Joe Palmer's Blog

One of the perks of being married a long time is that you know what and what not to get your wife for Christmas. Trolling motors are out. Ditto vacuum cleaners. Jewelry’s always a winner, especially if it’s so expensive you have to hock your boat to pay for it.

We old dogs who’ve been hanging out in the Christmas shopping for wives market long enough have figured out the kinds of gifts that’ll make the mistress of the house squeal with delight and give us the petting we desire, as well as those that’ll land us in the dog house straightaway on Christmas morning.

There’s no quicker way to make your special lady glow than buying her lingerie, especially the sexy stuff. Most women love lingerie, guys. They love guys who suck up their embarrassment and go shopping for it, too. I learned early in my marriage that, beyond learning how to cook and shop for the best jewelry, the quickest entry in my wife’s heart of hearts was through the door of a Victoria’s Secret store.

I know guys fantasize about seeing their ladies in the company’s spicy wares. I even read somewhere that men, for some reason, look at a Victoria’s Secret catalogues as much as women do. Go figure. But most men are squeamish about actually entering a store and chatting up a young lady who’s young enough to be our daughter or little sister about such intimacies as bras, panties, cup sizes, teddies, black silk baby dolls and red satin bustiers trimmed in white fur, complete with sleigh bell and matching Santa Claus cap. Whooee! Dear Santa. I’ve been a very naughty boy, I’m afraid.

If you can hide your male awkwardness about walking in and fondling all the pretty bare necessities, your halfway to home plate. I remember the first time my wife dragged me into a Victoria’s Secret. After my initial shock wore off, it was kinda fun. Okay, while my wife was shopping, I snuck back to the store for a peek five more times.

Now, I’m a regular. I even have a platinum Angel V.I.P. card. Guys, if you have one of those and show it the moment you set foot in Victoria’s Secret, you’ll be swarmed with enough pretty lassies to have made Hugh Heffner jealous – all of them just dying to wait on you hand and foot. And they make your experience embarrassment proof, too.

My first shopping expedition alone to Victoria’s Secret was a smidgen on the clumsy side. My palms were sweating, my heart was pounding and I kept waiting for a female patron to point at me and scream, “Pervert!” A very pretty and vivacious saleslady quickly saw my discomfort and rushed to my aid.

“May I help you find something, sir? she asked, with a show-stopping smile.

“Uh, yeh,” I replied, sotto voce. “Where are the puh-puh-puh…” She tipped me a sly wink.

“The panties, you mean? First time shopping here, huh? Don’t worry, nothing here will bite you. Give me an idea what you’re looking for and I’ll help you pick it out, then wrap it and ring it up for you.”

And she did. Two hundred and fifty bucks later, I was whistling Jingle Bell Rock and feeling as randy as Don Juan. Christmas at our house was very merry!

Over the years, I’ve schooled numerous young men about the mutual benefits of selecting their wives’ dainties at Victoria’s Secret. Once too embarrassed to be seen in the same mall with me carrying the store’s trademark big, pink shopping bag, my own sons are now Victoria’s Secret devotees. Their wives love them for it, too.

Years ago, I was in a Victoria’s Secret store and noticed a young guy cringing beside a display of very scanty panties. He’d pick up a pair, drop them like a venomous snake, then glance around like a kid sneaking his first cigarette. He finally worked up the courage to ask me how to know what size panties to buy his wife. I told him to look in his wife’s panty and lingerie drawer and get her sizes. I might as well have told him to go search for the Holy Grail.

Then I saw the gold Angel card he clutched in one trembling hand and told him, in knowing tones, that if he’d just wave that little gold card in the air, his problems would be solved in a jiff.

I saw the kid later in the mall. He was whistling Jingle Bell Rock, grinning like a mule eating briars through a barbwire fence and toting one of those big, pink shopping bags. In plain view as a pair of red silk panties with Kiss me, Santa,” embroidered on them. Every young lady he passed winked at him and smiled. They knew.

I’ll bet he had a very merry Christmas. Guess he’s still grinning.

The post Naughty And Nice For Christmas appeared first on Joe Palmer.

Yay! It’s getting to be that time of year again. You know what I’m talking about. Christmastime. The Big C. Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Seasons Greetings! And all that. The stores are full of bright, cheery Christmas decorations. Christmas trees are everywhere. Elves have sent their mute counterparts down from the North Pole to stand as unmoving sentries among the other seasonal trappings.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Okay, l plagiarized a bit on that one.

But best of all, it’s fruitcake season. And I do love me some fruitcake. For some reason I can’t figure out, lots of people scorn fruitcake. You can give homemade Christmas cookies, fudge and divinity candy to almost any friend or loved one and they’ll kiss you for it. But a fruitcake? Unless you’re absolutely sure that your special other person loves fruitcake as much as you do, it is an unpardonable sin, a ferocious faux pas and a huge no-no to give them out for Christmas. It’s also a surefire way to get put on Santa’s naughty list, not to mention going to visit your friend and seeing your culinary masterpiece being used as a doorstop. Or worse.

Fruitcakes hail back to the medieval ages. They have a long and proud tradition. There’s no record of anyone back then being hanged, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake or exiled for giving them as gifts. Back then, people were happy to receive them. Everyone back then LOVED them some fruitcake. What the dickens happened to change that?

Of course, the best ones these days come from old family recipes and are baked in the kitchens of Mamas or Mee-maws with the utmost of tender loving care. The fruit, those beautiful green and red candied cherries, have to be cut up just so. The nuts must be chopped precisely. The batter must be of perfect consistency. And, as always, a splash of rum, whiskey or sherry is a must. If you’re Irish, use Jameson. Bushmills will do in a pinch.

One year when I was on sea duty in the Navy, Mama baked a fruitcake, soaked it in bourbon, wrapped it in cellophane to conceal the smell, put it in a hat box and mailed it to me to share with my buddies, since we were far away and couldn’t be home at Christmas. Boy, was that a huge hit! A little group of us ate the entire cake in one sitting. When the Chief smelled alcohol, he came nosing around to see what was going on. I tried to explain to my infuriated boss that we’d been eating Mama’s fruitcake, shooting the bull and having a good time. Alas, the words came out all slurry. The Chief wrote us all up for being drunk on duty and we had to go to Captain’s Mast. The skipper, being a good Southern boy himself, took pity on us and let us off with a wag of his finger for not bringing him a slice. I snuck up to his stateroom that evening and gave him some bourbon balls Mama also sent along with the cake. Rumor has it that the Old Man was very merry the next day.

