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Maitland

Snow Days

December 30, 2008

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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Christmas Day Humiliation

December 24, 2008

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. [...]

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Death of Tooth 31

December 17, 2008

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 [...]

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Hope and Haircuts

November 20, 2008

Two barbershops, fifty years and three thousand miles apart.
At one I had my first haircut without a parent in tow. It was in Florida, and I was a young boy new to the South. The father and son proprietors were Alabama crackers. The only time they spoke more than a few words was when talk [...]

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Better than dreaming

October 17, 2008

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 [...]

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Time capsule of what?

October 8, 2008

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 [...]

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Decades later, an answer

September 6, 2008

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.

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Dogs back in the picture

August 3, 2008

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.

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Holed up in memory

August 2, 2008

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 [...]

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Pirate of memories

July 14, 2008

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.

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Poodle hip, not standard

June 30, 2008

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 [...]

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Shimmering portal to distant past

June 29, 2008

Summer stars greet the sun today — freshly opened blossoms in my Portland teardrop pond. I’ll wade in and reward my babies with fertilizer pellets. But I’ll be tempted to disappear beneath the lily pads into my past.

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Brave new bike world

June 23, 2008

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 [...]

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