Archive for Slices of Life

| March 9, 2012
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Eclectic Taste in Films

As a member of the Loyola University English Department’s Advisory Board, I receive many news announcements from my alma mater. I was sad to see this announcement of Professor Peggy McCormack’s untimely passing. I never had the pleasure of taking one of Professor McCormack’s classes, but I was an avid attendee of the Loyola Film Buffs Institute’s film screening series. I got my first exposure to such classics as Rashamon, The Seventh Seal, and Nights of Cambiria in the little auditorium on the third floor of Bobet Hall.

Usually, notices of memorial events don’t generate a smile or a laugh. This one did. See if you agree.

Tribute to Professor Peggy McCormack

Peggy McCormack, Ph.D., Loyola University Professor of English

Dear Loyola Community,

Professor McCormack who was a vivacious contributor to Loyola’s campus life for several decades passed away unexpectedly on Mardi Gras day 2012.

As a senior professor in the Department of English and a longtime director of Loyola University’s Film Buffs Program, she left a deep and cherished imprint on the lives of many students. She will be dearly missed.

To celebrate her legacy and to commemorate the inspiring friendships that she shared with many of her students, Film Buffs will show two of her all-time favorite films on March 9: Sunset Boulevard and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| February 7, 2012
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More Scarifying Than Rollerball or Death Race 2000

I'll bet James Caan never chaperoned a bowling party for 23 little kids...

Now that I’m a middle-aged guy with a professional job and family responsibilities, I very rarely willing enter a situation involving physical peril (my rollerblading days, for example, are far, far behind me). But this past Saturday, I found my pulse racing, my adrenaline pumping, my internal alarm Klaxon screaming like a banshee with a burning tail, and my trusty robot companion blaring “DAN-GER! DAN-GER! DAN-GER!”

What’s more terrifying than a Friday the Thirteenth marathon, more hair-raising than participating in a Mexican cliff-diving competition? How about… hosting a bowling party for twenty-three kids under the age of nine?

Since we’ve been up in Northern Virginia, Dara and I have been throwing the boys their birthday parties at one of a couple of local Burger Kings with indoor playlands. The parties have been reasonably pleasant affairs for involved; the kids get to get their ya-yas out by crawling through the tunnels and pitching themselves down the slides, and the parents can hang out with their BK ice coffees and chat, keeping only half an eye on the kids. I like those parties. I look forward to them.

The car-nage of Death Race 2000 can't compare with the catastrophic mayhem in my mind's eye at Bowl America

But this year, Asher, my middle son, decided a Burger King party was no longer satisfactory. He wanted Something Different. Now, mind you, Something Different doesn’t come cheap. Back in New Orleans, Februarys are fairly mild, so parents can make do with renting a bounce house for the backyard and inviting over twenty kids. In Virginia, however, the February climate isn’t so accommodating. Renting an indoor House-of-Bounce bounce house palace for a party runs over five hundred bucks when you include the food and drinks. Doing a party at Chuck-E-Cheese isn’t much less expensive.

So I came up with the idea of doing a bowling party. The boys have been nagging me to take them bowling for months. A big change in bowling for kids since I was a youngster is that nowadays, managers of bowling alleys are willing to block gutters for young bowlers. This lets the kids have way more fun. When I was a kid, being taken to the bowling alley by my summer camp counselors was an occasion for withering humiliation, as I launched ball after ball into the gutters. In today’s culture of Self-Esteem, however, such an outcome is simply not allowable. But the allowances made nowadays bode well for bowling’s future as a recreational pastime. Kids that can do it and feel good about themselves will probably grow up to become adult bowlers (unlike me, for instance).

Bowl America advertised bowling parties that included ninety minutes of bowling, followed by pizza, soda, ice cream, and tokens for video games. Their prices were reasonable, so I had Dara sign us up. Bowl America even provided invitations for Asher to pass out to his friends. We brought our own birthday cake.

I don’t know what I pictured; I guess I figured that the bowling alley staff would set all the kids up and supervise their games. We were assigned just one staff member to work with us, however. A very nice, accommodating young lady who was quickly Overtaken By Events.

Things didn’t start out too badly, when it was just a few guests and my three kids. We got bowling shoes for everyone, and Judah, my youngest, thought the red and blue shoes were the cat’s meow. My liaison set the five or six boys up on a pair of adjacent alleys and blocked the gutters on both. We had a total of four lanes set aside for our party. I was able to get the kids to take turns, with some difficulty, I’ll admit, but they listened. At first. Of course, some of the bowling was painful to watch. I’m talking balls that Dara and I made bets on as to whether or not they would finally reach the pins. I suspect that the lanes were very slightly angled downward, because only gravity could have caused those balls to keep meandering toward the pins after their momentum was entirely spent. But hey! Every ball a kid tossed knocked down at least one pin. So what if a kid sometimes tossed himself down the lane along with the ball?

The birthday boy, looking suspiciously innocent... is that pizza sauce or BLOOD around his mouth?

Then things began getting Out Of Control. One of the lanes consistently refused to reset on its own, so I was constantly having to run to the front desk to grab some help, leaving the kids temporarily on their own. More kids started arriving in a big rush. I had to direct parents where to go to get their kids into bowling shoes. Plus, I had to corral staff to sign the new kids onto the scoring machines and divide them between our four lanes.

In the meantime, the kids were Devising Their Own Games. That sort of thing is just fine at a Burger King playland, where the opportunities for mayhem are minimal. It’s another matter entirely when each child is wielding a spherical hunk of plastic weighing between eight and twelve pounds. I have to give kudos to the parents. They spontaneously organized themselves into supervisory squads that kept the most dangerous behaviors at bay. If just a few more parents had decided to drop their kids off at the party and head for a local bar for a couple of hours, I would have been S-C-R-E-W-E-D.

Even with the help of numerous parents, however, the bowling party rapidly devolved into Barely Safe Chaos. Balls were dropped. Many balls, which miraculously missed landing on many, many little toes. Kids launched themselves head-first down the lanes. Taking turns was quickly abandoned. When kids saw a freestanding set of pins, they ran to chuck their ball, even if the pins stood at the end of another set of kids’ lane. A neat thing the bowling alley had for the littlest kids to use was a wire ramp which allowed a small child to set his or her ball into its top, then push the ball down the ramp so it got up a good head of steam. My youngest, Judah, all of five years old, actually bowled a strike using one of those ramps. Unfortunately, we only had one ramp to service all four lanes. Most of the kids adored the ramp, so of course the ramp became the object of much competitive attention. My heart almost flew out my mouth several times as I saw various small children toting a bowling ball in one hand and dragging that ramp across the alleys with the other.

The little brother, about to bash someone's brains in...

Balls clanged into the reset sweepers as kids flung their balls before pins could be reset. This necessitated staff braving the hazardous spaces between the children and the pins to retrieve the balls. The birthday boy, either out of an overabundance of zeal or mischievousness, tossed his ball onto a lane as an unwary staff person trooped up the lane to grab a stranded ball, narrowly missing the man’s feet.

Amazingly, incredibly, almost unbelievably, no bones were broken, and no blood was shed (although I may have surrendered several birthdays of my own in years lost to fright). The children all had a marvelous time and said it was one of the best parties ever. However, rarely in my life have I been so relieved as when the pizza and ice cream arrived, and the kids put their bowling balls down.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| December 15, 2011
2 comments

Training the Next Generation of SF Geeks: Update #1

I’ll occasionally be posting on my success (or lack thereof) in promoting the growth of science fictional geekhood in my offspring. I’ll probably never be a Little League parent, unless Asher surprises me and decides he wants to play baseball (my two nephews in Florida play baseball, but my brother Ric has always been an avid fan of the game, unlike me). However, I am most definitely a Geek Dad, and proud of it.

It is fascinating to watch each of my three boys gradually develop their own interests. I’ve learned that the most I can do as Geek Dad is expose them to the things I love, in case that love is catching; but I can’t make them enjoy anything they don’t have an innate interest in. My dear stepdad learned that with me when he tried and tried again to get me interested in boxing. No matter how many Golden Gloves bouts he took me to, I insisted on staring at the ceiling rather than watch what was happening in the ring. I was very anti-violence as a kid, apart from illustrated punch ’em outs in comic books. (Ironically, as an adult, I’ve developed an interest in boxing, and now I wish I could go back in time and force my younger self to pay attention to the sport.)

Levi with his pair of Heinlein juveniles

Levi, my eight year old, has blossomed into an enthusiastic reader. He loves humorous books (like the Captain Underpants series and the Wimpy Kid books) and also immerses himself in beginning readers YA fantasy series (especially the Magic Treehouse books). He is curious about science fiction, too. So this past weekend I bought him a pair of the Heinlein juveniles, The Rolling Stones and Rocket Ship Galileo. He looked them over in the store and said they seemed pretty interesting. I’m crossing my fingers, hoping Heinlein will be his entry drug. If the Heinlein doesn’t float his boat, I’ll probably try some Anne McCaffrey or Andre Norton next. One of his classmates has started reading the Harry Potter books, and he’s expressed an interest in those. I don’t have anything against Harry Potter, but I’m a little afraid that, given the books’ enormous length, if he gets sucked into that series, he won’t be reading anything else for the next year or so. Plus, I really, really want to expose him to some science fiction, not just fantasy. I’ll keep you all posted on what he thinks of the Heinlein books.