My Mama’s fruitcake was a traffic cop’s best friend. She infused her fruitcakes with so much booze that her girlfriends sometimes staggered to their cars when they came over for cake and coffee. Sometimes, you’d even find one passed out in the front yard. Our house smelled like a moonshine still when Mama was nursing her fruitcake along. A recovering alcoholic who dared take even a bite of Mama’s fruitcake fell completely off the wagon and had to start all over by confessing to his or her slip-up at the next AA meeting and picking up another white chip, no matter how many blue ones they had to mark their years of sobriety. I remember one year, the local police department set up a DUI checkpoint down the street from our house and 27 of Mama’s best friends had to make bail the next morning. One was a preacher’s wife. No kidding!

Alas, the most berated of all fruitcakes is the Claxton fruitcake. You can find them this time of the year, right up until Christmas Eve, stacked up like firewood in grocery and hardware stores everywhere, especially in the South, since they’re made in Claxton, Georgia. You’ll know one when you see it. A nearly footlong piece of treacly treat wrapped in gaily colored cellophane to preserve its freshness, they sing Merry Christmas as loud as Jingle Bell Rock. If giving away your Mama’s or Mee-maw’s fruitcake is sinful, giving away a Claxton fruitcake is considered to be the tackiest of tacky. And, as everyone in the South knows, a well bred Southerner would rather be shot than said to be tacky. It’s even a felony to possess them in some locales. Okay, I read that on the internet so maybe it’s not true.

Don’t give away a Claxton fruitcake to anyone, with one caveat. I’ll take one any day. Heck, I was shopping in the commissary at a nearby naval base almost a month ago just as they’d set the first batch of Claxton fruitcakes on the shelves. They do well on military bases because good military folk will eat what they’re darned well told to eat and if it’s on the shelf in the commissary, well, it’s because the brass wants it there and by golly, you’d better eat it.

As we were getting ready to check out, I saw the delicious candy and nut logs lined up like shiny tin soldiers on a shelf near the cash registers. Whoopee, I shouted to my wife, who suddenly didn’t know me. Look, honey, Claxton fruitcakes! I scooped up an armload of them, ate one in the checkout line, two more on the thirty-minute drive home, and stashed the rest in the freezer where I can pop them out, zap them in the microwave and enjoy them the entire holiday season without having to go back to the store and get the ones that are starting to go stale because fruitcake snobs won’t buy or eat them. Did you know they’re even delicious deep fried? Try it sometime!

My wife, being of third generation German heritage, should have a PhD in baking holiday goodies. She also makes fruitcake from a recipe a friend gave us some years ago. I don’t have Mama’s recipe because the last time she made one, the cops raided our house and confiscated it. Poor Mama never was able to replicate it just so and dear old Mee-maw had up and died and taken her recipe to heaven with her. Which reminds me, if you ever detect the smell of alcohol when your guardian angel rests on your shoulders, blame Mama and Mee-maw. Although I do love my wife’s fruitcake, I cannot resist a Claxton fruitcake.

Who knows where all the unsold ones go after the holidays? I suspect that large trucks steal in under cover of darkness on Christmas Eve after the stores close, box them all up and return them to Claxton, Georgia, where they’ll be freshened up and redistributed the next year. That’s my theory and if you know the real truth of it, I’d love to hear from you.

Last thing before I go. Anyone have any idea what a Claxton fruitcake soaked in booze tastes like? Being a recovering alcoholic, partly which I attribute to eating Mama’s fruitcake as a toddler on up to adulthood, I’ve never had the pleasure.

The post Battle Of The Christmas Fruitcakes appeared first on Joe Palmer.

Remember that oldie by Nat King Cole from the summer of ’63? If you do, welcome to old age and childhood memories, some of them which still shine as bright as the late June sun for me and, I’m sure, many of you. We’re just a week past the Summer Solstice, the official first day of summer and the longest day of the year. So, saddle up and join me for a trip down the memory lane of summer.

My earliest summer recollection is of the time that my lifelong friend, Hollye Waters (Reid) and I got into a tussle over a beach ball I didn’t want to share during a vacation mom and dad and my mom and dad vacationed together here in Fernandina Beach together. Despite Hollye’s demands and pleading, I wouldn’t let her play with the ball. So she took it from me and bit a hole in it. I bawled as it deflated. Hollye laughed maniacally. I think we were five.

Decades later, she gifted me with a new beach ball at a high school reunion.

Summers at my Granny Tanner’s house in Alma, Georgia also play into my summer recollections of childhood. In addition to being a great cook – she could make a dead man hungry with her biscuits and gravy – Granny Tanner also loved to fish. She had lots of friends around the county who had small ponds stocked with bream, blue gills, bass and catfish. I remember her in her fishing attire, which always featured a big, floppy straw hat, hauling me into the bait shop for worms or crickets.

We always fished from a small jonboat my Granddaddy made. I never went fishing with her when we didn’t come home with a mess of fish. Followed by a feast of fried fish and hushpuppies that evening. The patron saint of fishermen and women is St. Betty of Tanner. I frequently invoke her when the bite is off. She’s never let me down.

My fun Aunt Linda lived next door to Granny. Less than ten years older than me, she always seemed more like a big sister or cousin than an aunt. Never bossy or “adulty,” she was tons of fun to hang out with. I spent summers with her because I worked in the tobacco fields during the harvest when we carried green tobacco to be flue cured in the barns. Got big money for doing it, too – ten dollars a day! A king’s ransom for a 15-year-old boy back then.

Aunt Linda was divorced and sometimes wanted a night out with her friends so I babysat my two little cousins, David and Eric. I confess to my friends and I sampling the liquor in her cabinet and to swiping a few beers from the fridge. One night, we got drunk with purloined whiskey mixed with cold Gatorade. If Aunt Linda noticed, nothing was said.

A few of the best friends I ever had lived in Granny’s neighborhood. In the novel I’m writing now, I give them new names and vague them up a bit to tell a story about found and lost friendships. Our summers together were the things magic is made of and I frequently think about two of them, in particular. One of them died of Covid two years ago. I miss him.

