Month: May 2021

31 May 2021

After visiting Fairchild, I took the back way into Coconut Grove through shady narrow streets will multimillion dollar mansions lining the road. I was an early visitor to Coconut Grove in the 80’s, discovering it during the Coconut Grove Arts Festival. The festival started in 1963 as a publicity stunt for the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s production of Irma La Douce. As far as I know, its been continuous ever since until it was cancelled last year for the pandemic.

Each year the festival produces an official poster and I think 1988 was my first year of attendance. It got to be a habit to purchase the year’s poster and I would have them framed. I got this nasty habit from Ron Jones who probably has every poster ever issued by the festival.

It’s one of the largest outdoor art festivals in the country and it takes up most of downtown Coconut Grove over the second or third weekend in February. Crowds can be so dense that it’s difficult to move. Artists sell quite well and we are not talking cheap craft stuff.

Much later (in the 90’s) Ron’s friend who shared season tickets at the Coconut Grove Playhouse moved away and I started doing the season with Ron at the playhouse.

The playhouse opened in 1927 as a movie theater and was refurbished as a playhouse in the 1950’s. It opened in 1956 with the US premier of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I even got to see the revival on the stage one year.

The playhouse has a long history of famous actors on the stage: Maureen Stapleton, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Eve Arden, Tallulah Bankhead, Carol Channing, Liza Minnelli, Linda Lavin, Bea Arthur, George C. Scott, Collene Dewhurst, Ethel Merman and Raúl Esparza.

Sadly, the theater became mismanaged and closed. The city and state are still talking about reopening the theater but the latest suggestion is to raze everything but the front facade of the building and completely build a new theater.

I’ve seen some excellent productions there. It was a very cozy theater and Ron had third row seats. My most nervous time at the playhouse was when smoke began to billow out of the back of the stage. The actors were confused about the ripple of nervousness that went through the audience and finally stopped the performance to look around. Shortly, someone came on stage and said there was a small fire in the back of the theater and for us to calmly evacuate. Fortunately, I was near an exit. However, when all clear was given, I refused to go back in. Joel and Keith were with us that night and I stayed out in the car until the play ended. I have this horror of fires in theaters. If they do reopen the theater, hopefully they’ll upgrade their safety features from the old building.

I would leave from campus in Hollywood and drive down to Coconut Grove and meet Ron at his place. From there, we mostly went to the Kaleidoscope, our favorite eating establishment. Hans was our waiter 9 times out of 10 and he made sure to pamper us with attention. This went on for years.

Like all good things, the Kaleidoscope closed. Hans opened his own restaurant on the same street and it was good but he couldn’t keep a chef. Hans’ attempt also went belly up.

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Another entertaining part of the Grove is the annual King Mango Strut. The Strut was started in 1982 by Glenn Terry and Bill Dobson to parody the King Orange Jamboree Parade for the Orange Bowl. Their band, the King Mango Marching Band was denied permission to march in the King Orange Jamboree Parade, so they started the strut. It’s the height of satire where participants poke fun and local, state and national figures and issues.

Probably one of the more interesting contingents in the parade is “Friends of Fred.” It was named after the Miami Herald wine critic Fred Tasker. Anyone named Fred could march with the group as friends of Fred Tasker (you may think the name Fred is a rare one but you should see the contingent. One year, Holley and Wilson had shirts made up for everyone in our group of parade attendees. Some of the comments on the shirts included “Better Fred Than Dead” and “Better Fed than Fred.” Finally, my shirt just said “Fred.” Again, sadly, the parade was cancelled for last year.

The Grove holds a lot of memories for me. One of the oldest gay bars in Dade was located there (I think it was called Hatties) next to a head shop – at the time legal. You could get an ice cold beer at the bar and then people watch as they paraded by the bar. You could enter the bar from the street side shown in the photo below or you could walk down a hallway (no longer there) to get to a side door if you didn’t want to be seen entering a gay establishment.

What was unique about Hatties was there was no membership to go inside. Straights as well as gays were welcome as long as everyone got along. At the time, in most of Dade and Broward, you had to be a “member” of a gay establishment to enter. In essence, it was a door charge but it was a way the bars protected themselves from police raids. Dade and Broward were still very conservative at the time. You would even be issued a membership card (Stonewall Library and Archives in Fort Lauderdale has hundreds of these cards). If you forgot you card, you simply paid a door charge. All you had to do at Hatties was walk in and order a beer.

There is a French restaurant that always had a great reputation on Main but I always found it to be a little dicey. I ordered leek soup one night there and the leeks were very, very gritty. I think the chef was a little incensed when I mentioned it to the server. The explanation was you shouldn’t mind a little grit in your soup.

At one time, Coconut Grove had some very high end shops. Interspersed were some wacky, cutesy shops but definitely more on the high end. The only thing that has consistently been there and no changed whatever is the Christian Science Reading Room. At one time, it was sitting on some of the most valuable real estate in Florida. It’s still there.

It used to be a great deal of fun to walk the streets of Coconut Grove. It was a window shoppers paradise. Most of the buildings fit the Mediterranean style or Spanish style famous in Coral Gables (next door).

From my visit on Friday, I can tell the Grove has been hit hard by the pandemic and only now is coming back. You used to be able to walk by the outdoor cafes and hear virtually every language in the world. It, at one time, was the world’s shopping district with a little bit of something for everyone. I suspect Sawgrass Mills in Broward put a significant dent in the traffic and the pandemic simply finished it off. Hopefully, it will come back better than ever.

What was that Thomas Wolfe book? “You Can’t Go Home Again”

30 May 2021

When I moved to south Florida in 1985, I made a point of trying to get to know the area since it was so new to me – at least I thought. I later found out Mom and Dad had brought Archie and me down here for vacation. Mom loved to tell the tale of me getting carried out to sea on a rip current. After exploring a little, I found the little Mom and Pop motels along the beach strangely familiar.

In any case, to get better familiar, every weekend, I traveled to a different location to soak in the color. One of my first stops was Fairchild Tropical Garden.