Judah, my five year old, is, as I have previously mentioned, a fanatic for monster movies, particularly Japanese giant monster movies, and their associated toys. He frequently asks for toys from movies which have never been especially toyetic, such as Gorgo and Tarantula. But where there is a will, there is a way. My mother has always been a very artsy-craftsy person, and she passed along some of that love to me. It is a fun challenge to create toys which Judah and Asher will not destroy within their first five minutes of playing with them. My first effort was a Gorgo stick puppet. I folded over a piece of green construction paper, drew a picture of Gorgo (essentially a Tyrannosaurus with long arms and big, square ears), cut it out, drew all the details on the opposite side, and glued the two sides together with a plastic straw in the middle. It has proven to be surprisingly durable. Judah and Asher have used it for puppet shows.

Judah with homemade Tarantula; Asher with homemade Gorgo

Next Judah begged me for a Tarantula toy. I planned to take him to a reptile expo and exotic pet show at the Prince William Fairgrounds, where I figured I’d find a rubber tarantula or two on sale, but I got the dates wrong, and we missed it. So it was Michael’s Crafts to the rescue — black pipe cleaners, a bundle of black yarn, and a package of googly eyes. For the body, I recycled a pair of plastic tokens cups we’d brought home from Chuck E. Cheese’s. I poked holes in the cups for the eight pipe cleaner legs, glued and taped the cups together, then wrapped the body in black yarn. I finished off Judah’s Tarantula with a pair of pipe cleaner pinchers and six googly eyes. My wife Dara said it was one of the creepiest toys she’s ever seen.

Judah adores it and plays with it daily. I am one happy dad.

Next up? Mothra. That’ll be this coming weekend’s project.

Category: Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags:
| December 6, 2011
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Training the Next Generation of SF Geeks: an Intergenerational Case Study

My gateway to the heroes of comics' Golden Age, courtesy of my stepdad and Jules Feiffer

Any culture that fails to train its young in its traditions is doomed to extinction. The culture of science fiction geekdom is no exception. Many SF geeks have come into their geekhood entirely on their own, sometimes in clear opposition to their parents’ preferences (most of the Futurians, for example, needed to get away from their families in order to come into their full geekhood). Yet many others (myself included) have benefitted from the support and encouragement of a geek (or partial geek, or proto-geek) parent. SF geek culture has now been with us long enough that grandparents can share it with their grandchildren (especially if it is Flash Gordon serials or Astounding Science Fiction pulps or EC horror comics that are the artifacts being passed on).

My stepdad was my initial mentor in geekdom, although I’m sure he didn’t think about in those terms (my training in geekhood began in the late 1960s, but the term “geek” did not begin taking on anything approaching a positive connotation until fairly recently, sometime during Bill Clinton’s term in office). He is a movie lover and for many years was an amateur movie maker (in the old days of Super-8 equipment; he never made the transition to digital media). During his twenties, he had nursed an ambition to go to Hollywood to work for Warner Brothers as an animator. He ended up a salesman instead, a very successful one, first of shoes and later of folding cardboard boxes. He and my mother both enjoyed science fiction and horror movies, so my earliest movie-going experiences were outings to the drive-in to see pictures including Destroy All Monsters (1968), The Return of Count Yorga (1971), Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971), and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971). (Come to think of it, we saw an awful lot of movies at the drive-in in 1971.) He was a huge fan of old-time film actors, so the bookshelf in our living room was stocked with oversized volumes on the history of movies serials, classic films of Hollywood’s Golden Age (including the Universal monster movie cycle), and silent film comedy stars such as Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields. He also amassed a pretty big collection of Super-8 film shorts to show on his collapsible movie screen, including shorts by Chaplin, the Our Gang kids, and Laurel and Hardy, as well as compilations of coming attractions from Japanese kaiju giant monster films and 1950s Hollywood giant insect movies.

The book on his shelf that probably had the biggest impact on me, though, was Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965). I still have numerous passages virtually memorized (most especially Feiffer’s remembered glee as a young man when he read that psychologist Fredric Wertham had written in Seduction of the Innocent that Batman and Robin, in their civilian identities as Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, could be said to be experiencing “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together;” Feiffer always hated Robin, so anyone who muddied Robin’s rep was okay by him). I passed hundreds of hours on my living room sofa with that book open on my lap. Feiffer presented a very personal memoir of what each of the classic characters of the Golden Age of Comic Books had meant to him during his childhood and teen years. His book generously provided me with origin stories or very early adventures of such figures as Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, the Spectre, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and the Spirit, in nearly all cases (with the exceptions of Superman and Batman) my very first exposure to the characters. My stepdad, noting my enthusiasm, followed up by taking me to my very first comic book and nostalgia convention, held in the Coconut Grove library, where I got to see a couple of chapters from Monogram’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel serial and page through a mimeographed reproduction of the famous Human Torch-Sub-Mariner epic battle from Marvel Mystery Comics.

The fact that my stepdad loved old monster movies and old comic book heroes made me want to love them, too; not that I needed too much encouragement in that direction, since I had discovered my love of dinosaurs, prehistoric life, and Greek and Norse mythology all on my own. One thing led to another. Novelizations of the Planet of the Apes films and TV shows proved to be my “entry drugs” to original science fiction novels and story collections by H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Silverberg. A fondness for atomic apocalypse movies led to my picking up books on worldwide catastrophe by J. G. Ballard and John Christopher. The movie versions of The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend made me hunt down the original books by Richard Matheson. The same kid at summer camp who let me look at his dog-earred Iron Man comics also lent me a truly magical novel, The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney.

And thus was my career as a science fiction geek well and truly launched by the time I turned eight. That year I wrote my first short story, “Tyrann!”, a tale about a lonely little boy, his scientist father, the mechanical Tyrannosaurus the father builds as a companion for his son, and the gangsters who have evil plans for the scientist and his robot creation. The boys at school loved it, and I got the idea that writing stories and entertaining my peers was kind of fun.

One thing my stepdad didn’t do was pass on any relics of his own proto-geek childhood. Hardly anybody from his generation saved their comic books and pulp magazines (unless they were extremely obsessed with them). This, of course, is what makes those artifacts of the 1930s and 1940s so valuable – scarcity. Oh, the daydreams I had, though, as a child – “If only Dad had saved his Captain America comics!” I resolved at a very young age that I would save everything: all my comics, all my issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, all my copies of Eerie and Creepy, and all of my science fiction paperbacks. No future son (or daughter) of mine would ever have to pine for the childhood stuff I had thrown away. I also considered the potential monetary value of the collectibles I would be passing on, figuring I would be doing my future children a great fiduciary favor.

Judah "Iron Man" Fox, celebrating his fifth birthday

Unfortunately, I proved to have an odd talent for buying comics which would never go up in value and for passing up those comics which would someday be worth real money. I distinctly recall seeing all the early issues of The All-New, All-Different X-Men on the carousel wire racks at my local convenience stores (Little General and 7-11) and turning up my nose at them, because the characters on the covers looked “too weird” (why I felt that way about the New X-Men I cannot currently fathom; after all, I eagerly purchased other comics with stranger heroes, such as Jack Kirby’s The Demon and Marv Wolfman’s The Tomb of Dracula, but I remember having a powerful aversion to the costumes worn by the New X-Men in their early adventures). Instead, I bought reprint comics like Marvel Triple Action, Marvel’s Greatest Comics, Monsters on the Prowl, and Creatures on the Loose; the adventures of short-run, failed characters like It! the Living Colossus, the Living Mummy, Man-Thing, Brother Voodoo, the Defenders (a bit more successful than the others on this list), the Invaders, the Golem, and Werewolf by Night; and a fairly full set of The Invincible Iron Man during the character’s worst run ever (excepting, perhaps, the much later Teen Tony issues), from about issue 35 to issue 90 or so. So I ended up with an accumulation of essentially worthless comics, boxes and boxes of them, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Worthless, that is, except for the reading pleasure they might provide a young person.

Over the past eight years, I’ve been blessed with three sons. How should I divide my childhood collection among the three of them, I’ve often wondered? Have them draw lots? Let them sort out the materials among themselves, according to their preferences, with me serving as referee? As things have turned out, this will not be an issue, surprisingly; two of the three appear to have very little interest in my old stuff.

Levi, my oldest, is a voracious reader, but he generally avoids comic books. He showed a mild interest in Silver Age Superman stories for a time, but that didn’t last. After I took him and his brothers to see Captain America: the First Avenger, we went to the comic book store next to the theater, and I offered to buy him any Captain America or Avengers comic he wanted. He wouldn’t bite; instead, he insisted I buy him the latest Wimpy Kid chapter book. The only comics or graphic novels he seems to be interested in are the Bone books. He is very interested in science, but blasé about dinosaurs. He shows very little interest in my collection of old horror movie videos. However, he is fascinated by astronomy and outer space, and most of the chapter books he likes to read (such as the Magic Treehouse and the Captain Underpants books) are essentially fantasy. So I have hopes that I’ll be able to steer him toward science fiction. Within the next year (he is currently in second grade) I plan to introduce him to the Heinlein juveniles, the Rick Riordan books, and eventually Ender’s Game. We’ll see how he takes to those. He is very opinionated and particular regarding what books he chooses to read, so I know I will only be able to suggest (and gently suggest, at that). The potential for an SF geek resides within him (“The Force is strong in this one…”). We shall see.