Summertime also meant vacations to Fernandina Beach, where I live now. Back then, so many people from my hometown of Waycross, Georgia, owned beach cottages here that Fernandina was referred to as the Waycross Riviera and Waycross-by-the Sea. You could literally spend an entire summer here by couch surfing from one friend’s house to another whose moms and dads had cottages here.

In my mind, the long gone Pavilion with its Blue Seas diner, skating rink and trampoline park still exist, even though Hurricane Dora dealt them a deadly blow in 1964. Those were the salad days of this little beach town before it got “discovered” and all the resorts and snooty, demanding tourists came in to uglify the place and spoil its natural beauty and ambience.

Summers were for the special friendships you forged with other kids who were beach vacationing or staying with their own grandparents and aunties. A Columbia, South Carolina girl named Karen and I became besties for a week in the summer of 1969 when we were 15-years-old. On July 16, we sat in the living room of her auntie’s beach cottage, next door to the one we’d rented for the week, eating potato chips and drinking Coca-Cola watching, gobsmacked, in front of the black and white tv, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

Tommy James and the Shondells’ hit, Mony, Mony and Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline got the most airplay on the Big Ape out of Jacksonville that week. Before the week was halfway through, we’d memorized the lyrics to both. All these years later, Karen and I are still buddies.

Summer was mowing lawns for a dollar and coming home with your feet and legs stained green and a pocket full of candy you bought at the store with your pay. Summers were boiled peanuts, hand cranked ice cream and icy-cold watermelon. My Granddaddy once bought Granny an electric ice cream churn and she made him take it back to the store. Back then, at least, an electric churn couldn’t beat a churn full of hand cranked ice cream. Granny added the blackberries we picked in the fields or strawberries from the garden to hers. One day, she added a heaping helping of huckleberries we picked in the pine-scented woods.

Summer was playing outdoors after the street lights came on. We caught the June bugs and mole crickets attracted to the lights and went fishing with them the next day. A big blue gill cannot say no to a properly presented mole cricket. We went swimming in the tannin-stained black water of the Satilla River – sometimes sans clothing.

We fashioned rope swings overhanging the river in fragrant cypress trees and cannonballed into the water when the swing, pushed by our buddies, reached its zenith above the chilly water. We camped out on sugar-white sandbars in the middle of the river and stayed up all night gorging on hotdogs grilled over pieces of wood we gathered along the riverbanks, and telling tall tales and ghost stories. And in the morning, awoke with faces blackened by the soot from the campfire.

Come August, we reluctantly began going to the department stores with our moms to stock up on school supplies and clothing for the new school year that started after Labor Day. But summer was never far from our thoughts and, throughout the doldrums of winter and the pedantic lecturing by our teachers, we kept our minds focused on the most important thing – the carefree days of the next summer.

Those lazy, hazy, crazy days where we were the masters of our own fate and impending adulthood was only some vague concept, never to be taken at face value.

The post Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days Of Summer appeared first on Joe Palmer.

This afternoon, I had the honor and great pleasure of standing with a large gathering of students at the University of North Florida who’d gathered for a rally to demand that the UNF President Moez Limayem reject Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ relentless assault on education. DeSantis has been on a mission to erase anything from public education, Grades K through college, he and his right wing ilk consider “woke,” which, by the way, is just one of many culture war words the collective consciousness of this country is being bludgeoned with daily. What is woke? Simply, it means that you/we/all of us have been awakened to the rights and legitimate concerns of others, regardless of race, color, creed, gender identity, sexual orientation or one’s chosen pronouns. Woke is a good thing. It gives everyone a seat at the table in this big tent of a country of ours, and it assures that everyone’s voice is heard, whether one agrees with it or not. But, as they’ve done with the totally fictional War On Christmas, the culture warriors have assembled yet another bogey man to scare an already scared, gullible and angry base.

To hear Ron DeSantis and others like him tell it, woke means that the LGBTQ “agenda,” the Black “agenda,” the Hispanic “agenda,” the Native American “agenda” and the “agenda” of anyone who’s not a White, conservative evangelical Christian Nationalist, is being “shoved down the throats” of impressionable school children and college students and their parents. Almost every day, something nuttier and more offensive comes from the cesspool of wrongheaded thought that is the office of Ron DeSantis, be it erasing anything to do with diversity, inclusivity or culture from every kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school classroom and library in Florida, as well as college campuses which are, ironically, conventional hatcheries of questioning and critical thinking.

Critical thinking skills? Questioning authority? Oh, but we can’t have that, can we? It’s gotten so bad that college professors are self censoring rather than risk drawing the ire of Florida’s own little Napoleon. Books are being banned and removed from libraries, and “media specialists” must now approve any books in a school library or in a teacher’s classroom library. Innocuous children’s books are even suspect. And now DeSantis has his hands on the necks of college professors, administrators and board members. Cross him and see what happens. He wants lists of the names of professors he considers to be indoctrinating students.

There have been other heads of state throughout history who collected names. One of them was a German fellow with a silly mustache, if I remember correctly. DeSantis, who hasn’t yet grown a silly mustache, says he’s going to replace the board of Sarasota Florida’s renowned New College with his own likeminded toadies and turn it into, his words, not mine, “the Hillsdale College of the South.” You know, the one that’s essentially a Christian-centered think tank with a college curriculum in Michigan. No college worth its liberal arts degree salt would ever aspire to become Hillsdale College. But that’s what DeSantis wants. It’s his fevered dream for education, which is really anti-education, in Florida. He’s even gone so far as to threaten tenure.

Thank God, Generation Z is having none of DeSantis’ theatre of the cruel. They’re standing up and pushing back. In numbers and with loud voices. They’re whip smart, social media savvy, sophisticated and wise beyond their years. The last thing they’re going to tolerate is a tyrant shoving a totalitarian ten commandments down their throats, instead of allowing them to get the education they’ve sought and paid for. When I was coming of age, it was the Vietnam War that rallied college students and other youth. When the voices of the youth could no longer be conveniently ignored, and when moms and dads watched the evening news every day and saw the bodies of their friends’ and neighbors’ kids being wheeled off transport planes in gray metal caskets at Andrews Airforce Base, the war became untenable and ended. But the beginning of the end was the protests of college students and other youth. It is my belief that the beginning of the end of DeSantis-ism is beginning on school campuses.

