Cracked Window

Two barbershops, fifty years and three thousand miles apart.

One is where I got 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. About the only time they spoke more than a few words was when talk turned to farming. They grew corn on acreage outside my small town of Maitland. Even at my age I could tell they wanted to be with their crops and not messing with other people’s hair.

What I remember most was their only employee, a black kid about my age who swept up hair. We often exchanged glances that felt like long conversations between occupants of different worlds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.