Asher, my middle child, on the other hand, appears to have little or no geek potential. His interests are decidedly mainstream American boy – he likes sports, race cars, and monster trucks. He enjoys superhero and science fiction movies and TV shows, but he mainly appreciates them for their action. He likes watching things explode and seeing giant robots beat on each other. He thought the last twenty minutes of X-Men: First Class were “awesome,” and he simply loved Real Steel. His favorite toys are his large collection of Hot Wheels cars. He is a pretty strong reader, but he won’t go out of his way to pick up a book. He gets bored when I try to read him Silver Age Superman stories (which Levi enjoys to an extent). His preferred books to look at are illustrated editions of The Guinness Book of World Records and any books on monster trucks.

So, I was at two strikes and one ball to go, so far as passing along my old comics and monster magazines to one of my offspring. Perhaps Judah, my youngest, sensed an opportunity, an unclaimed niche, a chance to beat out his brothers at snuggling up close to Daddy. Or maybe it’s all in the genes (could there be a specific geek chromosome)? In any case, with my final opportunity to reproduce myself as a young geek, I finally struck geek gold in Judah. Several years back, I bought a whole collection of plush Godzilla figures for Levi and Asher as Hanukkah gifts; on eBay, I found Godzilla, Minya, Rodan, Anguillis, Gigan, young Godzilla, Hedorah, King Kong, and Destroyah. These were gorgeous toys. Had they been available when I was a young boy, I would have wet my pants with excitement. But neither Levi nor Asher took to them. They sat on the edge of the boys’ bed for years, unplayed with, gathering dust and cat hair.

Judah with "The Deadly Mantis"

Then Judah decided he liked Godzilla movies. In fact, he loved Godzilla movies. Better still was to watch a Godzilla movie with toys that matched the monsters on screen. He expanded his palate to include a fondness for Gamera movies, too (and I happened to have a few Gamera toys lying around). He will watch any monster movie with his daddy, and he has a particular liking for giant insect movies. Like me, he can watch Tarantula over and over again. When I took him and his brothers to Dinosaur Land in White Post, Virginia, one of the statues there was of a ten-foot-tall praying mantis. I took a picture of the boys standing beneath its claws, and I posted the picture on my website, next to a photo from the 1957 monster movie The Deadly Mantis. Judah took a look at that photo and declared he simply had to have a Deadly Mantis toy. After looking far and wide, I managed to find a really nice praying mantis figurine at Le Jouet Toys down in New Orleans, and I bought it as a birthday gift for Judah. One event marking his fifth birthday celebration was a family viewing of The Deadly Mantis (a clean DVD print obtained from Netflix). Judah sat in bed between me and his brothers with his brand-new mantis toy in his fist, watching Craig Stevens, William Hopper, and Alix Talton deal with their bug problem. He is very disappointed that there has never been a Tarantula vs. the Deadly Mantis movie, or, even better, a Tarantula vs. Godzilla film. He has asked multiple times for me to buy him a Deadly Mantis costume to wear, and I’ve endeavored to explain that no one is likely to make a costume based on a giant bug movie from 1957 that hardly anyone remembers.

It’s not just monsters. He loves dinosaurs and superheroes, too. His favorite dinosaur (for the past few weeks, anyway) is Ankylosaurus, an armored dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period. When I told him that Anguillus from the Godzilla movies is an Ankylosaurus, he went and got his plastic figurine of the monster and asked why Anguillus doesn’t have a knob of bone at the end of his tail like a real Ankylosaurus would. The only reply I could come up with was “artistic license.” So he went and found a small, hollow rubber ball that he was able to insert on the end of Anguillus’ tail. Thus far, he doesn’t seem to have a favorite superhero. Between his dad’s old toys and action figures he has gotten as gifts or collected from McDonald’s or Burger King, he has amassed a pretty impressive set of Justice Society, Justice League, X-Men, and Avengers figures. His affection and loyalty shifts between characters and figures, depending on his mood and which toy happens to catch his eye. One day his favorite will be Banshee from the X-Men, and the next day it might be Captain America or Iron Man, and the day after that either Batman or the Golden Age Flash will have captured his fancy.

Scene from "The Deadly Mantis 2: Mantis in Manassas"

He’s still too young to pass along to him my old comics and issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland (I shudder to think what shape he would leave them in after tearing through them). I’ll probably wait until he turns eight. But that kid has a tremendous bequest coming his way. I can hardly wait to see his face on the day I pull out box after box after box of my old stuff from the basement.

For the time being, I’m as delighted as any proud Little League parent to have him sitting next to me and watching Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster or Tarantula, a rapt look of enjoyment on his face. I glance down at him, squirming with excitement while nestled in the nook of my arm, and think to myself with a glow of satisfaction, “That’s my boy!”

Category: Book Love, Conventions and Fandom, Horror and Fantasy, Science Fiction, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: , ,
| November 1, 2011
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Trunk or Treat at the Family Drive-In

Jack o' lanterns, a Coke, and a minivan: recipe for an American Halloween

If there’s one thing Americans are pretty darned good at, it’s coming up with new and imaginative ways to celebrate old holidays. Halloween is a completely different animal today than it was when I was a kid (we’re talking the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s). When I was young, it was all about the kids. Now, Halloween competes with New Year’s Eve as an excuse for adult bacchanalia. However, in one little rural corner of northwest Virginia — Stephens City, to be exact — Halloween has stayed all about the kids. Not to say that parents can’t have a blast, too.

the Grim Reaper invites sundown to come so the movies can begin

I’ve gotten into the pleasant habit of taking my kids to the Family Drive-In , about an eighty-minute drive from our house. The vibe at the drive-in is pure late 1960s, early 1970s. It’s always chock full of families. Every time I drive through the gate, I half expect the lot to be filled with the same Chevy Bel Airs and Plymouth Belvederes Ford Fairlanes that would’ve been parked in front of the screens back in 1956, when the theater first opened. The current owners do a fantastic job of keeping the old place relevant with solid choices in family movies and lots of special programming. Last year, they put on a Halloween event called Trunk or Treat. The boys and I enjoyed ourselves so much that I swore on my stack of classic Universal Studios monster movies that we’d go again this year the Saturday before Halloween.

a typical Trunk or Treat family

For a bit there, it looked like I’d have to disappoint the boys (and myself). The entire Northeast got socked with a rare late-October snow storm. The area around Stephens City was predicted to be buried under six to eight inches on Saturday. However, rather than cancel their biggest event of the year, the Family Drive-In folks pushed it off one day, to Sunday. Trunk or Treat ended up being a bit soggier and chillier than last year (there was still a good bit of snow on the ground, surrounding the bounce house the theater set up for the kids), but this in no way ruined the fun.

Judah about to enter the bounce house

Patrons are asked to bring three bags of candy and to come in costume. The gates open at 3 PM. Admission prices are the same as they are every other weekend — a very reasonable $7.50 (adults) or $3.50 (kids under 12), which is a great honking deal for a double feature (or you can pay a little less if you only want to come in for the party). For that modest admission fee, the kids get a bounce house to play in while they are waiting for twilight and the start of Trunk or Treating, plus fire engines from the local volunteer fire department that they are invited to climb around in, a costume contest, and music from one of the area’s FM radio stations.

ghouls on the Family Drive-In playground

Plus, the kids have Ye Olde Playground of Death, a well-preserved example of early 1970s hard steel playground architecture straight out of my elementary school’s recess yard. Ah, the memories… monkey bars that look like exercise equipment you’d find in an old-time prison yard; a tall, steep slide that dumps kids into a mud puddle; and Wild West horsey swings with grasping steel hinges and chains that threaten to amputate little fingers. The leaflets you get with your tickets say no ball playing or frisbee throwing, but plenty of kids do it, anyway.

This family went all out!

Then comes the Trunk or Treating. I love how so many attendees have already started a tradition of decorating the backs of their SUVs, pickups, or minivans just like they might decorate their front yards and porches. Instead of walking from house to house and down driveway after driveway with the little goblins and their candy buckets, you comb the aisles of the drive-in, weave past the speaker stands, and go from trunk to hatch to pickup bed. No need to worry about keeping the kids out of traffic and off the road, because all the cars here are parked.

waiting for Trunk or Treating time

What movie did we see? It almost didn’t matter after all the fun we’d had. We saw Dreamworks’ newest animated comedy, Puss in Boots. Not as good as the Shrek movies, in my humble opinion, but not bad at all. At least it wasn’t The Zookeeper, still my choice for Worst Family Film of 2011. Puss didn’t work as well as last year’s reprise of Monster House as a Halloween film, though. Maybe one of these years the Family Drive-In will make their Trunk or Treating event an evening of classic, family friendly monster movies (a few choices from this list would make for a terrific spooky evening under the stars).

my three little goblins

I can hardly wait for next year!

And neither can my boys…

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| October 28, 2011
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Dinosaur Land: Imaginary Monsters

Imaginary giant shark, or the actual prehistoric Megalodon? The model maker didn't know himself!

One of the wonderful, weird, and almost dada aspects of Dinosaur Land is that its builders did not limit themselves to actual dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. They let their imaginations run a bit wild. The first two creatures a visitor encounters when he or she walks out of the gift shop, through a short, cavern-like tunnel and out into the Prehistoric Forest are a 60 foot-long shark and a giant octopus which stretches 70 feet from tentacle tip to tentacle tip. In fact, to continue on into the park, one must walk beneath one of the octopus’s pink tentacles. Now the park’s operators could have identified the big shark as a Megolodon, an actual prehistoric shark which grew up to 52 feet long. They don’t; I get the feeling the big shark was installed up front, where it could be seen from the road, around the time the movie Jaws was a mega summer hit (my feeling was reinforced when the boys and I discovered you could walk into his mouth through his gills and pose between his giant teeth).