After the war ended, campuses underwent a long period of activist dormancy. There are various reasons, but the biggest is that there wasn’t a threat to young folk as existential as the Vietnam War was to my generation of students. The social safety net seemed secure. Roe v Wade gave women a right to choose to have an abortion. Dispensing contraceptives was no longer a crime. Federal legislation began policing run amok state legislation that trampled on civil rights and the wellbeing of all. Things looked pretty good for a while. But while no one was tending the kitchen, interlopers snuck in and began a long, calculated process of poisoning the soup. And here we are today. It’s not just Ron DeSantis. It’s that whole lot of them took the Crazy Train to Insanityville and aren’t coming back. And now, just like that, students and colleges once again have a common enemy to stand against. Ron DeSantis, all puffed up with hubris, might well have unwittingly handed disaffected teachers, college students and professors the means of his own undoing.

The rally at UNF today was sponsored and organized by Students for a Democratic Society, also known as SDS. In the bad old days of my youth membership in, or association with, SDS got you either arrested and jailed or, at the very least, on an FBI watchlist of subversive organizations. But the SDS today, which arose in 2006 after the fall of the old SDS in 1974, isn’t instigating riots or setting fire to government buildings. They’re approaching their mission with peaceful means, knowing that the powers that be will try to metaphorically kick their teeth in. But they’re united. They’re determined. They organize. They do voter drives. The rally people to the polls and vote. They have big voices full of a youthful zeal that I find as refreshing as an icy glass of sweet lemonade on a blistering hot summer afternoon. And it did my old heart proud today to stand with UNF’s SDS Chapter President Lissie Morales and a large, vocal crowd of students to say enough. This is the line in the stand. We’re here and you’re not getting away with this. This cannot stand. This will not stand.

As one young speaker at today’s event said, “College students aren’t a bunch of zombies that don’t read and understand.” They don’t need “protecting” against free and unfettered exchanges of ideas and thought in the classroom. They don’t need DeSantis or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz or any others in that clown car to save them from themselves. They’ve got this and we need to support them.

In an incisive editorial last week, UNF’s student news publication, the Spinnaker wrote: “Escalating each week, DeSantis’s “woke” offensive is the culmination of almost a year of bills, memos and political strong-arming designed to shape Florida’s educational curriculum into something that conforms to his whims and worldview. His strategy? Death by a thousand cuts.”

Today’s college students are taking a stand to try to prevent their colleges from bleeding out. They sure could use our help, not just our Facebook rants and blogs. We need to support them in concrete ways, too. Today, this old UNF alum took the first two steps. I went to their rally. I spoke at their rally. I will now join, as an alum, Students for a Democratic Society and stand with them. I’m not doing this for me. In the grand scheme of things, my time here, as is many of yours, is almost done. I’m doing this for my kids and grandkids. And for yours, too.

These are some dark days. There might even be darker ones ahead. But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his “I See the Promised Land” speech on the day before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, had something to say about darkness that bears remembering: “I know, somehow, that only when it’s dark enough, can you see the stars.”

Please, stand with me. Stand with us. Help these kids find the starlight in this darkness.

The post Education, Not Indoctrination appeared first on Joe Palmer.

I’ve always said I’d never allow an artificial Christmas tree defile our home. “It makes about as much sense as a fake fireplace and a fake chimney,” I’d fume, every time the subject came up, which has been increasingly frequent these past few years. “They have no Christmas-y fragrance,” I’d protest, each time my wife said maybe it’s about time we quit fussing over getting, putting up and decorating a tree each year. “How can you have a Christmas tree that smells like an Ikea store? Absolutely not! I forbid it!”

Flash forward to Christmas season 2022. A beautiful artificial tree graces our living room. It’s beautifully decorated. It holds all the ornaments without small branches giving up the ghost after a few days and sending our precious, heirloom ornaments crashing to the floor and becoming the dog’s latest toys. No, it doesn’t smell like a tree but the balsam candles in the living room mitigate that. But perhaps best of all, it was easy to put up, came with twinkly white lights and doesn’t lean. Which has caused many a squabble between my wife and I for years. The leaners came close to causing marital civil war in our home a few times. One of those is a horror story worthy of a Stephen King novel.

Fed up with a succession of tree stands that were about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, I decided to go shopping for one that would actually make a tree stand up as straight as a Marine at attention. Let me preface this by saying that I think I’ve bought every kind of tree stand there is. None of them did their job, although I confess that perhaps there was some operator error involved.

The most promising were those with pre-drilled holes in the base that came with a tree stand, which cost nearly as much as the tree, that have a spike in the center. You impale the bottom of your pre-drilled tree onto the spike and presto, there’s your Marine at attention. Until it isn’t. And then you have to remove the base of the tree from the spike and reset it, a nearly impossible task that always involved a storm of F-bombs and other colorful language not in keeping with the spirit of Christmas. I’m here to tell you that once you jam that tree down onto that long, steel spike, removing it is about as easy as operating a chainsaw single-handed, not that I’ve ever attempted to do that.

The two times I did do it, I ended up enlarging the hole so much that as soon as I reset the tree, it leaned like the Tower of Pisa. And it was unstable. Real unstable. One of them so unstable that it swayed off balance one night and fell right over, breaking quite a few decorations, which resulted in a grumpy toddler’s display of crankiness in me. That was the last straw.

“Damn it,” I bellowed loud enough to wake the neighbors. “Something has to be done about the blankety-blank, F-bombing tree stands that don’t work. I lose my religion every time I try to put up a tree!”

My wife scowled at me and said: “And you make me lose my religion hearing your effing and blinding every year. It’s time we get an artificial tree.”

“Never!” I yelled. “Over my dead body!”

So, off I went in search of the nirvana of Christmas tree stands. I ended up at a store here that had a big sign showing a photo of a stand that would make your tree stand as pretty as if it were still in the forest. A salesman appeared in front of me like the ghost of Christmas past and grinning like a demented elf.

“Yep,” he said. “From the look on your face, I’m guessing that you’ve had it up to your eyeballs with Christmas tree stands that don’t work. Well, sir, this here new model is guaranteed to hold that tree up without any fussing, mussing or cussing. Well, take a look at this jewel. Put your tree in this here basin and fasten these basin clamps with protective ends guaranteed not to cave into the tree trunk. Set the tree and the basin into this here receiver, adjust the tree till it lines up straight and step on that black lever there which locks the whole shebang into place. Trust me, that tree ain’t going nowhere.”