Fairchild is the largest tropical garden in the continental United States (Hawai’i is basically one large tropical garden) and is comprised of 83 acres with over 3,400 species of plants. What especially interested me in the garden was it has the largest cycad collection anywhere. Cycads are a very primitive group of plants that look, at first glance like a mixture of palm trees and ferns. They reproduce by spores and at one time were considered to wind pollinated – a very inefficient method of pollination. It was Fairchild Tropical Garden that discovered that at least one species was insect pollinated which led to reassessment of the group of plants as evolutionarily primitive.

The garden opened in 1938 and was named after the noted plant discover and explorer David Fairchild. He would travel the world to look for new plant species and would often introduce them into the United States as ornamentals or as fruit and spice species. Unfortunately, sometimes the plants grew too well in south Florida and became nuisance plants.

After getting familiar with the garden on my first visit, I started bringing students from my botany class. It was like pulling teeth to get them to leave Broward County to come to Dade – many had never left their home town before. However, once they made the trip, they usually decided it was worth the effort.

A big part of Fairchild is education. I’ve attended many of their night classes. Believe me, it was tough driving down I-95 at night for a class that began at 8 pm, driving back home and teaching the next morning at 8 am. Two classes remained with me for quite a while – one on palms and another on orchids. For the orchid class, we cultivated orchids and visited some of the major orchid dealers in south Florida. If you don’t know, most of the orchids you purchase are actually clones and grown in glass vials.

As I was getting ready to write this, I went to my Photos and realized I only had three photos of the garden. I know I’ve taken photos every trip down (at least 20 or 30 over the years) but I could not find them anywhere. Yesterday, I made a trip down, renewed my membership which had lapsed since I quit field trips, and toured the garden. It was like seeing an old friend. I also replenished my photos of the garden.

The garden has changed over the years. The original entrance to the garden was through a small gate with an even smaller parking lot.

You entered right at the Montgomery Garden House (where I’ve seen many orchid shows) and the research library.

I confess to spending way too much money on botanical manuals in that tiny library.

The next thing you would see is the cycad circle, a pretty good representation of cycads from around the world. There’s only one cycad native to Florida and that is Zamia pumila or coontie. The rarest plant in the world is a cycad from Africa. It’s only known from one plant and that plant is a male so it will never reproduce.

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Over the years, the garden has hosted all kinds of exhibits, shows, and plant sales. One special exhibit was by Dale Chihuly who completed filled the major walking paths with his glass sculptures. I was fortunate to see it both in daylight and at night. At night, all the sculptures were lit within the garden – truly magnificent.

On this visit, they were exhibiting dinosaurs within the park. It called “Jurassic Garden: A Prehistoric Adventure” and it matched Jurassic plants with Jurassic dinosaurs. From what I could see, it was a big hit with the kids.

They now have a new entrance and gift shop (I preferred the old ones) and the Rainforest Cafe still makes excellent sandwiches.

You can eat outside under a huge chicle tree (from what they make chewing gum) and socialize with fellow visitors and suggest places to visit within the garden.

Because of the pandemic, they’ve stop the tram tours. They are a hoot and the best way to see the larger parts of the garden unless you really, really like to walk – remember, it’s 83 acres. Volunteers run the trams and you get some real comics giving the tour. Unlike the tram tours of Key West, you get pretty factual information about the plants and the garden.

Whenever I have guests from out of state or out of town, this is my go-to visit for them. I’ve taken Archie and Tanis, Michael Llewellyn, and many others. It never fails to impress.

One of the more interesting places in the garden is the rare plant house. It houses plants that are considered rare species worldwide. It’s a huge greenhouse. They now have a separate orchid house and butterfly house in the vicinity of the rare plant house.

Another section of the garden is set aside for a rain forest. To mimic the conditions, they have attached sprinkler systems in the tops of trees. It’s amazing to walk through because the humidity is astronomical inside the forest.

To get a better understanding of Fairchild, click here for a video I put together.

22 May 2021

With apologies to the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III “Now is the summer of our discontent.” Summer in South Florida. Actually, life in South Florida is excellent climate-wise for six months of the year. The other six months can be a little overbearing with the three “h’s”: humidity, heat, and hurricanes. As I wrote before, May 15 is the onset of the rainy season and before that date, it’s really like late spring down here. After that date, anything goes.

Spring is early in South Florida. My sure fire way of recognizing spring is the blooming of the yellow tab tree (Tabebuia argentia is the common one in our area). I’ve seen it bloom as early as February. There was one growing outside my window at the office on Broward College South Campus and I think it had to be one of the earliest of bloomers of the species. They can be quite spectacular when in full bloom.

The tree drops all its leaves before blooming and you get one large tree full of flowers. It’s a very brittle tree and, as we say down here, it self prunes in hurricanes.

As a kid in Mississippi, I recognized spring by the first robin and the emerging daffodils. Then came the dogwoods and redbuds. Spring in South Florida is a little harder to discern because it goes from chilly to very warm within a few days. Some of our trees shed their leaves, not in the fall, but in the spring and summer.

May is the time of the Royal Poinciana (Delonix regia) native to Madagascar but so widely planted in South Florida that it is rare to drive more than a block or two and not see one.

Poincianas are at their best from around now until the middle of June but you’ll find flowers on them as late as July and even August. What strikes me about this tree, other than the brilliant red color of the petals, is the yellow reflexed sepals with orange trim. I’ve often thought that the sepals would be a great model for a metal candle holder.

Down here, many people confuse the Royal Poinciana with the Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia). Understandable in a sense since many neighborhoods use both names: Jacaranda Estates, Poinciana Way, etc. However, the flowers are different. The common species of Jacaranda down here has blue flowers. The tree flowers from July until around late September.

Instead of robins, we watch the manatees leave the springs of Central Florida and migrate down to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream near us. At the same time the manatees are moving south, the buzzards are heading back to Hinkley, Ohio. Since large numbers inhabit the roof the federal courthouse in Miami during the winter, people going to trial are no longer exposed to them looking over at them with hunger in their eyes. Crows migrate back north and I’ve often floated in the pool counting crows flying either north or south depending on the month until I get tired of counting.