Did any octopi actually grow to be seventy feet in diameter? Who knows? They didn't leave any fossils behind!

The octopus? Who knows? There’s the legend of the kraken, of course. And it’s possible that giant octopi did exist at one time, but we likely will never know, because, apart from their beaks, no other parts of their bodies would have fossilized. As cephalopods, they would have left behind no bones for us to find.

"The Deadly Mantis:" 1957 called and wants its giant bug monster back

So I suppose the big shark and the giant octopus are borderline creatures, on the margin between potential scientific fact and imaginative fantasy. Other critters in Dinosaur Land, however, definitely fall into the latter category. There’s the giant king cobra. Actual examples stretch up to 14 feet long. This representation, on the other hand, towers a good 14 feet high. Then there’s the 13 foot-high praying mantis. Unless its breathing apparatus were to be completely different from that of actual insects, a mantis anywhere near this size would be unable to breathe.

But it is a wonderful reminder of one of my all-time favorite Creature Features, the 1957 giant bug movie The Deadly Mantis, starring Craig Stevens and a bunch of other B-listers I never heard of. The film’s memorable climax takes place when the big bug crawls into the Manhattan Tunnel in New York City and the army goes in after it.

Kong says, "Fay Wray? Who needs Fay Wray? These boys look tastier!"

And then there’s the boys’ favorite, and one of the largest statues in the park – King Kong. Kong is the only figure the park’s managers encourages children to climb upon (into his big paw, at least), so he makes for irresistible pictures. Interestingly, all of Kong’s prehistoric playmates from the classic 1933 film are with him at Dinosaur Land. His companions include a Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus, a Stegosaurus, a giant snake, and a Pterodon.

Is this the giant octopus Kong fought in "King Kong vs. Godzilla"?

The only missing creature from the original King Kong is a giant spider (but, to be fair to the park’s designers, the giant spider scene was cut out of King Kong’s original release prints, and was not restored to the movie until nearly fifty years later).

On the other hand, one of Kong’s antagonists from a later film appearance is present, the giant octopus from 1962’s Toho Films monsterfest King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Forget King Cobra... how about "Emperor Cobra?"

One request for the Dinosaur Land folks… my youngest son, Judah, was sorely disappointed that there were no giant turtles in the park. He is a big fan of Gamera (child after my own heart!). The closest thing we could find to a giant turtle was the Ankylosaurus, which looked more like a giant horny toad than a giant turtle.

unnamed colorful beastie menaces the boys

All in all, we loved the place. You could easily take a quick look-through and spend only twenty minutes in the Prehistoric Forest. But you would be denying yourself one of the park’s primary pleasures – an opportunity to quietly and languorously allow your imagination to roam.

a sign you can't miss if you're driving Route 340/522 North

(Go to Part One)
(Go to Part Two)

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| October 27, 2011
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Dinosaur Land: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Allosaurus on the prowl


(Go to Part One)

Dinosaur Land has added a number of additional statues since its opening back in 1964. Most of the additions have been carnivores (or herbivores being eaten by carnivores in life-sized dioramas of ancient life and death battles). I’d be curious to find out how many of the newer carnivores were added to the park after the huge success of the film version of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1993, which helped make Velociraptors part of every red-blooded American boy’s fantasy life.

Watch out, Stegosaurus! Oviraptor is about to steal your eggs!

The park certainly suffers from no shortage of meat-eaters now. Newer dinosaurs include a Gigantosaurus, a Dilophosaurus, a Velociraptor (star of the movie), a Megalosaurus, and an additional Tyrannosaurus, this one trying to take down a Titanosaurus. The park also added a few herbivores, including a Styracosaurus and a mother and baby Stegosaurus. (More fantastical additions have included a 60 foot-long shark, a 70 foot-wide octopus, and King Kong, I suppose to keep the 13 foot-tall praying mantis company.)

Boys, don't tick off the Stegosaurus! You wouldn't want to get whacked by that tail!

Oddly, one of the original figures has disappeared, the “cave man” (possibly a homo erectus, to try to judge from an old photo, but more likely a figure from the artist’s imagination). Possibly he was just too anatomically incorrect (but the 70-foot octopus and King Kong have remained?). Or maybe some overly exuberant children tried climbing up his back or yanked on his arms, toppling him over and smashing him beyond repair? I would bet on the latter, given my own children’s behavior (Asher, my middle son, admitted to breaking off one of the giant ground sloth’s claws while hanging on it; I sheepishly handed over the broken finger to one of the staff).

Tylosaurus is a fish out of water--actually, a marine reptile out of water

Dilophosaurus says, "Aww, Mom, just one snack before dinner?"

Pterodon swoops down on the attack!

Gigantosaurus says, "Mmm... tastes like chicken!" Pterodon says, "Shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning!"

Megalosaurus about to enjoy an Apatosaurus steak

Each child that attends Dinosaur Land receives a free copy of a wonderful booklet on the park’s recreations that was originally compiled and printed back when the attraction first opened in 1964 or shortly thereafter (the girl in the miniskirt on the rear cover, standing next to the Tyrannosaurus, makes me think the photos in the booklet might come from a little later, perhaps 1966?). It contains photos of the original 27 statues — dinosaurs, other prehistoric animals, and two oddities, a giant praying mantis and a giant king cobra. Especially eye-popping is to page through this little guide and see how comparatively desolate the park appeared in the mid-1960s compared to its lush foliage today. Back then, all of the trees in the park were saplings, none taller than five feet. Today, forty-five years later, the trees are all fully grown and provide dense shade above most of the animals’ heads. It is also intriguing to see how the paint schemes have been changed over the years on the original animals, such as the Dimetrodon, the Oviraptor, the Pachycephalosaurus, and the Stegosaurus. All of them have become much more colorful since their original unveilings.

Who is "Responsible for accidents," Pachycephalosaurus or Levi?

A 1993 article on Dinosaur Land in the Hampshire Review listed the park’s annual attendance at between 18,000 and 20,000 visitors per year, or an average of 50 visitors per day. That would roughly match the level of attendance I saw during the couple of hours the boys and I explored the park on a Sunday afternoon. About half a dozen families with 3-5 members wandered in while we were there, along with another four or five moms pushing a toddler in a stroller. There were a few ten or fifteen minute stretches during which we were the only guests present. Which was wonderful.

Tyranosaurus vs. Titanosaurus (I know who I'd place my bet on)

Despite the four scenes of carnage and combat (a Gigantosaurus munching down a pterodactyl; a Megalosaurus feasting on an Apatosaurus; a battle between a Titanosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus; and, if memory serves, another Tyrannosaurus facing off against a pair of Triceratopses), the park is exceptionally peaceful and quiet, inviting silent contemplation of the ancient beasts (and the fanciful creatures mixed in). I enjoyed as restful a Sunday afternoon with the boys as any I can remember. That, by itself, was well worth the $17 we spent on admission to the Prehistoric Forest.

(Go to Part Three)

Your kindly blog narrator, one second before his head is bitten off

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| October 25, 2011
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Dinosaur Land: Not Just Another Roadside Attraction

We're there! We're there!

Ah, roadside attractions… at one time in our national childhood, salvation for parents traveling cross country with their kids, looking desperately for a bathroom break and a pause from choruses of “Are we there yet?” Oases of fun for children stuck all day long in the rear storage hatch of their parents’ station wagon, tired of reading the same comic books over and over again.

hanging out with Triceratops

I grew up in South Florida at pretty much the end of the Golden Age of roadside attractions, just before the mega theme parks closed so many of them down by drawing away their customers (I was born in 1964, and Disney World opened in Orlando in 1971). I still remember Planet Ocean, Stars Hall of Fame Wax Museum, the Fun Fair, the Miami Serpentarium, the Mystery Fun House, Ocean World, Parrot Jungle (now Jungle Island), and Monkey Jungle (still going strong!).

My fondest dream as a kid was a pet Stegosaurus that I could ride to school

I loved dinosaurs as a kid. The only life-sized dinosaur statue anywhere near me was a scrawny Tyrannosaurus mounted in front of the parking lot of a furniture store located, I believe, in South Miami, placed there to make parents with kids pull over and take a look (and then maybe wander into the furniture store). The Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium had statues of a giant ground sloth and a sabretoothed tiger, but those were prehistoric mammals, not dinosaurs. Had I known back then that a place such as Dinosaur Land existed, I’m sure I would’ve bugged the dickens out of my mom and dad until they agreed to take me to White Post in rural northwestern Virginia, between Winchester and Front Royal (maybe combining that with a visit to relatives in Charleston, West Virginia, not too far away).

Good thing Psittacosaurus is a plant eater--that beak looks sharp!

Dinosaur Land was built the same year I was born. So it’s about 47 years old. The place doesn’t advertise much; I’ve driven the western stretch of I-66 a dozen times or more and never seen a billboard hawking the place, which is located only seven miles north of the highway, up Route 340/522 North. I stumbled upon a description of the place when I was looking online for weekend activities for my three boys. That was back at the height of the summer. I decided I’d wait for a perfect autumn day and then take my sons. The perfect day arrived this past Sunday, crisp and sunny. Off we went.

Mama Stegosaurus and her baby

Diatryma says, "There's Colonel Sanders! Hide me! Hide me!"

Cheer up, Dimetrodon! It'll be sailing season before you know it!