Whenever I hear “Trust me,” I get a mite suspicious, since it’s been my experience that one who can be trusted need not advertise it so flagrantly. But I was desperate.

“Well, it’d be helpful to actually see one of these in action,” I said. “I mean, looking at the picture of it isn’t very helpful.”

A good salesman is always prepared for an objection. This one was no different.

“Why, I can’t blame you a’tall,” he exclaimed. “I feel the same way. That’s why I’m gonna demonstrate it for you. C’mon.”

He pulled the contraption out of its box and led me outside to a row of firs for sale.

“Watch this!” he crowed.

Within moments, my eyes beheld the mostly perfectly perpendicular tree I’ve ever set eyes on. I’m gonna digress here a moment. Every been to a county fair? If you have, then you know that lined up alongside the midway on one or both sides are various games of chance – basketball hoops, little bottles stacked in a pyramid, bean bags, etc. The carny will demonstrate how easy it is to win. He’ll toss the ball so effortlessly and score so easily that you think a child could do it. Three tosses or shots for two bucks. Fifteen bucks later, if you’re lucky, you’ve won your girl a teddy bear the size of a coffee cup, and not a big one. And no matter how many hundreds of dollars you hand that shifty-eyed, obsequious carny, you will never win that five foot tall teddy bear. Back to the salesman.

I should’ve known I was dealing with a carny wearing a Santa Claus hat but threw caution to the wind after having watched him scored so easily. Instead, I took the bait.

“How much for one of these?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “It normally costs $75.00. But since you’re my last customer for the day, I’m gonna knock it down to $59.95. Whaddya say, buddy? This here is some high tech stuff. And the little lady will be pleased as punch when she sees how easily this works.”

I didn’t just take the bait. I swallowed the hook, sinker and twenty feet of line and took the Rube Goldberg of Christmas tree stands home with me. Included in the parts were a twizzlemahatchet and a thingamabob. The twizzlemahatchet has a sharp, pointy end and when I tried to employ it as the Christmas carny had demonstrated, my hand slipped and the damn thing thing ran it through like a sword.

“Aieeeee!” I screamed. “Eff it! Damn this effin effin effer to hell and back. I’m bleeding!” I screamed again, spewing blood everywhere and wishing death upon my cardiologist for insisting I take blood thinners so I wouldn’t die from a blood clot in order that I might later exsanguinate assembling a Christmas tree stand.

“Aww, honey,” my sweet wife said. “Let me go get you a Band Aid.”

“Band Aid, my hind leg,” I yelled, smearing blood all over and ruining my favorite Grateful Dead T-shirt. “I need an effin tourniquet. I might even need stitches.”

After we left the emergency room, I vowed to track down and murder the Christmas carny who sabotaged me and sent me to the ER, where I had to listen to nurses and doctors outside my curtained cubicle whispering and giggling about “the klutz in 3″ who harpooned himself with a Christmas tree stand tool.”

I took the Rube Goldberg tree stand back the next day, showed my bandaged hand to the nice lady in customer service, demanded a refund and asked the whereabouts of the Christmas carny, as I’d decided to wring his effin neck. She sighed and rolled her eyes.

“You’re too late,” she said, leaning across the desk and whispering like a conspirator to a crime. “We found him deceased on Aisle 4 by those tree stands early this morning with a twizzlemahatchet buried in his skull. Sorry about your inconvenience. I can give you a complimentary coupon for ten dollars off the price of another kind of tree stand.

I shouted, “Bah-humbug!” and stormed out.

So, when this year, my wife suggested it was time to get an artificial tree, I demurred. All we had to do was remove it from the box, put the three sections together, pull the branches down into position, plug it in and put the ornaments on it. No twizzlemahatchet required, no bleeding out in the living room, no emergency room visit, no effin and blindin. Just eggnog, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby singing Christmas carols.

Three days later, that bad boy is still standing at attention like a Marine. They never did find out who whacked the Christmas tree carny. Heh-heh-heh!

The post O (blankety-blank) Christmas Tree appeared first on Joe Palmer.

Papa on the deck tending red-hot coals and spitting meat while listening to the football game on the television inside. In the kitchen, whoops of laughter from the ladies over some shared hilarity. Meanwhile, in the living room, raucous cheers from the guys as our team scores another touchdown. Harley, our lovable Great Dane barking and chasing the the kids as they run shrieking and out of the house and around the deck.

Another autumn settles in . Toasty, dry days and pleasantly cool nights. The trilling cicadas of summer are gone. The creeping dusk belongs now to the crickets and katydids. A Great Blue Heron takes leave of the marsh behind us, departing with its characteristic, harsh roh-roh-roh sound. I gaze at the woodpile and hope that we’ll soon have an evening cool enough to building a crackling fire in the fireplace. I’ll toss in a couple of logs of Irish peat to give the house the warm, welcome smell of a an Irish country pub.

Later in the evening, with dessert finished, goodbyes, hugs and kisses all around, the dishes put away and the sun finally gone home from the sky, my wife and I brew tea and make hot chocolate and relax, elbow to elbow, in the wooden deck chairs outside. I build a fire in our old, Mexican chiminea, faded a pastel pinkish-orange, the bas relief roses on it worn nearly smooth by the caressing hand of the years. Hoping for some petting or a possible treat, Harley joins us. I give him a marshmallow which he slurps and then lies down beside me, stretching and groaning, soon fast asleep.

My wife and I sit comfortably side by side, as older folk do, sipping our tea and cocoa and recount, in low voices, the events of another day already in the history book of time. The sky is now as black as the devil’s heart. A harvest moon rises in the east, smiling expansively at us with its fat, golden face. Regal Jupiter ascends his throne in the east. Mars and Saturn crouch low in the southwest. Diamond-brilliant stars pierce the veil of the black sky amid the sweep of the constellations surrounding them. Andromeda, made immortal by Athena, shows her fair face alongside her parents. Perseus, her father, follows mother Cassiopeia across the firmament like a doting lover. We gasp in sudden wonder at a smatter of fiery meteorites spat like seeds across the sky by the hunter, Orion.