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We also have a four season tree, the pongom tree (Pongamia pinnata). This time of year it produces copious amount of blooms to the point they cover the ground. These are massive trees and unfortunately, they have a shallow root system which means they tend to topple during hurricanes, often taking the roofs of houses with them.

Soon the flowers will set fruit and that means the ground is then re-covered in seed pods. After the seed pods disappear, there is a brief time of just green leaves. Then, in the early spring, the leaves fall. If you plant one of these, for nine of the twelve months you are sweeping something up from the driveway and sidewalks. It’s gotten to be such a nuisance that the Institute of Food and Agricultural Science (IFAS) considers it invasive and not to be planted.

When one in my neighbor’s yard behind me toppled, it took a section of the roof off the house and produced a root ball so large it took up half the yard with it. It cost several thousand dollars to remove so they left it for a couple of years after cutting the top of the roof.

One of the summer plants I remember in Mississippi was the crepe myrtle (Lagerstoemia indica). One grew outside my Grandmother Ruby’s back door. Dad would cut it down to the root stock every winter and it would bounce back out in the spring and in the summer produce light purple blooms. We have a crepe down here but it is the Queen Crepe (Lagerstroemia speciosa) and everything about it is larger – the tree, the leaves, and the flowers.

Everything else about it looks like L. indica except it looks like it is on steroids. Even with the larger size, I get a little nostalgic when I see this in bloom.

I guess what I’m saying is that due to the subtropical climate of South Florida, the seasons seem to be reversed. Spring is Fall, Winter is Summer. Well, actually, spring, fall and winter are all summer. More accurately, a lot of plants shed their leaves in the spring, birds migrate north in the spring and arrive down here in the winter, and sea cows know a good thing and stay in the state year round.

18 May 2021

I moved into my house in 1995 with the help of a good friend who wrote my mortgage and the GI Bill. I actually looked at the house once before but decided I didn’t want a house with a pool. After a dearth of other available inventory, I ended up where I am now. Ironically, the pool is where I spend most of my time.

At the time I didn’t know anything about taking care of a pool but I figured I had enough chemistry background I could at least get the chemicals right. Trust me when I say it’s not that easy but after 27 years here, I finally have gotten the chemicals pretty much down pat. Regardless, every once in a while, the pool goes haywire and I spend the next two weeks figuring out what the deal is with the pool.

What I did not anticipate was the variety of things that I find in the pool every morning. I’ve gotten into the habit of looking out the window to see what is in the pool. Often it is simply a palm frond that blew into the water. I get that out as soon as I can because sometimes the hose to the Great White Shark (pool cleaner) gets tangled in it. You can actually tell the seasons down here by what leaves are in the pool.

Every time I do my laps, I usually spend some preliminary time gathering leaves of the surface and the bottom of the pool before I start my laps. The reason is it is disconcerting to be mid lap and have leaves brush up against you thinking they are pool monsters.

Then there are the real monsters. Yesterday, I looked out and noticed something on the bottom of the shallow end and thought it was just a piece of palm frond. I ignored it and thought it would be simple enough to remove when I got ready to swim. After my walk, my second cup of coffee and my yoga stretches, I was ready to hit the pool. I noticed the object was now floating upright in the pool as opposed to on the bottom as before. As I started to reach down to pull it out, it moved. It was a legless lizard. I used the net to pull it out and dump it on the outside of the fence hoping it would find a burrow to go back into. I found one in the pool before but never floating vertically like that. It’s not a good scene for the lizard because I’m sure the chlorine in the pool would have eventually been toxic.

My pool seems to be a microclimate for botanical and zoological study. I had an algae that got started that was pink. It was a little embarrassing to take the great white into the pool store with pink all over it.

Other forms of wildlife that are frequent visitors are migrating land crabs. At one time they were so common along Riverland Road next to my house that hundreds were crushed by the traffic along the road. Every year, the land crab migrates from a burrow in the ground to a water source to lay their eggs. Most of the time, they find the canals around my area but I usually get three or four a year in the pool. If I don’t find them soon enough, they expire due to the chlorine.

I’ve found mole crickets, termites, large frogs and baby frogs and salamander eggs. Just so you know, frogs lay eggs in masses but salamanders lay eggs in strings.

Mole crickets are pretty common. They are an interesting species. The males burrow into the ground and then use the “tunnel” as an amplifier for their calls to females. It’s like they use a megaphone. I find them swimming around at certain times of the year – probably accidentally falling into the pool.

After every swim, I swim over to the hose attachment and pull any leaves out of there. I’ve reached in blindly too many times and have pulled out a large frog and a ring-necked snake. That’ll get your attention. I tend to look before I grab these days.

Ring-necks down here are very small – around 6-8 inches long. I try to get to them before they are pulled into the filtration system but I have often found their carcasses in the pool filter.

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In the spring of the year I get swarms of termites who drown in the pool. Then there are the ants. I’ve had them take up residence in the skimmer for some reason. They even get pulled into the filtration system on the side of the house and amazingly, when I clean the filter, live ants are washed out of the filter.

The saddest thing are the bees that drown in the pool. I image they are trying to skim the surface for water but get caught by a wind wave and get waterlogged and cant fly out. The same goes for beetles. They at least swim to the hose and climb on for the ride of their life when the pool pump comes on. The hose constantly vibrates when the pump is on. Spiders love to skim along the surface of the pool and I’ve removed a good many of them but more of their exoskeletons that shed into the pool. Dragonflies constantly skim the surface and on occasion, I pull one or two dead ones out.

About the only thing I haven’t found in the pool are birds, rats, or O’possums. I did go through a period of time that a raccoon would wash its food on the pool steps and after washing her food she would live a pile of poop on the step – under water. Good thing I chlorinate the pool. I used to watch a live podcast of this guy back before there were podcasts and he complained about raccoons pooping in his pool. We commiserated over having to clean that out every morning. A couple of times I heard something outside and flipped the outside lights on and saw the raccoon on the pool steps. She paid me no mind whatsoever.

The good news is I have never had an alligator in the pool – although that is fairly common in Florida. Just to be sure, I look before I leap into the pool.

And then, there are the members of the lizard family. I have the curly tail lizard, the brown basilisk and the green iguana in the brown and green phase as well as breeding phase. In addition, the brown anole and scaly tailed lizard are frequent guests.