Dinosaur Land is completely charming. Any Baby Boomer (I came at the tail end of the boom) will be plunged into nostalgia by a visit. You enter the attraction through the gift shop (of course). This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because the gift shop is part of the charm of the place, with a tremendous variety of knick-nacks and tchotches for sale at all price ranges, from leather moccasins to dinosaur masks. As a parent, I was very pleased to find I didn’t have to spend a minimum of five bucks per kid on souvenirs; I could’ve easily spent a bundle (had I heeded my boys’ pleadings), but the shop also sold a huge assortment of rubber insects and small dinosaur figurines from 75 cents to $2.95, so I was able to redirect my childrens’ cravings to more reasonably priced items. Admission to the Prehistoric Forest is also very reasonable at $5 for adults and $4 for children (children two and under enter for free).

Pachycephalosaurus reminds himself, "Next time, I need to buy the anti-psoriasis shampoo!"

Once you exit the gift shop, you walk through a “cavern” to get to the Prehistoric Forest. The approximately three acre park contains 37 creature statues (not just dinosaurs), all either life-sized or larger than life-sized (I’ll explain that in an upcoming post). When the park opened in 1964, it had 26 statues. Since then, the owners have added several dinosaur battles and beefed up their stock of the trendy carnivores. Attached to the multi-room gift shop is a modest ranch house where the original owners once lived. They looked out their windows at Tyrannosaurus, a gigantic praying mantis right out of the 1957 monster movie The Deadly Mantis, and a Mylodon, or giant ground sloth. I wonder if they had kids.

Judah says to Moschops, "I prefer lamb chops!"

The dinosaurs are definitely old-school (except for the most recent additions), modeled upon the classic dinosaur murals that line the walls of the New York Museum of Natural History. Since then, paleontologists have completely revised their theories of how dinosaurs moved and lived, and many dinosaur skeletons in major natural history museums have been remounted to reflect the current view of dinosaurs as swift, active animals, possibly warm-blooded, very different from modern reptiles, more like modern birds. The Dinosaur Land dinosaurs, however, would all be very much at home in the Ray Harryhausen dino epics of the 1950s and 1960s.

Stegosaurus, the armored dinosaur which was my favorite when I was a boy, gets lots of love at Dinosaur Land. There are three of them, one an old-fashioned green gentleman and the other two a more updated mother Stego and baby. I was very pleased to see all of them.

cuddling with the friendly Stegosaurus, my childhood favorite

More photos to come! More dinos and other weird, fantastical creatures! A mystery dinosaur! The giant octopus from King Kong vs. Godzilla! And Kong himself!

(Go to Part Two)

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| October 11, 2011
7 comments

Colonial Beach, Resort From a Bygone Era


My son Levi is obsessed with maps. All kinds of maps. Road maps. Maps on place mats. Google maps. Perhaps the latter most of all. He can spend hours and hours on his little netbook computer, starting at our home in Manassas or perhaps in a nearby county, following various roads from screen to screen to see where they end up.

A few months back, he ended up in a place called Colonial Beach, Virginia, in Virginia’s Northern Neck, alongside the Potomac River, about sixty-five miles southeast of Washington, DC and an equal distance east of Richmond, Virginia. I’d never heard of the place. Levi couldn’t stop talking about it, though. He insisted that I look at Google with him while he navigated around the virtual town, pointing out the municipal fishing pier and the beach and various restaurants. He insisted that we go.

Monroe Bay, Colonial Beach


Google Maps said the drive from our house would take about ninety minutes. That certainly seemed doable for a day trip. So I told him we would go there sometime, half-expecting he would forget about the place. Then we got involved in all the events of summer: the swimming lessons, the soccer lessons, robotics camp, a trip to Long Island and New York City. I forgot about my promise to take Levi to Colonial Beach.

cottages across from the beach


Levi didn’t forget. Nearly every weekend, he asked me if this was the weekend we would be taking a drive to Colonial Beach. Eventually I ran out of excuses. A couple of Sundays ago, even though the day was overcast, cool, and occasionally drizzly, I picked the boys up from Sunday school and told them we’d be having lunch in Colonial Beach, followed by exploring. I felt like a long drive. I was in a mood to see some places I’d never seen before. Colonial Beach seemed a destination as good as any other.

riverside home under renovation


And wouldn’t you know it, but Levi picked a winner. “The Playground on the Potomac” has seen better days, certainly, but that is part of its charm and attraction. The town and its waterfront are currently suspended in a kind of Twilight Zone between urban decay and gentrification, between a distant past of Victorian opulence, a more recent past of fires and hurricanes and commercial abandonment, and a likely future as a boutique destination. Renovated waterfront Victorian homes and an Art Deco hotel sit just a few blocks away from beat old diners, a rusting, half-ruined beach playground dotted with piles of rotting driftwood, and curio shops so bizarre and disorganized you can’t tell from looking through their windows what is for sale and what is there just to provoke a double-take.

war memorial by the Potomac


Rod Serling would love this place. I love this place. And I’m nearly positive that, five years from now, I’ll hardly recognize it from my first visit. Towns like this in locations like this don’t sit in their Twilight Zones for very long. Eventually all of the “three-buck-breakfast-plate” greasy spoons will be replaced by French bakeries and spiffy joints offering nouvelle cuisine. Unless another disaster strikes, or a massive cutback in government spending results in a recession and high unemployment in the Greater Washington, DC region.

Bell House bed and breakfast inn


The roots of Colonial Beach stretch all the way back to 1650, when Andrew Monroe, the great-great grandfather of President James Monroe, founded a town called Monrovia on the approximate site of the present-day municipality. The town of Colonial Beach, which had begun thriving as a fishing and bathing resort, was formally incorporated on February 25, 1892. It possessed (and still boasts) the second-longest stretch of beach in the Commonwealth of Virginia, second only to that of Virginia Beach. Until the widespread popularity of the automobile, virtually all of the town’s visitors traveled by boat downriver from Washington, DC, and many stayed for the entire summer season. Homeowners included Alexander Graham Bell, whose house still stands as the Bell House Bed and Breakfast Inn.

the municipal fishing pier


However, automobile travel made weekend getaways more popular than the season-long hotel and cottage stays which had provided the mainstay of Colonial Beach’s economic livelihood, and the building of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge made the oceanside beaches of Maryland more accessible and attractive to travelers from Washington, DC than the “Playground on the Potomac.” Colonial Beach briefly regained favor with tourists and travelers by offering slot machines on riverboats anchored at the ends of excursion piers (the Maryland state line begins at the low-water mark of the Potomac River on the Virginia side, and gambling, outlawed in Virginia, was legal in Maryland), but the piers all burned down during a devastating fire in 1960, and the gambling boats never returned. Additional damage to the town’s infrastructure occurred in 2003 when Hurricane Isabel swept through the region.

my boys on the windswept beach


The beaches are still there, and the vistas they offer of the wide Potomac and the distant Maryland shore are very much worth seeing. While the boys and I were beachcombing, a large family arrived and pulled several huge bouquets of balloons from their vehicles. They set the balloons, several dozen of them, loose to ascend into the gray-clouded skies. I tried taking pictures of the balloon release, but I wasn’t quick enough, and the balloons are just tiny specks in my photos. I learned from the family that this was a memorial for Samantha Penney, their daughter and sister, who had been killed one year earlier by a drunken driver.

Doc's Motor Court Motel


The town’s waterfront is dotted with marinas and watering holes, most of which have put out sandy volleyball courts and picnic benches with either river views or bay views. What was once the town’s main riverfront commercial strip still bears the scars of Hurricane Isabel, with several blocks lacking any development at all. Fans of Depression-era commercial architecture will find much to appreciate. The downtown area includes Doc’s Motor Courts, still with its original neon sign, the Riverview Inn, a renovated Art Deco jewel, and the Hunan Diner, a Chinese restaurant which was once a railcar-style diner and which could be restored to its former glory (and probably will be, eventually, unless the wrecking ball finds it first).

view from the back deck of our lunch spot


The boys and I had lunch at the Lighthouse Restaurant and Lounge, which sits on the edge of Monroe Bay. It offers one dining room for Washington Redskins fans and another, separate dining room for Baltimore Ravens fans. Separate but equal, so far as I could tell (and hell, I’m a New Orleans Saints fan first, a Miami Dolphins fan second). The fried fish is very, very good.

the Riverview Inn, a nice bit of Art Deco


We didn’t get a chance to check out any of the town’s antique or curio shops (many of which were closed on a Sunday afternoon), and it was too wet out for the boys to play at Monroe Bay Park, which has an inviting, well-maintained playground. The boys could easily have stayed on the beach for many more hours, even without going into the water. So we’ll be back. It helps, too, that the drive between Manassas and Colonial Beach, along State Roads 218 and 205, is one of the prettiest in Northern Virginia.

Good job, Levi! Keep up the virtual exploring, kid!

Levi, happy to have finally reached his destination

Addendum: Here’s a fascinating article on the history of Colonial Beach, featuring interviews with some of its most prominent businesspeople and characters. It’s a marvelous evocation of the flavor of the town.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| September 28, 2011
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Potomac River Blockade Anniversary at Leesylvania State Park

Freestone Point today

What do you do if you’re the father of three rambunctious little boys, live in Northern Virginia, and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War has rolled around? You take them to plenty of Civil War reenactments and events, that’s what. Gets ’em out of the house, and maybe they’ll learn something.