By now, I’m thinking of baked apples. While my wife stargazes and sips her tea, I slip back into the house and check the temperature of the oven. Finding it just so, I go to the counter and fetch the two, big apples I prepared earlier. It’s a family tradition handed down from my mama, God rest her. Earlier, I’d scooped out the apples’ seeded cores and filled the cavities with brown sugar, the tiniest kiss of butter and a big smooch of cinnamon. I’m slow and deliberate as I work. It’s a ritual and makes me remember times in mama’s fragrant kitchen.

Satisfied that I’ve gotten it just right, I wrap the prepped apples in foil, set them in a metal pan and put them in the hot oven. On the way back outside, I grab two of her soft, cozy Afghans and take them with me.

The fire in the chiminea has burned low. Only a few orange tongues still flicker. I go to the woodpile and select two, well-seasoned pieces of cedar I split last fall from a dying tree that a friend felled in his backyard. It put it in the chiminea and it blazes bright and fast, impregnating the air with its spicy bouquet. Dreaming of chasing rabbits perhaps, Harley’s legs twitch and he yips in his sleep.

The warm, homey aroma of cinnamon baked apples soon tells me they’re ready to eat. I ease back into the kitchen, remove them from the oven, set each of them in a small bowl and top off each with a dollop of whipped cream.

It’s getting late and Pegasus is grazing his way toward the midnight pastures. An airplane drones unseen, high overhead. he blazing cedar crackles and hisses. We’re snug in our Afghans. The baked apples are perfect tonight.

We eat them in silence. Sometimes silence is better than a prayer. Sometimes silence is an unspoken prayer. And what better place to pray than beneath heaven itself, with autumn as its chapel?

The post Heaven Above, Autumn Its Chapel appeared first on Joe Palmer.

I’m heartsick today because a friend has died. More heartsick because she’d just celebrated her 35th birthday a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t fair that the young have to die. It’s a grievous transgression of the natural order of things when a parent has to bury their child. It’s backwards. Our children are supposed to bury us.

Let me tell you a bit about my friend. Her name is Rachel Green. Rachel worked in the graphics department for many years at our local Staples store. That’s where we met. I stopped in from time to time to get placards or posters made to use at author events. I’m an obsessive-compulsive  perfectionist by nature and, quite often, my ship of patience has sailed when I finally get around to asking for help. I’m lousy at computer-ish stuff. I know what I want, but not only do I find it impossible to do on my own, I sometimes have trouble articulating how I want the image in my head to appear on a poster or some other form of visual media. During those times, I’m at the mercy of those who do understand these things, who are mostly young folk like Rachel.

All of us know how frustrating it can be walking into a “big box” store and finding someone to help us. And finding someone to help us who’s as eager to assist us as if we are their very first customer is a rare bird, indeed. Rachel was that rare bird. It can be especially intimidating when having to deal with techy types when your own technical ability doesn’t extend much farther than successfully booting up your computer and not losing everything you wrote the night before. Sometimes they’re hard to communicate with because we speak in different languages. I’m a wordsmith, not a mechanic or a plumber or electrician or a graphics artist. But Rachel always put me at ease.

Rachel was an artiste at graphics. But more importantly, she had the innate ability to listen to what you said and translate all that muddle into the precise results you wanted. It’s like she could peer into your mind as you struggled to put into words how you wanted the finished product to look and say, “Ah, I know exactly what to do, and I think you’ll really love it. And if you have time to hang around with me a few minutes, we can tweak it until it’s perfect.” That’s always what I got from Rachel when I went into the Staples graphics department and sheepishly tried to communicate my needs, which, as usual, I’d put off until the eleventh hour. But when Rachel was on duty, I knew that it’d be a simple task and the project would sparkle once she put the finishing touches on it. I knew that it’d be money well spent and the turnaround time would be rapid.

But aside from all that, Rachel was a delightful person. She was a lot like me in that she never met a stranger and always enjoyed talking to people. Rachel and I became friends through her work at Staples. Then we became Facebook friends. Then we became regular friends. And though we didn’t know each other very long or see each other often, I considered her to be a good friend. She was a keenly intelligent young woman, inquisitive about everything and could converse with you about anything while she worked. She loved anything tie-dyed, as do I, and always was delighted when I’d walk in wearing one of my many tie-dyed tee shirts. She had a big smile, a merry laugh and a fillet knife-sharp wit.

Rachel suffered from an autoimmune disease call lupus. Like most autoimmune diseases, it’s miserable and plays havoc, not only with your physical wellbeing, but your psyche and emotional wellbeing. The disease is painful and drags down those who have it. The array of medications a lupus victim has to take to keep the disease at bay can also wreak havoc of their own. In Rachel’s case, one of her meds eroded the bone in her hip, necessitating extensive surgery and therapy earlier this year. I was a Navy medic and surgeon’s assistant. I specialized in orthopedic surgery. When Rachel told me what was going on, I knew right away and we were able to talk about it because I understood the kind of procedure she needed to have done and was able to answer questions for her and talk about the surgery, itself. We stayed in touch, via Facebook messenger and texting, during her recovery.

Rachel was a happy warrior. She always had a big, infectious smile and never complained, even on those occasions when I could see the limp in her gait and knew how much she must be hurting. A good attitude and good cheer is one of the best medicines, they say, and Rachel had that in abundance. The thoughts of going to Staples’ graphics department and not seeing Rachel behind the counter is going to be hard. I’m going to miss her a lot. She’ll be impossible to replace.

The 17th-century metaphysical poet, John Donne wrote a poem called, “Death, Be Not Proud.” The poem, addressed to death itself, mocks it for its arrogance and pride in believing that it’s the final victor, when, in reality, it cannot kill us, but instead, sets our soul free from our weary bodies so that we can have eternal rest. In 1949, an author named John Gunther used the title for the memoir about his son, Johnny, who died of a brain tumor at 17-years-old. It was a tribute to his son’s courage, wit, friendliness and enduring patience. When I sat down to do this blog in Rachel’s memory, the poem, and the book, immediately came to mind.

See you on the other side, my tie-dyed friend. I dedicate one of my favorite poems to your memory.

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

The post Death, Be Not Proud appeared first on Joe Palmer.

Just over two weeks from now will be the second anniversary of one of my best friends, Dr. Clark Hoshall. This blog is an updated version of a newspaper column I wrote about Clark just a few days after his tragic death in August 2011. The world would be a much kinder and better place with more Clark Hoshalls in it.

Just a few years before Clark died in a fall from a balcony, I had a serious heart attack, the kind known in the graveyard of the medical profession as “the widow maker.”