The brown basilisk is the one that can run fast enough on two legs it looks as though it can “walk” on water. I’ve seen one run across the pool surface. The curly tail lizard is a newer phenomenon in my neighborhood but have apparently been in south Florida for a while. I started noticing them about 10 years ago. I’ve even had the scaly tailed lizard which is an omnivore and will eat other lizards.

They all hang out around the pool deck, in my gutters, in the palm trees and any place else that can find. Those in the palm trees that overhang the pool simply deposit their poop in the pool and they allow me to fish it out with the net. If anyone is in need of iguana guano, I’m your man!

My pool never ceases to entertain me.

16 May 2021

I read the other day that the National Rifle Association (NRA) lost their court battle with the state of New York. The NRA was trying to declare bankruptcy in New York state (the NRA was chartered in New York state) so they could escape a fraud and self-dealing suit brought by New York’s Attorney General.

What I find interesting is that the NRA is being accused of what most right-to-work states accuse unions of doing – having the union leadership live a life high on the hog and misusing funds of the union.

The NRA has undergone significant changes since my childhood days. I’ve previously written about Boy Scout Expositions at the state fairgrounds in Mississippi. Once a year, the Andrew Jackson Council of Boy Scouts of America would put on an expo where troops from the council would choose some topic and use a booth at the expo to expound on that topic.

One year, we chose gun safety. It was a no brainer because there had been a lot of accidental shootings during hunting trips in the state and it was getting out of control. We used the NRA for information on gun safety. That was the purpose of the NRA at that time – gun safety. It had no political leanings and it had a very small membership and it certainly didn’t try to defend the use of military grade weapons.

At the expo, we built a “fence” in our booth and taught people how to properly cross over a fence with a shotgun or rifle. We had both in the booth. You would always break the shotgun and remove the shells and leave the gun broken if you had someone to hand the shotgun to or snap it back into position and lean on the opposite side of the fence if not.

For a rifle, you would remove any shells from the rifle, lean it on the other side of the fence and then cross. I personally know of one person who lost their leg in a hunting accident where they leaned their gun on the opposite side of the fence, climbed over the fence, the gun tipped and discharged and wounded the person. We provided good NRA information and we demonstrated how to properly do the action with a shotgun and rifle.

Back then, handguns weren’t really mentioned as hunting tools so we didn’t broach that subject. I’m amazed that the council let us bring two guns into the exposition but those were different days. Can you image what would happen today if you brought two guns into a public facility – even in Mississippi?

If you were male and living in the south, you came into contact with guns. I’ve been around them all my life and have a healthy respect for them. I remember Dad showing me how to load and shoot a 22 rifle as a kid and what to do and not to do with a loaded weapon. Archie and I would have shooting contests – usually in gravel pits – and just so you know, I would often outshoot him.

I remember one time at a gravel pit behind David Earl Walter’s house in Morton where Archie threw a bottle into some standing water, handed me a pistol and said “see if you can hit it.” I did with the first shot, shattering the glass and sinking it to the bottom. He was livid! If you don’t know, shooting a pistol accurately is far more difficult than shooting a rifle. Those old westerns where everyone is a dead-eye shot may or may not have been true but accuracy with a pistol is challenging.

The closest I ever came to being shot was in Mr. Marler’s house in Morton. I was sitting in the dining room next to the heater because it was so cold that day. Dad was cleaning a pistol at the table and he went to reload it. Somehow the pistol went off and I looked next to me at the floor and there was a bullet hole.

The closest Archie has been to being shot was with his very young daughter Ashley. He was showing her a pistol that had a hair trigger. She didn’t know it was loaded and pointed the gun at him. As he raised his hand to move the pistol away from him, it went off. It just missed him.

I actually have been shot – twice with a BB gun. Archie, ever the trouble maker, used to have “wars” with the neighborhood kids in Boyle, Mississippi. The war was fought with BB guns. What separated us from the other “side” was a bayou. We built a fort on our side of the bayou and went at it. BB’s would fly thickly through the air. I think we had 4 or 5 on our side and they the same on the other side of the bayou. With the distance, I suspect the BB was on its last leg as it flew over the bayou. I wasn’t allowed to shoot – just serve as the reloader for the others. I got pretty good at quickly reloading BBs in everyones’ guns.

Apparently, I raised up to look at the other side at the wrong time and got a BB right between the eyes. It stung. The other time, Archie shot me as he was cocking his BB gun (back then, you had to cock the gun in order for it to fire). As he was cocking it, it went off and hit me in the side. That hurt like hell. We were all lucky we didn’t shoot each others’ eyes out. We also probably ran with scissors.

Back to guns. Ruby had a gun after Hollie died. Often she was alone in the house and slept with it by her bedside. It was a 22 pistol mostly loaded with rat shot. Rat shot is exactly what it sounds like – you used it to kill rats. It gave her some sense or protection.

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I remember staying with her one night when the neighbor came running over to the house around midnight saying she had seen someone looking in her windows. The neighbor and her two children, Ruby and me marched around the house with her brandishing the gun looking for the intruder – of which no sign was found.

That particular pistol had a long history in our family. Once when Mom and Dad were on the outs and Mom was staying at Ruby’s with me, Dad came pounding on the door drunk wanting to see Mom. Ruby refused him entry and he barged in anyway. Ruby got the gun and she and Dad fought for control of it. Dad knocked it out of her and and it skittered across the floor. I ran to the phone and called the only person I knew to depend on – Aunt Mabel. She came down and broke up the fight and restored calm. What was scary is that gun could have gone off at any time and shot any of the three of us.

When Ruby died, I inherited the pistol and kept it with me for years. I kept it loaded with rat shot and even had the opportunity to try to hit a rat or two. Later, I gave the gun to Archie who gave it to Tanis who was working in downtown Jackson. She sometimes worked late and Archie wanted her to have some protection. Her car got broken into and the gun was stolen.

I really am (or was) a pretty good shot. One day in boot camp we were loaded on a bus and driven to Fort Ord (no longer an active base). We were given instruction on a 45 pistol and the M-16 rifle. We were required to break them down, clean them, and reassemble them within a specified time. After an all morning session of instruction and cleaning we were sent to the firing range.