Freestone Point Battery engaging the OSS Seminole and Jacob Bell Sept. 25, 1861

This past weekend marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Confederate blockade of the Potomac River following the rebel victory at the first Battle of Manassas. Confederate artillerymen mounted a small battery of four cannons at Freestone Point, meant primarily as a diversion from larger batteries which were being built upriver, closer to Washington, DC. On September 25, 1861, those four cannons exchanged fire with Federal gunboats OSS Seminole and Jacob Bell. Nobody was killed or injured on either side.

living historians at 150th anniversary of blockade of Potomac River

Leesylvania State Park, the present site of the Freestone Point Battery, marked the occasion with a living history reenactment. A woman in period dress invited my boys to enlist in the Confederate Army. First she looked at their teeth–they had to have at least one set of opposing teeth in front to join the infantry, so they’d be able to bite off the tops of cartridges of gunpowder. If they lacked opposing teeth in front, they’d have to go into the artillery. Levi and Judah got enlisted into the infantry; Asher, who’s been enjoying lots of visits from the Tooth Fairy recently, got shuffled over to the artillery. Four “soldiers” then gave the boys a demonstration of rifle drill, loading, and firing, which my sons expressed great enthusiasm for. I foresee myself buying one, maybe two Daisy air rifles sometime down the road.

modern day view from site of Freestone Point Battery

Leesylvania State Park, which hugs the Potomac River a little north of Triangle and Quantico, Virginia, is a beautiful place with a fascinating history. The land the park occupies was originally the estate of “Light Horse Harry” Lee, the Revolutionary War hero who was the father of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Freestone Point, a landmark within the park, became locally famous as a spot where sandstone could be easily quarried. Later, in 1861 and 1862, the bluff was selected as the site of a small battery of cannons mounted to enforce a Confederate blockade of Federal traffic along the Potomac River. Nearly a century later, in the late 1950s, the area became known as Freestone Point Park, a gambling and swimming resort. Landbased attractions included three swimming pools, one of them Olympic-sized, a Ferris wheel, a narrow gauge excursion railroad, restaurants, and bandstands for live music. There was also a mile’s worth of white sand beach and a pier which led to the S.S. Freestone, a gambling ship. As soon as a person stepped out onto the pier and over the Potomac’s waters, he or she left Virginia and entered Maryland, which made the activities on the gambling vessel legal. Here’s a quote from one of the park’s historical markers:

Gambling ship S.S. Freestone in the 1950s

“‘A Pacific Paradise on the Potomac,’ suggests the type of atmosphere that existed at Freestone Point in July, 1957. The S.S. Freestone, a gambling ship, was the main attraction of an exciting new recreational resort. Even though it was illegal to either gamble of sell liquor by the drink in Virginia at this time, activity on the S.S. Freestone was protected from Virginia law by mooring in Maryland waters. The S.S. Freestone featured 200 slot machines on her deck, a finely furnished restaurant on the second, and on the third deck a cocktail lounge, in Hawaiian décor, featured live music and dancing. Formerly an excursion steamer, the ship had been retrofitted as a floating casino. Special opening day ceremonies held on July 20, 1957, included events such as the live music of Johnny Long and his Orchestra, water ballet, water skiing exhibitions, raced by sailing craft, fireworks and a beauty contest to crown the Queen of Freestone Point.”

reptile and amphibian pond at Leesylvania State Park

Freestone Point Park and its gambling ship were but a memory by the mid-1960s, and the area sat fallow for a number of years before its owner donated it to the Virginia State Parks agency. Leesylvania State Park opened in 1992. One of the most imaginative and attractive reuses for an abandoned swimming pool I’ve ever seen is the park’s transformation of the old Olympic-sized pool into a reptiles and amphibians pond. The boys and I spotted bullfrogs, dozens of big tadpoles, a snapping turtle, and a red earred slider. The pond roughly retains the shape of the old, now vanished swimming pool. The old resort’s beaches, unfortunately, have mostly been eroded away by the Potomac’s tides.

A wonderful park. We’ll be going back, frequently. If only I can keep the boys from falling into the river…

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| September 22, 2011
4 comments

A Day at the Manassas Antique Car Show

I have to hand it to the folks at Manassas City Hall — they sure know how to fill a calendar. Just this past weekend, they had Old Town playing host to a Greek Festival on Friday, the Manassas Antique Car Show on Saturday, and the Latino Festival on Sunday. My boys and I made the latter two events.

Real rod and poseur rod... guess which one my boys liked best?

I love old cars. I picked up that love from my father, who always seemed to manage to drive something interesting, whether a 1962 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible or a 1969 Buick Riviera or his current car, a 2003 Lexus GS 300. Now I’m trying to pass along that love to my own sons. I’m not having to try too hard, either. They love anything with wheels, particularly monster trucks. But they also showed they were willing to spread their love to more vintage iron. Not always with the greatest of discernment — faced with a genuine vintage Ford hot-rodded coupe from the early 1940s and its knock-off, a Chrysler PT Cruiser tarted up with flames painted on its flanks and some mild engine mods, they “oohed” and “ahhed” over the Chrysler. Oh, well. They still have plenty of time to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or, considering that it’s now out of production and will be a presumably cheap first car by the time they hit their high school years, maybe my boys will develop a lifelong fondness for the PT Cruiser, the car they will have taken their girlfriend to the junior prom in. It’s not a bad vehicle to drive, by the way. My dad bought one, then passed it on to my sister, who still drives it. Shame it gets such lousy mileage for a compact car.

Ford Falcon Ranchero--my high school dream machine!

Now, here we’re talking — a 1965 Ford Falcon Ranchero! This was my dream car in high school, the trucklet I desperately wanted so I could cart around sets for one-act plays my club, the Pioneer Players, would put on in thespian competitions all over Florida. I did end up buying a Ranchero my senior year, but the one I found was a 1975 edition, a bloated monstrosity based on the 1975 Torino made sort-of famous by Starsky and Hutch. It had a 351 cubic inch Windsor V-8, so choked with smog control equipment my Ranchero risked being humiliated at stop lights by a Toyota Tercel of similar vintage. The truck’s bed had rust holes in it big enough for me to stuff grapefruits through, so my buddy Keith Johnson and his dad very kindly laid down a layer of fiberglass over the rust. Good enough! And yes, I took my girlfriend Ilma to the senior prom in the Ranchero, after spending an afternoon hand waxing it.

Corvair Monza Spyder--Judah says, "Where's the engine?"

Another car which immediately caught my eye was this gorgeous 1965 Chevy Corvair Monza Spyder. The Corvair really got a bum rap thanks to Ralph Nader; once GM made a few fairly minor adjustments to its suspension (rather than relying upon drivers to keep the front tires inflated to a different psi setting than the rears), it handled as well and predictably as any of the other, more conventional GM compacts. I think the styling is timeless (I also like the earlier “bathtub” Corvairs, of which there was one at the show). Of course, I played the “where’s the engine?” game with my boys. They’d never seen a rear-engined car before (I pulled the same stunt with a mid-1950s Volkswagon Beetle parked nearby).

Not an optical illusion--my 7 year-old son really IS as big as this Crosley

This Crosley was a definite oddity at a show mainly devoted to humongous 1950s-1970s American cruisers and performance cars. I’d like to compare the measurements of this Crosley to that of one of the modern Mini Coopers. The Crosley looks so much mini-er, but I’d have to see the figures to know for sure. Levi looks like an escapee from Land of the Giants next to the Crosley. That propeller in the center of the grill really spins, by the way. Levi was having a grand old time spinning it until the owner cried out in horror, “The chrome! The oil from that kid’s hands means I’ll have to replate the chrome!” Sorry, buddy… but your car looked like a big toy to my son…

They sure like that big motor...

The show featured lots of 1960s Camaros and Mustangs, plus some Mopars, too. One of my favorite cars of the afternoon ended up being a 1968 Dodge Charger. I’d never had an opportunity to take a look inside one before. It turns out that, just as they’d done with the original Plymouth Barracuda, Chrysler Corporation added the really nifty feature of a fold-down rear seat that extended the trunk all the way to the back of the front seats. Given the first generation Barracuda’s bubble-back rear glass and the Charger’s swoopy fastback, both cars allowed drivers to turn their trunks and back seats into servicable beds. I wonder how many Americans in their late thirties to mid-forties owe their existence to the convenience of these “Mopar Murphy beds”?

Boys, don't touch the car--don't TOUCH--!

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| September 21, 2011
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Celebrating a Sweet American Success Story

Sometimes missing your train is a good thing.

A few weeks back, I missed the last Virginia Railway Express train of the morning into downtown Washington, DC, which forced me to wait an hour and a half in Old Town Manassas for the subsequent Amtrak train. I figured I’d walk over to the only coffee shop in Old Town, Simply Sweet on Main, grab a cup of java, and sit with my laptop for ninety minutes, working on my current novel. While walking on Center Street towards Main, I approached a storefront which had been sitting dismally empty since before I’d moved to Manassas two years ago. It wasn’t empty anymore. In fact, it appeared to be… a second coffee shop!

I looked at the sign on the window. “Persnickety Cakes.” I stared inside at their menu board. It listed all kinds of coffees–lattes, frappuccinos, espresso drinks, and plain, ol’ American coffee. How sad I’d been two years ago, during my first visit to Old Town Manassas, to learn from the owner of Prospero’s Books (the neighborhood’s sole used bookstore) that Old Town’s only coffeehouse had closed barely two weeks earlier. About nine months later, Simply Sweet on Main opened up in the location of the closed coffeehouse. And now there was a second choice. Things were looking up for Old Town Manassas, the town invigorated, I imagined, by the sesquicentennial observances of the battles and events of the Civil War, particularly the two battles of Manassas/Bull Run.

