Remembering New York as a Kid

New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town … especially on someone else’s dime. That’s where my little sister, Lauren, is. The dime, along with two nickels, 83 pennies, a roll of 20s, and a small bank loan charging 63 percent interest, is thanks to my dad. It’s summertime, and for a 12-year-old kid, the living’s cheap and easy. Ahh, little kid summer vacation. Is there nothing better? My mother never truly appreciated travel, and considered leaving the great state of Florida to be a waste of time, and possibly treasonous. Not my dad. With him we went everywhere as kids, and twice to New York. I’ll never forget our first trip to New York when I couldn’t have been much older than 12 and my brother, Scott, maybe 10. The three of us had driven all the way to the Adirondacks, those picturesque mountains in upstate New York where we hiked for a week with the Sierra Club. I have good memories of that part of the trip — a bear breaking into a car and stealing the giant tub of peanut butter I was supposed to carry, chipmunks who could perform “Mission: Impossible”-like stunts to trump the bears and vegetarian cashew chili that tasted like seasoned mud. But the best memories, the kind that don’t peel away with time, are of driving back through New York City. We only spent the day there, pulling up in my dad’s Toyota 4-Runner with its blanket of dust and muck, and […]

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A Night on an Aircraft Carrier

It was the chance of a lifetime. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, my next lives as a goat, a chicken feather and a booksalesman in Idaho named “Stan” will never see its equal. For the next 1,300 years, I’m officially out of luck. But you can’t take this away from me. Flagler College faculty member Barry Sand and I got the chance to fly out to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, where we spent the night, watched them launch and recover aircraft, and generally tried to take souvenirs of anything that wasn’t tied, welded or bolted down. A common refrain: “Can you fit this landing gear in your bag?” They call it the “Big Stick,” as in Teddy’s famous saying about speaking quietly and carry one. The ship fits the motto, bristling with firepower, military technology and pilots who must essentially takeoff and land on a floating shoebox. We got to see it all: takeoffs from the flight deck, night landings, the giant catapults, the 2,000-pound laser guided bombs. And the bunks. Sleeping arrangements are not unlike a night in a Maytag refrigerator box, although I think there would be more headroom. I slept on the top of three stacked bunks, so high that I needed a pick ax, oxygen tank and a Sherpa to get up there. We wandered the guts of this mighty warship, spoke with every sailor whose ear we could turn and ate their food. (It was good.) Then the next […]

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Send Me a Cure for Clutter Fast

One day, thanks to millions of dollars in funding and many dedicated scientists with no real cause to champion, the world will finally discover a cure for clutter. That day can come none to soon for me. Clutter has a way of swarming me, attracted to some scent that I can neither wash away nor mask. So, hard as I try, it always comes back — and worse than before. My desk at home? I haven’t seen wood in more than a year. Instead, it’s a collection of newspapers, pay stubs, house plans, bills, service cancellations, and most importantly, the note I wrote to myself about a great column idea I had for this week. Oh, well. Teacher, it was eaten by my pet Clutter. What is it about us that we have to, like some kind of modern security blanket, surround ourselves with this scourge? Has there been clutter as far back as man can remember. Or is the difference that once upon a time it was called by its scientific name — “crap” — and quickly discarded. The typical American, I will bet money, has on average 2,200 cheap plastic pens stuffed into a pen caddie on his or her desk. I will wager again that out of that 2,200, exactly two work. Why do we keep them? What is our fascination? Do we expect one day to extract oil from them? Why can’t we go anywhere without spotting a free pen and thinking, “Oooh, I better take […]

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