If you’ve never fired a gun before, the real effect is the kick. Remember that for every action there’s an opposite but equal reaction. If you consider the muzzle velocity of a bullet leaving the gun, it produces a pretty significant kick, whether a pistol or rifle. The heavier the gun, the more the weight of the gun mitigates the kick. The higher powered the ammo, the greater the kick. If you don’t hold the weapon correctly, you can get a pretty good bruise – to the shoulder with a rifle and to your head with a handgun.

A typical muzzle velocity of a Colt 45 pistol is around 860 feet per second. The gun is heavy but even so, there’s a pretty good kick to the pistol. We were taught to grip it with two hands. If you are trying to get off several rounds quickly, it affects your ability to hit the target because you have to bring it back into firing position every time. I shot expert with the 45 at Fort Ord. Out of our company, there were only two of us.

The Colt 45 has an interesting history tied to the Philippine occupation after the Spanish-American War. Moro warriors would charge American positions and the standard service 38 would not stop them. Often the person firing the 38 at the Moro warrior ended up hacked to death. The Colt 45 had enough stopping power that if the bullet hit you, it knocked you down.

Next up at the range was the M-16. There are three settings for the M-16. Single round fire, semi-automatic fire and fully automatic. We were not allowed to fire at automatic (similar to what a machine gun will do). However, it was demonstrated. If you aim at the target on fully automatic and pull the trigger, by the time you take your finger off the trigger, you are almost shooting directly overhead because each round kicks the gun higher and higher.

At single round fire, if you are quick enough on the trigger, you can get of 12 to 15 rounds per minute. In other words, in one minute, you can fire 12 to 15 bullets at the target – that’s the amount of time for the chamber to reload, you re-aim the gun and pull the trigger. For semi-automatic, you can fire 40-60 rounds per minute. On fully automatic (technically called cyclic) you can fire 700-950 rounds per minute (Wikipedia). That’s a lot of firepower. In the U.S. citizens can own a similar gun to the M-16 called the AR-15 but it is not allowed to be fully automatic, however, it can fire 40-60 rounds per minute and with the addition of a bump stock can increase that rate to 400-800 rounds per minute.

In any case, I also shot expert with the M-16. Not many people can do both.

I don’t trust most people with guns. There have been too many incidents where they act a fool. I was deer hunting with a friend one day in north Mississippi. I was reluctant when I found it was a large group of hunters. In any case, I was heading back to the vehicle when I rounded a blind corner and a kid pointed his rifle at me thinking I was a deer – in an international orange vest.

A good friend, Charlie Cooper, tells of his Sunday School class wanting him to take them hunting. He felt obligated and so he agreed. They all arrived at the agreed upon location. A fire was built since it was a bitterly cold morning and they were all standing around the fire drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and telling stories when a rabbit ran right through their circle around the fire. They all immediately pulled out their guns started shooting at the rabbit – it escaped. Charlie calmly got into his car and left them standing there.

Charlie had good reason. He was alone hunting in the woods one year standing next to a tree when someone shot him in the head from a distance. Fortunately it was a glancing shot but it knocked him unconscious. Whoever shot him left him for dead in the woods. I wish the NRA would go back to gun safety.

The stupidest thing I ever saw with guns was a national airing of a shooter in downtown New Orleans. Mark Essex starting shooting white men and women and eventually in the coursre of killing made it to the downtown Howard Johnsons. As with any crisis situation, things got out of hand. A group of police officers thought they had Essex contained in the stairwell on the roof of the HJ. The door to the stairwell was on the roof and it was a metal door. Around 15 policemen formed a semicircle around the door. Apparently a shot was heard and they all began firing at the door thinking they were under fire. You saw on national tv police officers starting to fall wounded. That made the remaining officers increase their fire – more falling wounded. It took a few minutes to realize the police officers were being hit by their own bullets which were ricocheting off the metal door. Essex was later found much further down the stairwell, already dead.

I own two guns. One is a 38 caliber pistol and the other is a 12 gauge shotgun. The reason I own two guns is another event in New Orleans. It was after Hurricane Katrina when the only people seemingly in town were the poor Blacks who had no way out of the city and the police. Some of the police broke into the Cadillac dealership and stole some of the cars. It’s also suspected some police broke into homes. Another group of police later accosted a group of Blacks trying to cross the Industrial Canal on the Danziger Bridge. To be totally fair, three officers were white and two Black. The police told them they would shoot them if they tried to cross the bridge. Two unarmed Black men were killed and four others were wounded. The police tried to cover up the incident. To be honest, you needed a gun to protect yourself from the police in New Orleans.

I don’t like guns. I have them but I don’t like them. I do know how to use them and until my eyesight fails completely, I can usually still hit the target. If I had my druthers, I would prefer a system like in England where all guns are registered and permits required. I would prefer to see mandatory safety courses for owning a gun with renewals required every five years. Then maybe the NRA can get back to gun safety issues.

15 May 2021

And so begins the rainy season. May 15th is the official beginning of the rainy season for south Florida. We get, on the average, 59 inches of rain a year with the bulk of that coming from May 15th until September 15. We get summer rains because we are a peninsula and because the most active month for hurricanes is September. As a kid growing up in Mississippi, the rainy season was split between spring and fall. Adjusting to south Florida climate takes some time and after 37 years, I’m beginning to catch on.

Instead of trees shedding their leaves in the fall, in south Florida, many of the trees shed them in spring and put out new growth immediately. Such is the effect of a subtropical climate on plants. I will admit that some of our spring days are remarkably like some fall days in Mississippi with bright, blue skies and falling leaves – just not the cold temperatures.

I’ve previously related I consider my home town to be Morton, Mississippi which, in a way is a little strange since I only periodically lived in that town. However, it was where most of my relatives from the Agnew side of the family lived and seven miles south of town where most of my Searcy relatives lived. Third, fourth and fifth grades were in Morton and eighth through my senior year. In a lot of ways it was small town living at its best. However, small towns also meant everyone knew your business.