The first few days back home after the stents in my blocked coronary arteries, I felt bulletproof. I’d beaten the deadly widow maker. Nyah! Take that, Mr. Death. But then the gravity of what I’d been through snatched me unceremoniously back to Earth and left me, as is fairly common post-heart attack and heart surgery, feeling blue. I was also afraid. I remember nights not sleeping so much and feeling my newly repaired heart thumping inside my chest, wondering if I’d live to see the sun come up.

No long after, my buddy, Clark, came to see me. When he asked me how I was feeling, I confessed that I was a little scared and just glad to be here, albeit for who knew how long. Clark slapped me on the shoulder, laughed, and said, “My friend, any day on this side of the grass is a good day.” And then we both laughed like a couple of fools. Just doing that made me feel better. How could you not laugh at Clark-isms, as his witty one liners were widely known? I felt fortunate to have been blessed with one all my own.

But Clark would too soon make that journey to the other side of the grass, one we’ll all make eventually. Clark’s death dealt a mighty blow to our little island community. You see, Clark was a wealthy man, but he also had a trillion dollar surplus of friends and loved ones who still mourn his passing. His premature death left a gaping, Clark Hoshall-size hole in the community. His wealth of friends left behind would make Solomon’s gold look like mere lumps of clay.

He was one of the most compassionate, selfless and giving people I ever knew. Clark wouldn’t just give you the proverbial shirt off his back, but, if he even thought you needed it, his entire set of clothes, his shoes, his car and enough gas money to get you where you needed to go. He’d also give you some money to tide you over. I remember once when the kids were young and my wife and I were struggling financially, Clark heard about it somehow and gave me a sizeable chunk of money to see us through. He didn’t want to be repaid, but I insisted on doing it anyway. But even if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have even made a little ding in our friendship.

Clark was a larger than life activist for the poor, the downtrodden and the afflicted. He was truly a modern day Don Quixote type. He was fearless ands relentless when it came to taking on their causes and being their advocate. No man or entity was too formidable for him. When he couched his lance and charged, powerful men trembled at his brilliant and confident voice. Laws actually changed or were written because of his relentless advocacy for justice.

“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for the sake of justice, for they shall have their fill,” one of the eight beatitudes decrees. I’ve no doubt that it’s true. It’s been proven time and again, not only in this country, but elsewhere. We don’t have to look as far as Mother Theresa or Dr. martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy or Gandhi to find tireless, unflinching warriors for just causes. We had one of them right here in our midst in the wry, laughing person of Dr. Clark V. Hoshall.

Clark, no doubt owing somewhat to being a doctor, also had a deep and abiding concern about the well-being of an individual. If he knew, or sensed a friend was sliding into the abyss, you could count on him being there with his hand extended. We had a mutual friend here in our community who’d been struggling for years with substance abuse problems. Clark picked this person up time and again, long after most people would’ve just written him off. Our friend, who’s also now gone, finally defeated his demons and died clean.

Clark wasn’t a maudlin, sappy type of man so I don’t want to go too heavy on the syrup here. It just wouldn’t be fitting. And he’d be sure to have a zinger for me if I did, were he still here. I prefer to remember his big, boisterous laugh, his bright smile and his keen intellect. He could talk with you about a subject far above your pay grade in such way that you could understand and without feeling patronized. He did that a lot with me, and I’m the wiser for it.

He would be proud of the well attended memorial service that his long-time partner, Amy, had at their home. We laughed and told Clark-isms about the man we all loved so much.

The world since Clark left it has become a bitter place. Elected leaders want to force us backward to the days or Jim Crow and when women, like children, were to be seen and not heard. Clark Hoshall wouldn’t have that. He’d spend his last dime fighting for those who bring so much pain to us just because they can. He’d leave a lot of them bloodied and bruised and wanting no further part of the fight. We have politicians now twisting themselves around the axle and trying to frighten us because they claim that men are becoming somehow emasculated by the enlightenment that men didn’t once have. They’re all hung up on the ridiculous John Wayne image of the manly man. I can hear Clark laughing derisively in their faces and making fools of them and that notion. Clark Hoshall wasn’t what these people would call a swaggering, macho manly man. They’d call him soft and weak. But he’d make hash out of them, laughing merrily while he did it.

I’m going to end this with a snippet of Simon and Garfunkel’s big hit, Mrs. Robinson. I’ll just tweak the words a bit.

“Where have you gone, Clark Hoshall. The community turns its lonely eyes to you.”

The post A Modern Day Don Quixote appeared first on Joe Palmer.

This is a column originally printed in the Fernandina Beach News-Leader from the 10-year run of my Cup of Joe column. Out of the hundreds I wrote, this is by far and away one of my favorites. I wrote it for my granddaughter six years ago when she was four. Now she’s ten, going on eleven and old enough to read it herself.

I took my little granddaughter Lora Leigh on a walk along the beach on Bird Island in Nassau Sound the other day to look for shells.

“Look, Papa,” she cried, letting go of my hand and stooping to pick up a sand dollar bleached as white as Sea Island cotton. “Mommy loves sand dollars.”

The two of us admired her sand dollar for a bit, talking about their beauty and how delicate they are.

“Let’s be very quiet and see if we can find some more,” I said.

“Why do we need to be quiet, Papa?” she asked, peering intently at me.“

“Because if we’re very quiet and walk softly we might be able to hear the sand dollars talking to each other and maybe we can sneak up on them,” I said.

“Papaaa!” she squealed. “You’re being silly! Sand dollars can’t talk!”

“Sure they do, sweetie,” I answered, stooping to look into her widening blue eyes. “All creatures talk to each other. But we have to listen very closely to hear them sometimes.”

“But how will we hear them?” she asked me. “They’re so tiny. How do they talk?”

“They whisper in tiny little voices that are as soft and pretty and delicate as they are,” I told her, lowering my voice to a whisper. “If we’re very quiet and listen very carefully and don’t do or even think about anything else, why, I bet we’ll hear them if there are any close by.”

“Ohhhh,” my normally boisterous granddaughter whispered back. “Then let’s be real quiet and listen.”

And so we did. We squatted side by side at the edge of a small, shallow tide pool and listened for the magical whispering of sand dollars. Presently, the breeze made ripples on the surface of the tide pool and the ripples lapping against the wet sand edges of it made a delicate tinkling sound like that of ants marching with tiny bells on their feet, the sound a sand dollar makes when it whispers.

