorrow, boys.”) Even the way he came into my bedroom every Sunday morning at eight and put his hand gently in the middle of my back and said, “Time to get up.” And now here I was, eighteen years old and more than ready to be on my own, free from the responsibilities and frustrations of home, and he seemed determined to get on my nerves one more time. Anyone who’s lived in the dorms (nowadays “residence halls”) at a university knows the importance of arriving early each semester to claim your storage space and bunk. I had arrived after only one other roommate had arrived, so the pickings were still prett...