I wrote this post nine years ago: August 18, 2013.  It seems like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

Commodore Perry

I’m writing this from the sun porch of my parents’ house in Perrysburg, Ohio.  It’s getting on towards late afternoon, but the sun is still high in the August sky, the sky is clear, the leaves on all the trees are that deep green that you see when they know they only have about a month or so before the light begins to change and the air cools in the evening.  The trees have to store up as much energy as they can to get through the long, grey winter ahead.

This sun porch is a familiar spot for me.  Most of my visits to this house have been in summer, and here is where we have our breakfast over the morning papers, afternoons on the couch with Tiger baseball on the TV, and dinner in the deepening twilight that lasts in summer until long after sunset and the rhythmic chorus of cicadas, katy-dids, and other denizens of the evening compete with the traffic on the street and the trains on the C&O railroad a few blocks over.

This is not the house I grew up in; Mom and Dad moved here in 1997 after living in northern Michigan for a while, but countless evenings were spent on the back porch of another house down the street where the same sounds filtered over the voice of Ernie Harwell calling the Tigers’ games on the crackling AM of WJR 760, the static telling us that somewhere, a thunderstorm was bringing rain and cool air to the cornfields that surround this small town.  Lightning bugs danced and glowed down at the bottom of the yard among the yew bushes and rhododendrons, and minty iced tea — and later, Stroh’s beer — made the evening cooler.

Summer, as you might have guessed, was my favorite time of year here, and even with our three weeks up in Michigan on the shores of Grand Traverse Bay, nothing said summer to me more than those evenings on the porch with the orchestration of light, shadow and sound and the scent of newly-mowed grass and drying alfalfa from the grain elevator across town.

But if things go as planned, this is my last night on this sun porch in Perrysburg.  Later this fall my parents will begin a new adventure in a new place far removed from this little town that has been our hometown since 1957.  It is all good for them, and all of us — my three siblings — are with them every step of the way.  They are healthy, happy, and in good spirits as they forge on ahead as they have done with so many adventures in their sixty-five years together.  And as I sit here in the peaceful afternoon, watching a hummingbird busily sip from the feeder, I know that letting go and moving on is a good thing.  I should know; I’ve done it more times than I can count, and have the license plates to prove it.

In the many times I’ve moved and in the many places I’ve lived, I have never let go of the feeling that this town of Perrysburg will always be my home town.  I know the streets and side streets better than any other place I’ve lived, thanks to the bike rides with my childhood friends Joe and Randy and Deke and Trip and Cynny and Scott and Jim and Tommy and Marvin.  I still call the stores on Louisiana Avenue by the names I knew them then: Houck’s Drugstore, Mills Hardware, The Sport Shop, Mrs. Piatt’s Bakery, Ken’s Barber Shop, and Norm’s Appliance.  That’s where we sat at the soda fountain and read Archie comics; that’s where we bought paint and nails; that’s where Dad bought his duck decoys and shotgun shells; that’s where the smell of bread crossed the street and birthday cakes came the way you dreamed they did; that’s where a haircut cost a dollar; and that’s the place where you lined up between the Norge refrigerators and GE air conditioners to get your driver’s license and license plates because the wife of Norm at the appliance store was the Deputy Registrar for the DMV.  It’s where I got my first driver’s license in 1968, typed out on a green piece of paper from a battered Smith-Corona.  The stores have all changed their names and sell different things — and Mills is closed, the windows papered over — but they’re still there.

The tennis courts, the swimming pool, the elementary school where I attended kindergarten, the grocery store, the railroad tracks; they’re as familiar as old books on the shelf that you take down and thumb through, remembering the stories they told.  The sidewalks still have the same cracks in them, the street signs may be new but the names like Hickory, Elm, Front and Second are still where friends and family lived, and the new car in the driveway is the successor to the Country Squire and Pontiac Bonneville that once parked there, the keys in the ignition, the doors unlocked.

I made sure that as I drove around town on the way to do errands with my parents I took notice of the town.  It has changed over the last fifty-six years, but not so much that I don’t recognize it by the sights, sounds, and sense of place that comes with having something become a part of you over a lifetime.  And I made sure that I said goodbye with a smile and a nod to old familiar places, echoes of laughter, memories of sadness and passings, and knowing that while Thomas Wolfe gets all the press for saying you can’t go home again, you can visit, even if the place you lived in belongs to someone else and the people you know have moved on.

They’re still there.  And so am I.

Our house from 1957 to 1982.

Another memory of summers at Northport Point, Michigan.

The official start of summer isn’t for a few weeks yet, which means the hours and minutes of daylight are still getting longer.  But a lot of us think of June 1 as the beginning of summer, marked by schools letting out, maybe some work hours adjusting, and thinking of vacation… or at least a trip to someplace nice to relax, like the beach or the mountains.  I know I used to welcome June as the parole from school, and even when I was working full-time there was a sense of relief that we had made it through the winter.

