Old clips, new stories

Peter brought over an ancient oversized scrapbook that has been drying out in storage in Florida ever since we sold our cottage in 1999. Truth is, it was drying out in the attic of the cottage for probably 15 or more years before that.

Every summer, when we'd fly across the country, it was the end of a long day by the time we finally got a rental car at a south Florida airport and drove out to the island. Unless there was a full moon, the night sky was black, though speckled with stars. The old doors to the cottage creaked as we entered. The lights flickered on. The old black dial phone still sat on the kitchen table. Familiar items from decades -- paintings, dishes, books, shells, chairs, dressers -- greeted us. Out front, the dock beckoned, stretching out into the San Carlos Bay.It always swayed as we walked on it, farther out in the Bay than any other dock. It predated any codes, installed as it had been by Alison's grandfather in the '20s. At the very end of the dock, we could hear porpoises breathing, mullet jumping, and other, mysterious creatures surfacing, spitting, diving, and scattering. The waters were alive with rays, crabs, octopus, eels, sharks, tortoises, and hundreds of types of birds.

As the years came and went, both of her parents died, everyone moved away, and relatives sold off their cottages for the value of the beachfront land underneath. The old houses were demolished until our cottage was the last one on that little strip of Bayfront sand. Behind us were canals and then jungle, with spiders, snakes, alligators, and other creatures ready to pounce on unsuspecting pets that strayed too far from home. The wildness of the place was palpable.

Tonight, Peter helped Dylan direct a home movie of Aidan. Julia was part of the team, too, and made a cameo appearance in the film. Afterwards, all four kids gathered around the computer to edit the footage down into a coherent story -- one of the series of short films they've made this summer.

As they did so, I glanced through the old scrapbook. I realized what it was -- a collection of my early writing put together by my father. Starting with my sports articles in The Michigan Daily, he had laboriously taped in clip after clip from the copies of newspapers and magazines I'd mail him whenever I published. The clippings are yellowed and crumbling now, but among them is an article I mentioned here once before: "The Violent Death of Non-Violence," co-authored from Memphis by Alison and me, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.


Maybe I'll scan some of these old articles, and try to create a better repository than this crumbling scrapbook. It touched me tonight to think of my father carefully preserving my writings -- many of which he could not have agreed with politically -- in the storage method of choice in those days.

It's a gift from him to me seven and a half years after he died.