Summers were idyllic. Not only did we get an extra month of summer vacation (cotton picking priorities) but I often spent the summer discovering new things and places to go. The center of my universe for a few years was my Grandmother Ruby’s house and my cousin Jimmie’s house and yard. It eventually expanded to the woods behind Uncle James’ Shell station and playing Tarzan on the vines in the tree tops.

Then it was Mrs. McCrory’s pasture which soon expanded to Doctor Burhnam’s pond. As you get older you roam further afield and one place that had great memories for me was Stuart Dale which was west of Ruby’s. I discovered this area totally by accident one summer when I was walking my usual route across the McCrory pasture and decided to go in a different direction – west. As I started walking I found a creek through the pasture that led to a grove of trees.

The creek through the pasture was pretty bare but there was a single cottonwood tree growing along the bank. I remember the first time I recognized what it was when it began to shed its seed. The fluff around the seeds which come from a capsule really do look like cotton bolls. So many seed are produced it can make it look like a snowfall under the tree. Actually that was what attracted me to it in the first place – it looked like it had snowed under the tree – in June.

As the creek flowed into the woods, the shade took over and the creek got wider and deeper. It was here that I had my first encounter with a water moccasin (also called cottonmouth – see the link?). I was getting ready to jump across the creek to the other bank. As I launched myself in mid air, I noticed something coiled on my landing place. I landed smack dab on top of the snake. I think I surprised it so much that it immediately jumped into the creek. It surprised me so much I went straight back up into the air. At least after that I knew to check the opposite bank of any creek I jumped across for the landing site. I wish I could tell you that never happened again but I’ve jumped on top of moccasins two more times – fortunately for me – both were in the spring when they were somewhat stunned by the chill in the air.

The great discovery was Stuart Dale. It was a pasture owned by Jack Stuart. I went to school with his son Jackie and Jack owned the first store on the right of Main Street perpendicular to highway 80 as it ran through downtown. I remember its first iteration as a hardware store which was probably in competition with my Grandfather’s Agnew Hardware – no competition – Agnew Hardware outsold everyone. Later it became a furniture store and even later, that went out of business and Stuart’s moved further west along highway 80.

Jack Stuart also ran the local dairy just outside of the west side of town. He kept a lot of his dairy herd on the north side of 80 but Stuart Dale was a pasture on the side side of 80. He kept a few head of cattle there. The attraction of Stuart Dale was the pond. It was my favorite fishing spot within walking distance. I became expert at crossing barb wire fences in the pastures to get to the pond. The only person I know of who ever went there with me was Ricky Waite, a fellow Boy Scout. I’d say 99% of the time, it was just me. My favorite spot on the pond was a weeping willow tree next to the edge of the pond. For some reason, bream liked to hang out there in the shade of the weeping willow.

Weeping willows hold some memories for me and I get a little emotional when I see them. They were far more common when I was a kid. They are not native but are planted as ornamentals but in the spring when they bud and in the summer when in full leaf, they are beautiful. I don’t know why they aren’t as popular as they used to be – they are quite stunning.

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My Dad had taught me how to make a fishing pole if you didn’t have a cane pole handy. I learned to cut a flexible treeling and he taught me how to attach a line to the pole. Boy Scouts taught me the fisherman’s knot to attach the line to the hook. I dug my own bait of worms. Actually, now that I remember it, Uncle James had put in a worm bed at his place. I think he probably sold bait at the Shell station. If I couldn’t find worms in Ruby’s yard – a rarity – she had very rich soil – I raided Uncle James worm bed.

If the time of year was right, I got Catalpa worms from the Catalpa tree at Aunt Eddy’s house which was next door to Ruby. There’s a lot of tales, lies, myths, stories and fabrications about Catalpa worms and how they get on the tree. The “worm” is the larval stage of the Catalpa Spinx moth. After the larvae feed on the leaves of the Catalpa trees in summer, they drop to the ground and burrow into the soil to overwinter. In spring, the pupae move close to the surface and an adult spinx moth hatches out which then mate and females then lay eggs on the underside of Catalpa leaves.

Fish go absolutely crazy over the larva when used as bait. They are so popular as bait that people freeze them in gallon jugs and use them when they thaw. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to go into someone’s freezer and pull out a package of meat only to have to work around a couple of gallons of frozen Catalpa worms. Not appetizing!

Not every Catalpa tree will have worms. That’s where a lot of the lore arises. I’ve seen people collect the worms from one tree and move it to another tree somewhere else and the worms not “take.” I’ve even seen a pair of Catalpa tree with worms on one but not the other. There were all kinds of methods floating around on how to get the larvae established on a tree that didn’t have them. To my knowledge, only the spinx moth made that determination as to which tree was acceptable and which tree was not. Apparently, Aunt Eddy’s tree was perfect in every respect for the spinx moths. It was always loaded every other year with the larvae. Every so often you would get a crop every year but that was not too common.

From the pond in Stuart Dale I caught mostly bream. Enough that I could gut and clean them and have Mom cook them for me for dinner. On a rare occasion I would catch a large mouth bass which was pretty amazing since I was using a tree pole, a hook, a bobber and a weight near the hook. I spent many summer afternoons at that pond and never saw a soul. I sometimes think I was the only person who ever fished the pond.

Even more interesting was I probably crossed over three or four land owners to get to the pond and no one ever challenged me. I suspect if anyone saw me they knew me or knew my parents or grandparents and I probably knew them. It was a more trusting time. I did know the pond belonged to Jack Stuart and I knew he knew me and my relatives. I never was close to his son Jackie but even so if Jack ever saw me on his property he probably would never say anything.

When Jack died, Jackie took over the farming part of the estate and ran the farm and dairy. I remember touring the dairy a couple of times with the Boy Scouts and that’s when I first learned about Pasteurization. The milk I drank from “the source” at my Grandad Searcy’s was certainly not Pasteurized. I suspect that’s why there was so much tuberculosis in Mississippi when I was a kid. Everyone still had milk cows out from town and milked their own cows for milk.