There are still a few roadblocks to happiness: rising inflation thanks to a global pandemic that disrupted the flow, and that matter of a war going on in Ukraine.  But if the figures are correct, people are still doing what it takes to get out, get away, if not for the sake of the summer ritual, than for their own way of finding a way to shake off the past and hope for a better time, at least for a little while.

It’s also the official start of the Atlantic hurricane tropical cyclone season, and we’ve already had an opening number cross Mexico and possibly bring weather to Florida.  But even then, we know what to do.  Or at least we think we do.  And for me, June marks a couple of memories of loss and of renewal.  So it all seems to balance out.

At least I hope so.

“The Dinghy Beach” by Marguerite Cassidy (1919-2005)

At the end of a very trying and tragic week, take a moment to meditate on the small hopes and dreams that get you through the day…and night.  Share the blessings of being with family, a loved one, even a good book and memories of happier times.  Sometimes that’s all we have.

Thirty-five years ago today — April 22, 1987 — on the third anniversary of our first date, Allen and I stood in front of the fireplace of our little house on Bross Street in Longmont and exchanged rings. We promised each other that we’d be together no matter what. It was as close to getting married as we could get in those days. We hugged and kissed and maybe even cried a few happy tears.

Then we went to Perkins for dinner.

We would be together in that way for another twelve years before separating amicably. We stayed close as friends, and he even moved back into our house as my roommate for a year until I moved to Miami. We often talked on the phone for hours on birthdays, anniversaries, or just when we wanted to, and as readers of my plays will attest, he shows up quite often as a character, and even as himself (“A Tree Grows in Longmont,” “Another Park, Another Sunday,” and “Going for a Walk with Sam”). When he slept away on June 8, 2018, the bond was not broken.

I kept our rings in a little wooden jewel box — his is the one on the left — and the piece of paper under it is where I wrote down his phone number on the night we met on April 22, 1984.

I will always call you sweetheart.

February 1 is a bit of an anniversary for me.  On this date in 1989, I slipped on some ice in my driveway in Longmont, Colorado, and broke my ankle in three places.  Later that day I underwent surgery to screw it back together, and the screws are still there.  Coincidentally, somewhere in Oklahoma a litter of puppies was born, one of whom was Sam.  (We’re not exactly sure of the date, but it the vet who took care of him said it was as close as she could get.)  Both events on that day changed my life.

From 1989, Sam with Santa in Longmont.  Sam was about ten months old, so it was his first Christmas.

Yes, I am back in Miami after the weekend at Cheley Colorado Camps, but in a sense, I felt like I was back home again when I was there.  I saw friends I’ve known since I was a camper in 1964, co-workers that I’ve been close to since the 1970’s and beyond, and had time to sit and talk with them as if we had never been apart for all those years.

This time I took a lot of pictures.  Many of them were reminders of places at camp that reminded me of the times at camp (a plate of beans and burgers, the Sunday night cookout staple) or reminders of good times (a prop from a legendary skit), and pictures of friends together, spanning the decades.  I won’t bother you with photos of things that don’t mean much to folks who didn’t go to camp with me.  But there is one picture that captures a memory and a vista that I hope I never lose: the magnificent view of the Mummy Range in Rocky Mountain National Park as seen from camp.  It was the first view I remember when I arrived at camp in 1964 and it was the view I had every morning, rain or shine, as I went down the hill to breakfast.  It’s the wallpaper on my home and work computer, updating the same view that I took in 2000.

I’m out in Colorado at my Cheley Camp reunion, so no heavy material today, but I can’t leave you without Doonesbury.  Karmically, it’s about remembrances of times past.

What I once thought was lost has been returned: a precious piece of my childhood and that of my father’s is once again reunited.

When my father and his twin were growing up in the 1930’s in Minneapolis, the twelve “Swallows and Amazons” books were some of his favorite books. I inherited them from him when my grandparents’ house was sold, and I read each one of them cover to cover, but they remained on my bookshelf when I went off to college and got on with my life. When my parents moved to Northport, Michigan, in 1982, the books went with them, and that was the last time I saw them all together. In the meantime, I’d found them in paperback at Fanfare Books in Stratford, Ontario, so I had my own copies, but the originals were still precious to me.

In 1997, my parents sold their house in Northport and moved back to Perrysburg. They were sure that they brought the books back with them, but it turned out that they remained in the old house. We tried to get in touch with the new owner, but either she didn’t hear from us or didn’t care, and I resigned myself to the harsh fact that the books were gone forever.

But like every Swallows and Amazons story, there is a happy ending. A year ago, that house in Northport was sold to friends of our family, and lo and behold, the books were still there, although scattered around to various places in the house. The new owners located eight of them last summer, two more last fall, and then the last two last month. Tonight I found them carefully and lovingly wrapped on my doorstep, and now at last, they are home.

Last summer I re-read the ones I had, and now I will re-read these last two, thinking of my father and his twin as they once read them, and thanking my friend Grace for her diligence and understanding how much of a gift they are to have them back home again.