Kith & Kin

Cindy and I celebrated our 40 th wedding anniversary (which was actually on December 17 of last year) by spending the first two-and-a-half weeks of 2024 in Florida. We started out in Key West and worked our way north, finishing in Orlando. It was a lot of fun and a very memorable trip! Since this is my blog and therefore I can do whatever I want , I’m going to post a few pictures and share vacation stories with you. So if you aren’t interested, you don’t have to continue reading. It’s your loss, though! 😊 Key Largo On our way to Key West, we stopped in Key Largo to meet a movie star: the original African Queen from the movie of the same name. Yes, this is the actual boat on which Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn had their adventures back in 1951. Bogart won his only Oscar for playing the irascible Charlie Allnut in the film. I was really excited to get to see her and even got to step on board when one of her captains showed up. If you want to read a harrowing and fre...

Early in the 1990s Cindy and I bought our first house. It was a homey little place that suited our growing family well. It was less than 1000 square feet, but it had a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and three bedrooms. I remember decorating the third bedroom in preparation for the arrival of our first baby girl. That was a new experience and a lot of fun! We lived, as we told everyone, “next to the farmers’ market on Rutherford.” The street was North Acres Drive, and it was shaped like a tennis racquet—one two-lane road that led both in and out with a loop of houses at the top. We lived in #2, the house you’re facing when you come to a stop at the top of the handle. As I cast my mind back over the few years we were there, I find a set of disjointed but mostly warm memories. . . . ·        One Father’s Day I came out of the bedroom and saw little Ben, probably three or four years old, eating his brown-sugar toast (cut up into bite-sized piec...

NOTE: The story below is very loosely based on actual events—so loosely, in fact, that if it tried to take a step forward, its pants would fall to the floor and it would tumble down a long concrete staircase. Therefore, I’ve turned it into a (mostly) fictional short story. ___________________________________________________________________________________ It is 3:30 pm. The park closes at 5:00. The sign says the queue length is 85 minutes. But I am determined. . . . Wendy and I are coming to the end of our day at Animal Kingdom. We are both 62. That’s a total of 124 years. As a result, we have difficulty navigating the place, even though we have a good, old-fashioned printed map. Me: “So are we in Africa or Asia?” Wendy: “I don’t know. Look for a sign.” Me: “What’s that one say?” Wendy: “‘Dim Sum and Den Sum.’” Me, after a pause: “Ohhh-kayyy, is that supposed to communicate anything?” Wendy: “I think they sell shoes. Let’s look at the map.” We do so, and then...

It ’ s December 1, 2023, and my brother Eric reminded me this morning that Mom would have turned 86 today were she still with us. Home at lunch by myself, I looked at an old picture of her, taken before I was born. She is young and slim and attractive; she ’ s pinning on a corsage, and she looks very happy. I looked at the photo and thought about Mom long enough for a painful lump of ice to form in my throat, melt, and come out my eyes. She was an amazing person—one in a million isn’t enough; she was one in a billion. Here are a few scattered memories of her that flutter around in my head from time to time. Days of Joy Mom knew how to raise boys. She knew what boys were like and how to handle them. She must have come by this naturally, because she wasn’t raised with boys—only her older sister. Maybe it wasn’t that she was a natural at “raising boys”; maybe it was just that she wasn’t going to let anybody buffalo her, be it a screaming three-year-old or a disrespectful teen. B...