It was on those walks through the pastures to the pond that I began to pay attention to nature for real. I saw black runners (black racers), and learned to chase them and let them chase me. I began to pay attention to birds for the first time and to cottonwoods. Life began to open up for a small town kid. Strangely, I didn’t mind being alone. The biggest danger I probably faced other than the cottonmouth was Mrs. McCrory’s bull.

I still like to see cottonwood trees and weeping willows and black racers (I actually have one in my yard).

7 May 2021

Maybe it’s a southern thing but my Grandma Searcy, like a lot of rural folk, swept her front yard. They didn’t have a lawnmower and it wasn’t like grass was going to grow under the old magnolia tree anyway. There was a brick pathway to the front of the house and sprigs of grass would pop up in the front but she consistently swept that area with a home made broom typically made from broomsedge bluestem, scientifically known as Andropogon virginicus. Interestingly, it is not a sedge but a true grass.

Andropogon is a genus found in tropical and temperate climes with at least 120 species, thirteen which are native to North America (Flora of North America 2003). Most species are also called bluestem due to the appearance of the stem at an early stage of growth. Supposedly the genus comes from andro for man and pogon for beard and refers to the white awns on the spikelets which give the plant a fuzzy appearance – like an old man’s beard. What made it especially useful as a broom is the plant often grows in isolated clumps and can reach 2 meters in height so you can make a pretty tall broom from just the plant.

Grandma Searcy made her own brooms by bundling clusters of the stems of the grass and tying them together with strips of old rags. It’s not as easy as it sounds. She somehow interwove the cloth strips among the stems and made a very tight and very compact bundle. My efforts many years later resulted in a really crappy broom which would fall apart after a few uses. Hers always held together.

Not only did she sweep the front yard but she was constantly sweeping the house. It probably had something to do with raising two boys on a farm and then having four grandkids underfoot all the time tracking in dirt from the yard. She was also not adverse to sweeping you out the door with the broom and if that didn’t work, wacking you on the fanny with it to emphasize her desire to get you outside to play and not be underfoot.

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There were always two or three of the brooms scattered around: the kitchen, the dogtrot and the front room are where I remember them most. If you complained too much that there was nothing to do, you would always be put to use sweeping the house with the broom.

Understand, the broomsedge broom looked nothing like the typical broom with a fan shaped bottom. It simply was a cluster of stems tightly wrapped to form a handle and the lower part was simply loose. It was more like a paintbrush on the business end. I guess it also looked a little like a shaving brush with a very long handle.

It was not an easy broom to use. There was an art to using it and I never got the hang of it – at least in the opinion of my Grandma. She would have me start sweeping and then tell me I was doing it wrong and then finally taking it from me and showing me the proper technique which I never mastered. What would take me 15 minutes of furious sweeping she could do with a few strokes.

Andropogon, for me, is one of the easier grasses to identify. Getting to specific level is a little more difficult but not as bad as some of the grasses. I have very few photographs of the species of Andropogon simply because it is so familiar to me I don’t think to stop and take a photo. I do get a warm feeling emotionally when I see patches of it growing and even think about harvesting some to try my hand a broom making again but I’m afraid I would be a disappointment to my Grandma Searcy.

Reference Cited:

Flora of North America vol 25. 2003. Oxford University Press: New York. p. 659.

4 May 2021

When people find out I am originally from Mississippi, certain assumptions are immediately made. I must be prejudiced, I’m backward, I can’t be very intelligent. The next question is often “Do you miss the state?” or “Would you ever move back there?” I suspect everyone has prejudices but I also suspect mine have less to do with race than most. I felt backward to others in high school and college but I found out later that was my own assumption. I’m not very intelligent but I get by.

Would I ever move back there? Perhaps at one time but I’ve been in south Florida for so long, my house is paid for, I have good physicians, medical care is some of the best in the world, and there’s a lot more culturally in south Florida than there is in Jackson, Mississippi. The bigger question is do I miss the state?

What I miss is the change in seasons, or to be specific, the change in the smell of the seasons. Olfactory memories are very powerful and many of my memories of Mississippi are associated with smell. That’s one reason I’ve been very careful about exposing myself to Covid – the loss of smell.

Spring has its very specific smells in the state. One of my first memory smells of spring is the blooming of daffodils. Sad to say, a lot of the daffodils these days don’t have an aroma but those of my youth very much did. Grape hyacinth is another spring smell. The best way I can describe the aroma is they smell purple. Yea, I know, purple isn’t an aroma but if purple had a smell, it would be grape hyacinths. Soil that is being turned over for spring planting has a distinct aroma to it and it’s not just a dirt smell. It smells of the time overwintering and also of promise. Then again, maybe it’s the earthworms that really smell since they are turned up by the plow and can be found in copious amounts during plowing.

I used to follow along behind the mule and plow of a neighbor as a kid, talking him to death and picking up earthworms for bait. On occasion, he would let me take the reins and carefully correct me with terse statements that the plow was too deep, the plow was too shallow, I was going too fast. The mule liked his “gee” and “haw” commands better than mine.

Another spring smell was yellow jasmine, a climbing vine. There are two species in the southeastern U.S. Gelsemium rankinii or swamp jasmine has no aroma. Gelesemium sempervirens or yellow jasmine (both have yellow flowers) is quite aromatic and you often can smell the flowers in early spring before you see them.

Summer had its own set of smells. Around May – that’s summer in Mississippi – you would get wisteria blooming. The aroma is absolutely intoxicating. Most country homes had a least one vine growing somewhere near their house in order to get the smell of the blossoms. Sadly, once the old homesteads were abandoned, wisteria would take over and cover the property and the house. Uncontrolled, wisteria is a disaster.

Another summer bloomer I loved was kudzu. The flowers are very aromatic and remind me a little of grape hyacinth in their odor. Millions of words have been written about kudzu including words about people feeling they were driving into an alien world when coming down south and seeing kudzu taking over entire forests and towns. I’ve seen many a billboard obscured from kudzu vines.

There’s also nothing like the smell of freshly mown grass in the summer. Not that I wanted to do the mowing but I certainly appreciated the smell when someone else was doing the mowing.

Fall was distinctive in the smell of leaves covering the ground. I know it sounds peculiar to associate a smell with leaves on the ground but after they’ve been in place for a while, if you stir them up (or better yet, rake them up) they have a distinct smell to them. I think of mushrooms when I smell decaying leaves.

