When I was six years old, my family moved to a small town in west central Florida. Four houses down was another family of recent arrivals, from Michigan. Mom, Dad, three boys (the middle child being close in age to me, so I had a permanent playmate), and a miniature...
So it turns out that New Orleans has a pub crawl (not that it needs one). This particular street has law firms at either end, with seven bars in between. You pick up a card at Fleesum & Tick, get a square checked off when you have a cocktail at each bar, present...
It was likely an accident of scheduling, but I’ll be accompanying the better half to a performance of Carmen on Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately, I’m of the age where Bizet’s classic reminds me of one thing only – The Bad News Bears. I’ve been told that I am not to...
Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies decided to go on safari in Africa. He killed a lion, an eland, and a hippopotamus, keeping the mounted heads for himself, and awarding the skins to three of his squires back...
Take flight.
On a moonless night some years ago, my friend Carlton Proulx jumped without warning from a speeding boat into a dark saltwater bay–outrageous behavior that I might have applauded had it not been my boat, my liability insurance, and my Coast Guard captain’s license...
A big family goes up against the yankee government and holds their own
Ornamental gardening doesn’t have to be difficult
Trying to take a little history home and grow it up
Tragedy and coincidence in four wars
Whereupon your humble author and The Bosslady make a return to the Golden Isles of Georgia.
Moar Shpip vacation!
In which we follow Shpip and The Bosslady through a couple of weeks of getting sand and salt spray in… everything.
Ocala, Florida wasn’t known for much back in the 1950s. No real natural resources if you don’t count the National Forest east of town, and while Silver Springs drew in some intrepid tourists back around the turn of the century, the attraction and its glass-bottomed boats weren’t exactly making the town a vacation destination.
Ah! Distinctly I remember