“Lora Leigh,” I whispered in her ear, touching her lightly on her arm. Listen very carefully. Do you hear that pretty little sound?”

“I do!” she whispered, her eyes growing wider in astonishment. “I hear it Papa! Is that a sand dollar whispering? Where is it? What’s it saying?”

“Well, it’s probably telling the other sand dollars to be quiet and hide because people are nearby,” I said quietly. “I think they’re somewhere very close. Let’s look and see if we can find them. I’m sure we will if we look real hard and keep listening.”

Much to my astonishment, perhaps by serendipity, perhaps by fate, two steps later, we found it. It was smaller and even more delicate than the first one – not much bigger than a quarter.

“Wow!” Lora Leigh cried. “Papa, we found it! Sand dollars really do whisper! How did you know that, Papa? Did your mommy tell you?”

“No, sweetie,” I said. “A little angel told me one day when I was about your age and walking on the beach. I never told anyone else.”

“But why, Papa?” she asked.

“Because I didn’t think anyone else would believe me but I knew that one day you would and so you’re the first person I ever told my secret to,” I said.

“I believe you, Papa,” she said, taking my hand again.

And then we walked back down the beach toward the rest of the family, stepping softly and listening for the whispers of more sand dollars together.

Some may frown and say I told my innocent and trusting granddaughter a lie. But one day, when she is old like me, she will take her own granddaughter or grandson by the hand and walk with them along a quiet, deserted stretch of beach at low tide and teach another trusting and innocent child about the magical whispering of sand dollars and their delicate, secret language that only a rare few of us can learn to hear.

And when that day comes, Papa will smile and lean down from heaven and softly blow his breath upon the surface of a warm shallow tide pool and make its ripples sound like the marching of ants with tiny bells on their feet, which is exactly what the whispers of sand dollars sounds like to those of us lucky enough to hear them. And that child will be filled with wonder, too.

So, what is the whispering of sand dollars?

It’s the singing of angels, my precious Lora Leigh, the singing of angels.

The post The secret language of sand dollars appeared first on Joe Palmer.

It’s coming up on summer again. It’ll be here before you know it. I’m going to start telling more stories from my newspaper column, Cup of Joe, that ran for ten years in the local newspaper here. Most of them are heartwarming like this one.

Eleven years ago, I wrote this column after a summer afternoon with my kids playing in a tide pool with our grandson. Did you ever play in tide pools as a kid? If not, you really missed something special. Many years ago, it seemed like they were everywhere along our beaches – long, narrow lakes of cool, clear seawater. When I was a kid like my grandkids now, I can remember playing in them for hours with my brother and other kids. Sometimes, the outgoing tide makes a current in them and you can lie on your back or a raft and float from one end to the other.

Some days, we barely ventured into the surf at all because we had so much fun entertaining ourselves in tide pools. All you needed was a friend a sibling or two, a sand bucket, plastic shovel and sieve, a little raft or inner tube to float on and you had all the fixings for an amusing day on the beach. Way back when but not so much these days, tide pools were a haven for all kinds of interesting sea life. Hermit crabs in colorful shells of all shapes and sizes patrolled the sandy bottoms like sentries. Every now and then, one of them would decide it liked its neighbor’s shell better than its own and it’d snatch the other one out of its shell and confiscate it, leaving its neighbor temporarily homeless. But not for too long because the evicted crab would soon decide a house swap with another neighbor was in order.

Sand dollars were more plentiful then, too. Sometimes you could just barely see their partially buried circular outline in the clear water. Other times, you had to inch along and feel for them with your fingers or toes. The greenish, prickly skin live ones were plentiful. A rare find was a big dead one, bleached bone-white by the sun and perfectly shaped with no dings or broken pieces missing. I remember finding one that was dang near as big as a tea saucer. I wish I still had it, although maybe it wouldn’t really seem that big now. If I had a real dollar for every sand dollar I scooped up as a kid between ages 6 and 11, I’d be a rich man today. Come to think about it, I guess I am rich because I have such a treasure trove of all these wonderful beach memories from childhood.

When we tired of playing in the tide pools, we walked along the shell line, scouring the beds of sea shells for interesting and unusual specimens. I haven’t seen olive shells in abundance like we used to find in ages. Where’d they go, I wonder? There are no shortage of the ubiquitous cockle shells, even now. I remember picking up some bigger than ash trays. Or maybe they just seemed that big to the eyes of an 8-year-old boy from South Georgia on vacation here. I’ve found a few huge ones here and there but nowhere near as many as I used to.

We came every summer and stayed a whole week. Back then, it seemed like a month. My family was poor and a week was all my dad could swing on his salary, and this in a day when weekly beach house rentals – Georgia folk called them cottages – could be had for as little as $25 to $30 a week. I recall daddy grousing when they went up to $30 to $40 a week. I fell in love with this beach before I was old enough for school. I met my first sweetheart here when I was, what, 14? Every summer, we kids made new friends among other kids from the beach not from our hometown and promised to be forever friends. Then we went home and began breathlessly counting down the long autumn, winter and spring months until our week on this once magical strand of beach rolled around again. Overdevelopment has left us only with memories of that magical place it used to be.

When I got out of boot camp in the summer of 1972, this was the first place I wanted to visit again. I needed to get some peace of mind and recharge my batteries before giving the US Navy the next four and a half years of my life. The beach went through a spell where weekly rentals were curtailed but that’s pretty much changed now. I’m glad. I wonder how many others are out there like me are here today as aging adults because our mamas and daddies and grandparents, aunts and uncles staked out a claim on the beach here for a week every summer? I’ll bet there are tons of us. And I’ll bet their memories are as delightful as mine.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to live here. It’s so close to Waycross, Georgia where I grew up that by the time we were in high school and had wheels, or friends who did, we used to come on weekends and holidays. Heck, I remember just up and skipping school to come down, knowing full well I’d answer for it when I got home. We started meeting local kids our age who lived here and envied them that they actually lived here.

I guess tide pools are as magical as they ever were. They seem to be making a comeback. Maybe it just takes the eyes of a child to see the magic. Standby for my blog next week about me teaching my adoring granddaughter about the secret language of sand dollars that not everyone can hear.

The post Little Kids Love Tide Pools appeared first on Joe Palmer.