What I remember about winter is the smell of snow. Yes, I know water has no aroma in its pure state and snow is about as pure as you can get but I swear snow has a smell to it. The closest thing to it I can suggest to you is if you’ve ever had anyone shave ice for a snow cone.

Of all the aromas I miss, the one I miss the most is the smell of freshly cut watermelon. Before you tell me I can get watermelons in the grocery store in south Florida, they are absolutely not the same. The same with grocery store tomatoes. The faint smell you get from a hothouse tomato is nothing like the smell of the tomato you pick from a vine in your garden. Homegrown watermelons are the same.

Perhaps the reason I associate a strong sense of smell with watermelons is that most of those I ate as a kid were grown by my Grandfather in Pulaski. Growing good watermelons is an art that Granddaddy Searcy had down pat.

Watermelons have male flowers and female flowers on the same plant. Only the female flowers produce the melon. The male flowers only provide the pollen for fertilization. I get a kick out of how many times I’ve seen the post on Facebook about watermelons of a particular shape are male melons and of another shape as female melons.

Granddad was meticulous about farming and especially his watermelons. As the melon grew, he would turn them a quarter turn back and forth every few days so they would be uniformly green. If you didn’t do that, the part of the melon that met the ground would be white or yellowish due to lack of chlorophyll in the rind because it got no sunlight.

He taught me how to tell if a melon was ripe. Right next to the stem attached to each melon is a little green curlicue. When that green curlicue turned brown and died, the melon was ripe. You can thump all you want and the sound you get will do nothing to tell you the ripeness. That’s why I have a very difficult time finding a ripe melon in grocery stores – they have no curlicue.

Granddad stored his ripe melons in the shade of the dogtrot of his house. If he knew for sure we would be coming for a visit, he would lower one into the well to cool it even further. When you sliced into that melon, the aroma would almost overpower you and your mouth would begin watering.

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Another little secret about the South. People slice their melons differently. It’s not uniform. My family always sliced the melon lengthwise into halves, then into quarters. Each person got their own quarter unless there was a lot of company then you sliced the quarters into eights or even sixteenths.

My cousin Jimmie’s family cut the melon crosswise into circles. They would slice off about two inches of melon and the round slice would be placed on a plate an eaten. Different strokes for different folks.

There’s also the question of salt – do you salt your melon or not? I’ve done both and like both but since the brouhaha over salt, I leave that off now. Salt does enhance flavor….

None of those seedless melons for me. I’ve always believed that fruits that have seeds always taste better than the seedless variety – curse you Luther Burbank! Besides, without seeds you couldn’t have seed spitting contests on the steps off the back porch. I never won but my brother and cousins were all bigger than me.

As you might guess, as a kid, I had water melon juice all over me. Grandma Searcy didn’t provide forks unless requested, so you simply dived into the slice. If it conveniently rained, you ran out into the rain to get the sticky sweet off you, otherwise you went to the well and pulled up a bucket of water to rinse off the watermelon juice.

You can do pretty much anything with a watermelon. I remember Aunt Sue making picked watermelon rind. I later discovered watermelon martinis.

If you bought a melon, you very seldom paid more than fifty cents for it. More likely, it was two for fifty cents. Inflation affects melon growers too and later on it was three melons for a dollar and them a dollar apiece, then two dollars a piece…. The most I remember my Dad paying for a melon was around $5. Trust me, it was a big melon. It was called a Black Diamond melon from Texas and the thing had to be two feet long and a foot in diameter. I still think it was the best melon I’ve ever had.

If you wanted a cold watermelon, you had to go to the ice house to buy your melon – refrigeration was extra cost added to the melon. In my youth, refrigerators were much, much smaller than today and you couldn’t really store one in there whole. For some days where we wanted a cold melon, we would go to the ice house in Morton.

The original ice house was on the road to Roosevelt State Park which is highway 13 south of Morton. It was located next to Nathan Springs. Nathan Springs was supposedly some of the purest water in the state – around 99% in purity – much better than well water on farms and in town. People used to haul water from the springs and the ice house used the water to make their ice. One the ice was made it was stored in another part of the ice house and covered with sawdust as an insulator. If you bought ice, they would cut off a block and bring it out to you with ice tongs. You had to remove the sawdust on your own. The room where they stored the ice was were they kept the melons. We chipped ice to make home made peach ice cream using the old hand crank machines.

I used to love going to Nathan Springs. Mother took me my first time there as a very young kid but as I later joined the Boy Scouts, when we would hike to the park and back, I’d get everyone in the patrol to stop at Nathan Springs and fill their canteens.

When old highway 13 was rerouted, the new roadbed went directly over Nathan Springs so it is buried under tons of dirt and asphalt these days.

I remember finding parts of the old ice house around the springs. The water in the springs was crystal clear and cold. The springs bubbled up from the ground and someone had boxed around it to facilitate filling buckets of water.

If I remember correctly, the old ice house was simply the old Ueltschey Tannery building turned into an icehouse. A new icehouse was built in town and the older one went the way of the dodo.

Every so often I detect a smell here in Fort Lauderdale that sends my memory banks reeling. On certain days if the wind is from the east, you can smell the ocean. It takes me back to boot camp days in Alameda where we were right on the bay.

There’s a native orchid here in south Florida called Ladies of the Night (Brassavola nodosa). It only produces an aroma at night to attract moths for pollination. Wikipedia describes the smell as citrusy of like a gardenia. I disagree. It smells entirely like cloves to me. Cloves make me think of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mom used to put cloves on the surface of hams she baked. The scent this orchid puts out must attract moths for miles. I’ve grown these for years in my back yard for their scent.

Dad lived to be 86 years old. He told me that he had lost his sense of taste and smell. I later read up on that and indeed, as you age, you don’t replace the olfactory receptors as well in old age. I don’t look forward to that time in my life where so many of my memories are tied up in aromas – Grandma Laura’s tea cakes in the oven, Datee’s Lucky Strike cigarettes (trust me, nothing else smells like those) Ruby’s gardenia bush by her house on a summer night.