A man I figured for the proprietor saw me staring at his menu board and waved from behind the counter, gesturing for me to enter. I waved back and decided to go in. I love Simply Sweet on Main and the folks who own the place and work there, but I wanted to support this new business, as well. I introduced myself to the owner, discovered we share a first name, and explained that I’d missed my train and was looking for a cup of coffee and a place to be for an hour and a half. We chatted some more, and Andy Goon asked if he could join me at a table next to the big windows looking out onto the hundred year-old commercial strip (I was his only customer). He told me that Persnickety Cakes’ main product line was their custom-made cakes, which could be ordered for parties, birthdays, or special occasions, or by restaurants for their dessert menus. But he and his family also offered items for the walk-in trade (like me)–muffins, coffees and teas, and fancy cupcakes in a plethora of interesting flavors, including Black Forest, red velvet, peanut butter, cookies and cream, and chocolate mint.

I asked Andy what he’d been doing before he’d opened up Persnickety Cakes a few weeks earlier, and if this was his first business. He told me he’d been a manager for Countrywide, the mortgage company which had been bought out by Bank of America and which had virtually imploded during the mortgage crisis of 2008-2009. Thousands of Countrywide employees were laid off, Andy among them. He told me he was actually glad he’d gotten out; he’d seen things go on that he didn’t want to talk about but that would stun and horrify people outside the financial industry, and the enormous pressures brought to bear on him during his final years with the company had turned him into someone he hadn’t liked much, a frazzled father too often short and curt with his three daughters, two sons, and his wife.

His wife, Tanya, had always loved to bake, and she’d long harbored the dream of opening her own bakery. Andy and Tanya decided this was the time to take the plunge and open their first business together, while they still retained savings that they could invest in their new effort. They had lived in Manassas for a number of years and had always loved the traditional, small-town commercial streets of the Old Town district. They’d observed with sadness how, one by one, many of the long-established small businesses along Center Street and its side streets had closed during the recession. They selected a location next to a barber shop which had managed to hang on, a storefront which had once housed a hobby shop but which had been vacant for several years. What they weren’t quite prepared for was the extent of the renovations the space would require, and the lengthiness and complexity of the permitting process.

Since the space had never been used for food service before, it would require a brand-new bathroom, one fully up to code and meeting all of the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements. Andy and Tanya split those costs with their landlord. However, they were faced with a huge unanticipated expense when their contractors discovered a layer of old asbestos tiles in the course of the work. The presence of asbestos triggered a whole new set of environmental reviews, regulations, and requirements and pulled in additional municipal overseers. The landlord balked at paying for many of the new costs. Andy and Tanya, having already sunk a good portion of their savings into this location, were faced with having to decide whether to cut their losses and abandon the store or to stick with their original plan and try to weather the asbestos-related expenses. They decided on the latter. It was a nerve-wracking decision; they didn’t know whether their savings would last long enough for them to actually open the bakery, then provide enough of a cushion to carry them through while they built their clientele. They sweated it out and aimed to open no later than the beginning of July, so they could benefit from the crowds sure to be pulled to Old Town Manassas by the anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run and all the city’s historic reenactments and special events. But delays in permitting and inspections caused them to miss their target opening date by a full month. Persnickety Cakes finally opened its doors on August 6, 2011.

Andy introduced me to Tanya, who had been baking in the back while we’d been talking, and to two of his three daughters, who were assisting their mother. I asked Andy and Tanya how they’d met. It turned out to be a story as sweet as one of their cupcakes, reminding me of an older America, an America that had prized its melting pot as one of its favored symbols. Andy’s family were Chinese Americans who owned a Chinese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. Years before Andy and Tanya ever met, Tanya’s mother, an African American, had been a regular customer at Andy’s parents’ restaurant. As teens, Andy and Tanya ended up working at the same McDonald’s, where their discovery that Andy’s best friend and Tanya’s best friend were cousins seemed to ratify their growing mutual attraction. They now have five teenaged children, all of whom help out in the bakery.

I took my three boys into Persnickety Cakes this past weekend, after we’d played games and listened to salsa and merengue bands at the Latino Festival at the Harris Pavillion in Old Town Manassas, a couple of blocks away. Unlike my first morning there, this time the bakery was bustling with customers. I asked Andy how business had been going in the five or six weeks since the first time we’d met. He looked at me with an expression of grateful amazement and told me he’d been selling cakes as fast as he and Tanya and the kids could bake them. I asked Levi, my oldest son, if he’d like “Mr. Andy” to bake him a birthday cake for his party come early November. Levi, having sampled a cookies and cream cupcake, enthusiastically replied “Yes!” He wanted Andy to invent a new flavor for his birthday cake, and helpfully suggested a combination of raspberry, coconut, and peanut butter (and I know Levi doesn’t like coconut). Andy gently suggested that we go with a flavor we already know Levi likes… like cookies and cream. Sounds good to me!

I couldn’t be happier for Andy’s and Tanya’s success. They took a huge risk with their family’s precious resources, and so far, it appears to be paying off for all of them. One of his daughters told me she wants to be an entrepreneur like her mom and dad when she is older. The fact that Andy was able to transition from the wreckage of one of the nation’s most infamous mortgage companies to opening his own business, while simultaneously helping to revitalize a corner of one of Virginia’s most historic neighborhoods, a business district which had been been partially hollowed out by the recession, gives cause for optimism that America’s traditional strengths of family, entrepreneurship, and “do-it-yourself, chase-that-dream” gumption will help pull us out of our current slump.

Persnickety Cakes is located at 9105 Center Street in Manassas, Virginia (571-379-8685; www.persnicketycakes.net ). They are open from 8 AM to 8 PM Mondays through Saturdays and from 11 AM to 5 PM on Sundays.

Category: Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| September 13, 2011
2 comments

Kitten Blogging!

innocence personified... NOT


Want to boost your page views? You can either claim that Sinead O’Connor has sworn undying love for your vampire character… or engage in the black art of kitten blogging.

My wife loves cats. No two ways about it. She had ten housecats when I met her, all rescues. By the time Hurricane Katrina rolled into town, we were down to eight. The stresses of going a week or more without food or water thinned the herd to a regrettable extent, so we were down to three cats when we moved north to Manassas. Bobby, our fourth current feline resident, was sort of an accidental housecat; Dara trapped her to get her spayed and meant to release her back into our neighborhood afterward. But while Bobby was convalescing in our house, she slipped the bounds of her cage and hid inside our walls for a few weeks. We’ve never been able to catch her, so she joined the other three by default.

Dara and the new addition to the household


Priscilla, however, is a kitten of choice. One of Dara’s friends who rescues cats and kittens from the streets emailed Dara a photo of what she described as the friendliest little kitten she’d ever laid hands on. We took the boys to meet her this past Sunday, and Priscilla, I’m happy to say, gave as good as she got, not backing down an inch from my sons’ overly enthusiastic play. All three boys are desperate for a cat who will sleep with them, rather than Dara, and Priscilla may well be the one.

I’m a dog guy, not a cat guy. But I must say, I like this one. At least until she shreds the upholstery on my favorite chair…

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| September 8, 2011
2 comments

The Foxes Head North

Levi and Asher in the clutches of King Kong!

This past week, the Fox Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia headed north — not stopping in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but looting and pillaging all the way into New Jersey and the southern portions of New York. Food vendors all along the Delaware and New Jersey Turnpikes were terrorizied by small boys running rampant (after having been cooped up in a station wagon for hours). Yankee children in various parks and playgrounds were accosted by their rambunctious Southern cousins, and motel beds groaned under the weight of boys joyfully using them as trampolenes while watching normally forbidden Adult Swim episodes on Cartoon Network.

This was our first Official Family Vacation since moving to Manassas two years ago. Having lived on Long Island from 1987 to 1990, I have many good friends there, and since then I’ve gained new business associates in New York City and had some of my New Orleans friends relocate there following Hurricane Katrina. It was time to renew all those connections, and I was eager to share my family with my friends and share New York, both the City and Long Island, with my boys.

Charlie Pellegrino, a.k.a. El Frenetico (with kung-fu sidekick Go-Girl)


We stayed in an America’s Best Value Inn in Smithtown on Long Island, so the boys got to eat donuts for breakfast four mornings in a row. No complaints there, at least not from the boys! Wednesday night we stopped in Northport before heading to our motel. We met Charlie and Ann Marie Pellegrino and their two sons, Christian and Joseph, for dinner at the Venus Greek Restaurant on Fort Salonga Road (yes, I know Venus was a Roman goddess, not a Greek goddess; but if they’d called it the Aphrodite Greek Restaurant, they would’ve had to have spent a lot more money on the sign). I used to eat all the time at the Venus back when I was a young bachelor and it was located about a half mile west. Used to walk through foot-deep snow to get there, mainly for the egg lemon soup (and the pretty young Greek waitresses). They still serve excellent vegetarian grape leaves and egg lemon soup. I first met Charlie at the Northport Public Library, where we both attended a lecture on Sylvia Plath’s poetry (and were the only two males in attendance, as well as the only two attendees under the age of 70). He then introduced me to the rest of my Northport friends, and later went on to star as the washed-up Mexican wrestler-superhero El Frenetico in a trio of “El Frenetico and Go-Girl” short movies — which are a hoot! (And which are available on Amazon, but only in VHS, and currently only at collectors’ prices, unfortunately.)

