Cracked Window

How strange to stumble upon photos of my childhood house of the 1960s on a movie web site. I was searching Google images for a picture of Lake Sybelia in Maitland, Florida. Once a quaint hamlet of citrus trees and lakes, Maitland was long ago consumed by the tourist monster that ate Orlando. During my search, up popped the house — white columns, veranda, and canopy of live oaks — under siege by a phalanx of movie cameras and crew.

Interlopers! was my first thought, irrational given that my family rented the house and moved out thirty-eight years ago. Then the movie title tugged at me: The Way Back Home.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Nor am I prone to paranoia. But I also recognize that we rarely understand what’s happening around us.

Those caveats are an introduction to a story that should give everyone pause, no matter their politics. It’s received too little attention, perhaps because the idea seems so outlandish: the Bush administration has a plan for granting itself sweeping dictatorial powers in the event of a natural catastrophe or major terrorist attack. As part of the plan, a list of eight million people has been created, people who might be questioned by authorities or even rounded up and “detained.” (A once benign word, detained is now ominous and foreboding.)

Hyperbole was among my mother’s traits, especially when I was a kid. Before issuing a warning or threat regarding my behavior, she would foreshadow her pronouncement with squinted eyes, like a gunslinger telegraphing lethal intent. Then she might let loose with the cliché of clichés: “It will go on your permanent record!” I’d respond with a look of mock horror.

Mom, if you can hear me from the hereafter, I say this: you were right.

I’ve learned that a blot besmirches my permanent record, and anyone with a computer and Internet connection can see it. And Google is to blame!

I learned today that a high-school friend died over the weekend. I last saw Jeff Schofield nearly ten years ago at our thirty-year reunion in Florida. He was frail as a twig, victim of personal excesses that claim so many.

The news naturally conjured up memories of Winter Park High, class of 1968. I remembered parties at Jeff’s house, wild by our standards back then. But what came back more urgently was a trip he and I took our senior year.

We both were considering going to the University of Georgia or Mercer University and decided to take a road trip to check out the campuses.

A dreaded Sunday morning excursion: stocking up on household staples at Costco in outer Northeast Portland. Luckily, I only have to run this gantlet once every few months. Not sure I could take the crowded aisles and old ladies peddling samples of bad food any more often.

What eases my disorientation and general disgust with commercial excess isn’t the $15.25 in coupon savings. It’s what I see on the way home. Call them diversions. Perhaps they wouldn’t have registered at all had my errand been different or my mind occupied with something pressing. But what I see stays with me:

First it was Zimbabwe, slavery, and the women’s suffrage movement. Now the possibility of Barack Obama’s assassination, RFK-style, is Hillary Clinton’s latest rationale for staying in the race. What’s next? Her “concern” that Obama could develop a brain tumor or melanoma or revert to childhood bed-wetting?

Make it stop. Please.

They’ve appeared before on the sidewalk across the street from my home office — grocery carts deposited like driftwood on an overnight tide. I noticed one this morning but paid it no mind. That is until I observed people react to this interloper in Irvington, my Northeast Portland neighborhood.

There was the boy clad in yellow backpack and cruising the sidewalk on a foot scooter. He wheeled to a stop and peered inside at an assortment of discards. Then a woman (his mother I presume), tugged along by a dalmatian, shooed him away. A few other pedestrians slowed and glanced at it, including a man who kicked at one of the wheels.