Tampa

Hey Dad. On My Late Father’s Birthday

Hey Dad, So much has happened since we last spoke in January 2017. Your grandson has doubled in age since then; he’s now 14. With each milestone of his, I think back to when I was that age and what we might have been doing together. The same goes for the little setbacks. How did you handle them? How had your memory shaped them over time? I’d love to ask you. You were younger, relative to my stage of fatherhood, but seemed to have it all together. Were you just hanging on, like I feel sometimes? I speak of you often to him. He has few but precious memories of his time with you, and he reminds me of the good ones when they come to mind. I remind him of my memories, too. While most of my stories seem to fall on deaf ears with the teenager, he listens when I mention his Papa. He can hear it in my tone, the shift in my demeanor. For him, it’s the Florida Aquarium and The Bucs that have him thinking […]

At 16 I Had No Muscles But I Drove a Muscle Car

I recently read Auto Biography by Earl Swift in which he retraces all the owners of a ’57 Chevy and it’s had me thinking about my first car. It was a 1969 Plymouth Barracuda. I unwrapped it in the Fall of 1990. Twenty one years after it rolled off the assembly line. It was a cool car. I, on the other hand, was not cool car guy. Nor was I even a cool guy. In the movies a guy gets a cool car and then suddenly he has people following him around buying him pizza. That’s Hollywood. In real life I didn’t smoke or have a varsity jacket. No tattoos. I didn’t listen to cool music or have a cool haircut. I was tall and awkward. After my 16th birthday I was a tall and awkward kid driving a 1969 Barracuda with a slant six engine. The car was a surprise. My father and I went car shopping in the months leading up to my birthday but unbeknownst to me, that was a ruse. My muscle car was parked in the

Pacita Jugo Ladd… “Nana”

My Nana passed away on February 13th, surrounded by her family, after being diagnosed with cancer just a few weeks before. She passed very peacefully and kept her wit until the very end. Hours before, when people were coming in and out of her room, I said to her, “I think you, Susan, and I are the only sane ones in this bunch.” She replied, “I think you’re right, honey.” My Nana was many things to me over the years. She was a grandmother and a babysitter. She was a mentor and an advisor. She was a resource for travel tips and a great-grandmother to our son. Through it all, and especially as I grew mature enough to realize it, she was a friend. Our conversations, though split by a fifty-year spread, were always casual but meaningful. She would offer me suggestions on how to live my life and how to raise my son, and she did so as a peer—never with an air of authority. She kept that spicy Filipino side suppressed until necessary to quickly end a conversation.

Since storms cancelled our evening with The Flaming Lips – I had to go to Youtube.

Well, The Flaming Lips show in Philadelphia turned into “A bit of a bath – a big bath” (to quote the Woodstock documentary – although theirs was in reference to the bath the promoters would take upon getting the bill for the festival.)Although we had a nice evening and some great Indian cuisine downtown with some friends at Karma, our evening of Lips was cut off after about 6 songs when storms rolled in from the West and forced us all into the air conditioned “too unbearably hot outside” tent. Or in our case, the air conditioned and cold “too rainy for outside” tent. Actually, first my wife and I cut through the rain into an unused beer tent that had since closed up shop. We were dry for about 60 seconds until we were forced to vacate our dry dwellings by a water saleslady, “You’re not allowed in there!”In the larger tent we waited for the storm to pass while I watched the Weather Channel app on my Google Phone draw red cells around “our current location”.We were warned about

I never got many Gold Medals – But I used to make them.

I once quit a job without giving two weeks’ notice. I quit after my lunch break. The boss wasn’t surprised at all. I think she even wondered why it took so long like it was a bet amongst the bosses. Each day that went by with me still on the line was another nickel in the jar. I worked at a trophy factory in Tampa and made the medals people wear around their necks after winning track meets and whatnot. For some reason we made lots of medals for the PBA – “The Police Benevolent Association” and I thought that if I ever got pulled over I could use this as a conversation starter. I was on an assembly line and would be given scalding hot medals from out of the mold and was to sand down the edges on a steel-brush sander until they were smooth and round. Like when Christmas cookies come out with bits that are cooked under the Santa mold. My job was to remove those bits with spinning bristles of steel. These were very hot

My childhood “Boy named Sue” moment

In grade school, we wore navy blue pants and white dress shirts. The boys had triangular collars, while the girls wore the rounded ones that little Catholic school girls wear. There was an unfortunate era when my sister and I wore the same size shirt even though we were two years apart. And, of course, there was that day. One of those days that sticks with you forever and came back to me the other day when I was trying on used sweaters at an outdoor market in Amsterdam. “This is a girl’s sweater,” I said to Susan. “Oh no, it’s not. It looks good on you,” she answered. “Irrelevant how it looks, the buttons are on the wrong side.” Back to grade school. The unlucky day must have been around 5th grade, and it was made clear to me by my teacher that I was wearing a girl’s shirt. She asked, of course, in front of the class, “Are you wearing your sister’s clothes?” The class turned and erupted in laughter. “Stork-dork’s wearing a girl’s shirt!” So my question

I was just a guy on a plane

As I made my way down the aisle yesterday for my flight back from Tampa, I saw two kids sitting in the row I was to take. They had the aisle and middle seats, and I was to sit by the window where a bald baby doll was strapped in. The mom was in the aisle, ordering them to behave themselves and not to bother anyone, and that she would be just across the aisle watching them. I asked if she’d rather sit with her kids, and she pointed to a third child strapped into the seat next to where she’d be. So I was with two kids on one side of the aisle while she’d be on the other side with her other one. Between us, though, was a Korean man who apparently spoke no English and was disinterested in making a better seating arrangement for all of us. I made small talk with the four-year-old girl to my left. Well, I accepted her invitation for small talk. We’d chat, and I’d answer questions about why I wore glasses

My theme park – My babysitter

I grew up in the theme park Busch Gardens and its water park sister, Adventure Island. They were my babysitters. They were my Grandma’s house. They were home. They were where I went when school was out for the summer, where I went when I was too sick for school or where I went when the parents didn’t want me around for the day. They were where my sister and I did our homework and worked on after-school projects. We weren’t latchkey kids. We were turn-style key kids. “Pick you up at the gate at 5” was as synonymous as “Don’t give your grandma a hard time.” Growing up, my parents both worked in management there. He was the VP of Marketing. She did the same for the Special Events department. Both titles had their own distinctive perks for two spoiled theme park kids. Marketing, through the eyes of a child, was more about trade than advertising. We had plenty of coupons and free food cards to eat wherever the current ad campaign was partnered. One month it may be

WHERE ARCADE GAMES GO TO DIE

With not much on my plate yesterday I made the short trek out to Crabtown to see what it was all about. I figured if it was listed on the internet on a website devoted to classic arcade game rooms and was ranked high on the most games list… I should check it out. Especially if Mapquest said it was just 9 miles away. I clicked on “map the scenic route” because it was going to take us to the heart of Glen Burnie, MD and all routes in Glen Burnie are scenic routes. As my buddy Ben said on our drive out, “If you’re ever feeling down about yourself, go to the Wal-Mart in Glen Burnie.”Growing up in a game room in Tampa I have missed the days of sweaty palms full of quarters and the sounds of dozens of games all blaring the sounds from the high scores screen. I look for classic games when i travel and have seen a few here and there but the idea of an old game room full intrigued me. The posts

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