Peter Rubie with Levi, Asher, and me


On Thursday, following a minor mishap with Dara’s cell phone’s GPS (which led us to Port Jefferson, rather than to the Smithtown railroad station), the family took the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan to have lunch with Peter Rubie of the Fine Print Literary Agency (my relatively new agent, and the man whose efforts you should all cheer on if you ever want to see any more of my books reach print), my old high school buddy Maury Feinsilber (who has recently been lighting up publications like The Missouri Review with his short fiction), and Maggie Zellner, Dara’s best friend from NOCA, the New Orleans Creative Arts high school, whom she hadn’t seen in twenty-six years. The boys behaved themselves surprisingly well, allowing us adults to catch up and even talk a little business. Peter was an absolute prince; he couldn’t have been more warm to the family. Best line of the afternoon, via Dara: “Maggie, I went from picking up boys in Georgetown to picking up after boys in Manassas!”

Judah looking like a real city kid


After letting the trio of youngsters burn off some of their steam in a pair of Manhattan playgrounds, I took them to the 86th floor observatory of the Empire State Building (expensive, but worth it if you only get into Manhattan once every decade or so). My own dad took me there when I was five; I’m sure it was a lot less expensive then (but they didn’t have nearly as many King Kong tchotches on sale back in 1970). What helped make it worth the price of admission was a guy in a gargantuan King Kong outfit who posed for photos with the kids. My youngest, Judah, got too scared at the last minute and clung to my leg while his brothers embraced the big ape. Then we went outside to oogle the Chrysler Building, the U.N. Building, and the Hudson and East Rivers.

me and Maury Feinsilber at the beach


On Friday we picked Maury up at the Huntington train station and ate lunch at the Shipwreck Diner in Northport, then headed over to the beach at Sunken Meadow State Park (which had just reopened the day before, after having been closed down by Hurricane Irene). I’ve been spoiled by the fine, sandy beaches of the Gulf Coast and South Florida, so the rocky shoreline of Long Island Sound caused a bit of “ook”-ing and “ouch!”-ing (didn’t bring flip-flops with me), but the bluffs ringing the beach are gorgeous, and we all loved the various types of gulls that flocked to Dara’s offerings of leftover french fries and stale cookies. It was great to get to hang out with Maury. I just wish we could do it more often. You never run out of things to talk about with someone who was your best friend in high school.

Laura Joh and Marty Rowland


Friday night we headed west to Garden City, to have dinner with Marty and Laura Joh Rowland. We knew Marty and Laura from New Orleans, where Laura had been a founding member of George Alec Effinger’s monthly writing critique group that I learned so much from between 1994 and 2009. Marty and Laura relocated to Queens a few years after rebuilding their home in Old Gentilly in New Orleans, flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Laura has continued writing her mystery series set in seventeenth century Japan which began with Shinju and Bundori; her latest is The Ronin’s Mistress, due out on September 13, just a few days from now. Levi, my little future engineer, spent most of dinner talking about building bridges and neighborhoods with Marty, who works as an environmental engineer with the City of New York; we had to do a bit of hydrological engineering when Levi accidentally spilled a glass of water all over himself. Not the worst of all possible disasters, but the restaurant was perhaps a bit too “posh” for my boys (Denny’s is generally about as upscale as Dara and I dare go). I’m really happy to see Laura and Marty thriving in New York.

Saturday we went beachcombing on Centerport’s town beach, where the kids collected smelly clam shells, oyster shells, and various body parts of deceased horseshoe crabs. Judah found a crab tail, which he immediately pronounced was his “claw,” and he told his brothers he was now Wolverine. Then we got together with the multitalented Jon Sanborne, poet, plant tender, singer in punk rock band Satan’s Cheerleaders, outlandish villain in various El Frenetico movies, and alumnus of the Smoke Stack group of writers, which briefly thrived on Long Island in 1990. Jon was kind enough to repair Judah’s crab tail with a strip of Scotch tape after my son cracked it in half (and was immediately inconsolable about the loss).

Chris Limbach, the young reincarnation of Frank Sinatra, and Jon Sanborne


After hooking up with Jon, we all headed for the Pellegrinos’ house for a pool party and barbeque. Charlie and Ann Marie were gracious hosts, and many of the guests they invited also brought little boys of various shapes and sizes, so mine had plenty of playmates. Dara and I basked in an unusual atmosphere of relaxation; we both realized this was the first party we’d ever attended where we’d felt secure just letting the boys go off by themselves and play with their peers. The Pellegrinos’ basement and dens were already brimming with toys and games and clutter; most of the things that could be broken had already been broken long ago by the Pellegrino boys themselves, so my sons had few opportunities to add more destruction or mess. So Dara and I were free to enjoy our friends. And so many friends! Charlie rounded up virtually the whole gang from my last year in Northport — Chris Limbach, another alumnus of the Smoke Stack group, and his two young sons (one of which was very natty in a Sinatra-like hat); Jon; Jim and Deb Robertson; and photographer Cliff Gardiner and his wife Marie and their son. The passage of time could not be better illustrated by the fact that the bunch of us, all lonely and moderately miserable bachelors back in 1990, were now, for the most part, married and carting around little crews of between one and three young boys apiece. We stayed as long as we could, considering we had to get the kids to bed so we could wake up early the next morning and get back on the road. Would we could have stayed longer.

Joyce and Barry Malzberg in front of their home


Sunday morning we said “so long” to our temporary home in Smithtown, after having made friends with an insurance adjuster up from Tennessee, in New York to assist with recovery from Hurricane Irene. Then we headed off to Teaneck, New Jersey and the home of Barry and Joyce Malzberg. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Barry twice before, once at a SF convention in Dallas and once at the Newark Airport, but this was my first time meeting Joyce. As my pal Maury would say, “What a doll!” She treated my boys like they were her own grandsons and made us all feel extremely welcome in her home. We all walked the boys over to a neighborhood playground, then walked another few blocks to a pizza parlor for lunch. Barry and I swapped stories of Noreascon II, the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, which we both attended (although we didn’t bump into each other during the con). Back then, Barry was working on the essays which would come to make up his classic collection, The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties, and I was a fifteen year-old fanboy, carrying around a stack of fanzines to sell (gave them all away), and a box of corn flakes and a tin of raisins so I wouldn’t have to spend any of my money on food but could spend it all on books in the dealers’ room. All too often, we lack an opportunity to tell our heroes how much they mean to us, or we let those opportunities slip past. I made sure not to let this opportunity get away. And Joyce, if you would like to be Levi’s, Asher’s, and Judah’s honorary grandma, the job is yours!

All in all, a wonderful trip (despite the fighting and the tumult in the car during the long drive home; the boys arrived back in Manassas duly chastised). Friendships can wither if they aren’t occasionally watered. I’m very happy we took time to sprinkle some water around New York and New Jersey.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: ,
| August 29, 2011
Comments Off on Remembering Katrina, Six Years On

Remembering Katrina, Six Years On


It’s Monday, August 29th.

Six years ago, on another Monday, August 29th, Hurricane Katrina, a Category Three storm pushing a Category Five storm surge, slammed into coastal Mississippi. For the first twelve hours after landfall, the city of New Orleans appeared to have avoided the worst. But then the levees designed to hold back Lake Pontchartrain began breaking — the Industrial Canal levee, the 17th Street Canal levee between Metairie and the western parts of New Orleans, the London Avenue Canal levee adjacent to the Gentilly neighborhood, and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet levees that had been meant to protect Chalmette and St. Bernard Parish. Within a day, eighty percent of the City of New Orleans had flooded, and nearly all of St. Bernard Parish was underwater. At least 1,836 people died along the Gulf Coast, most from the flooding, making Katrina the deadliest storm in U.S. history since the 1928 Lake Okeechobee Hurricane in South Florida, when approximately 2,500 people were killed.

Thank God Hurricane Irene wasn’t worse than it was. The worst effects of Irene appear to be the delayed effects, the post-storm swelling of rivers and streams. Vermont, where Irene swept through as a tropical storm, looks to be suffering the worst flooding. Seeing the photos of homes inundated with rushing water brought back a lot of memories. Those folks in Vermont and New Jersey and the flooded portions of Philadelphia are going to have many tough months ahead of them. Water is a terrible destroyer of homes, far worse than high winds. Winds may leave many beloved possessions behind, still salvageable. Water, and the mold growth it induces, rots one’s possessions and turns them to foul, stinking garbage. It’s an awful thing to witness.

My family and I were stranded in Albuquerque, New Mexico six years ago. We’d flown out with our two baby sons and four days’ worth of clothing and medicines to attend the Bubonicon science fiction convention and to visit my parents. We weren’t able to return to our home in New Orleans for almost two months. We had the great fortune that our house was located on the west bank of the Mississippi, in a different flood plain from the majority of New Orleans, and so was spared the flooding that devastated over a hundred thousand homes. But had the storm made landfall just fifteen miles more to the west, it would have been our levees that breached, and our neighborhood would have been inundated with up to nine feet of water.

My hopes go out to all those folks who will be rebuilding after a flood. It is heartbreaking, backbreaking, stinking work. But somehow, it gets done.

I’ve posted an article I wrote called “Crossing the River Styx,” which was about my return to New Orleans six weeks after the levees broke. It originally appeared in Moment Magazine in April, 2006. The congregations I describe in the article have all rebuilt and are once more thriving, six years on.

Category: Big Easy, Slices of Life | Tags: , , ,
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