Ah, Junior Prom, 1973. The steady girlfriend I had through all of my Junior year, Amber Day of Falls Church High School, dropped me just a few weeks before the prom. I hadn't dated a girl at my high school for two years.

I created a short list of two or three girls, and finally asked a girl by the name of [you're not going to believe this] Fish Gill. Marguriette [Fish] Gill was A fresman who lived at the Chateaux Apartments near the 7-corners Shopping Center. We were friends, and had no "feelings" for one another. I didn't want to stay home, and she wanted to be the only freshman at the prom. It worked out well for both of us.

I hardly remember a thing about the night. I have no clue where we ate dinner, and the prom itself was at something like an Eagles Lodge. I took her home and she gave me a quick kiss and that was that.

It beat sitting home and watching Sanford and Son, but just barely.

Oh, How Embarrassing

Now, I have to admit that I probably goaded my Dad into taking this picture, but hey, he's the adult and should have realized it was a bad idea. Oh well.

This was taken in our apartment in the Barcroft Towers, next to Munson Hill Apartments on Arlington Blvd in Falls Church. It was Christmas, 1968. It was our second Christmas without my Mom, who died suddenly at the age of 40 in February, 1967. Take a look at the small, sad looking Christmas tree behind me. That was about the size of those first few Christmas seasons while our family was in morning.

I guess I'm supposed to be leaving the batters box after whacking the ball into centerfield, and my Dad's camera froze me in some kind of stop-action silliness. Cool in 1968. Very embarrassing in 2005. Notice the lack of any logos or team designs anywhere. That just wasn't around in 1968 I never owned a Washington Senators cap; I don't think any of my friends did either. You couldn't buy the real thing at the store, and no one carried the replicas. That hat I'm wearing came from Drug Fair. It was bright red and the closest thing I could find to a Nats cap.
With my luck, I was probably thrown out at first base.

Dad and I never got over our problems. Ask me what happened, and you'll get a different answer from what my brothers might say. I think all the problems were based on his absolute love for his wife, my mother, and after her death, I was the only thing on Earth that reminded him of her, and that really, truly hurt him. Sure, I did some dumb things, but nothing so bad as to be asked to leave the house. Twice. I never did drugs. I didn't drink. I wasn't a member of some anti "something" group. No. I was just a kid searching to find himself. But for whatever reason, I didn't do it in a way that satisfied my Father. I regret those things I may have done, but I am not sure at this point in my life what those were, other than perhaps being an immature 18 and 19 year old.

It had been several years since I moved away from Virginia, and it was very difficult to see my Dad again. It was the same for him. Until the day he died in 1986, he never was able to treat me as just "one of his boys." But he wanted to. He gave my wife Tracey and my daughter Kira all the love they wanted, and then some. He took them on long drives in the mountains, and gave them beautiful gifts. Me. Me he couldn't look in the eyes.

I miss my Father -- he has been gone almost 20 years now. I wish something could have been done to make our last years together more enjoyable for both of us, but it is too late. I still love him, and wish that things could have been different.

The 1970s -- yuck

How in the world did we think we looked good in these clothes and that hair??

This photograph was taken on my 16th birthday [May 28 1972], with my brothers Tim [left] and Sharif [behind me] there to support me. Tim worked in computers for a bank at the time, and Sharif managed a Bonds Clothing store in suburban Maryland. My father took the picture.

We were living in Woodlake Towers at the time, on Arlington Blvd. just down from Seven Corners.

Oh gosh, I was so young. This picture was taken driving along Interstate 15, somewhere between Ogden and Layton. Most Saturdays, Tracey and I would drive to her parent's house and spend a few hours there. The hat says "Tylan," which was a drug sold to veterinarians. I was working at the time for Interwest Vet Supply in Ogden.

Tracey had returned from Naval basic training in Orlando a few months before, and new plans had to be made. I was going to go back to college while Tracey served as a Physicians Assistant in the Navy, but they found her ear problems just before she concluded her basic training, and was released from duty.

In another month, I would find a job in the accounting department at Zions Bank in Salt Lake City. We moved form a somewhat rundown home in Ogden to a beautiful apartment in Salt Lake City, near Trolley Square. That was one of the happier times in my life.

My Backyard in Beirut [circa 1959]

I lived in a apartment house in Beirut. It faced the Mediterranean sea [I can't remember how close it was to the ocean] and the picture above shows the back yard. The coastline of Beirut looked very much like any other large, cosmopolitin city in Europe. But once you began to take the back roads however, it had a taste and feel of the backwardness of the Middle East of that time.

I remember that the women didn't like having their pictures taken; my Father would have to hide and snap his shutter before they could react. See the woman who just noticed my Father? She wasn't too happy with him.

Tracey and I had been married three weeks when we decided to look for a new car. I can't say that I remember why we did this. We didn't have a lot of money, and we had a good, reliable car.

Our 1967 Pontiac Catalina stationwagon got us around quite nicely. No, it wasn't brand new, and yes, it was a little warn, but it was clean and should have lasted us for several years. We just couldn't wait, I guess.

We were driving down Riverdale Road in Ogden Utah one day and saw the new Mazda GLC[GLC meant Great Little Car] at Cutrubus Motors. At this point, Honda was THE small car in the United States, and Mazda was trying to make inroads. Tracey liked a yellow one, but it was a very basic model. This brown one had everything you could put on a GLC. The cost: $3,875. We couldn't get credit because we were still very young, but Tracey's Uncle Nolan co-signed. Interest rates were very high, and the two loans [one for the car, one for the down payment] totaled $168/mo, a great deal in 1979.

No regrets. The car gave us safe and reliable transportation. We went to Seattle to visit Tracey's family, who had just moved there from Layton. Tracey's parents had to go to Boston to visit family, and they took our little Mazda. It survived many years. It moved us to Seattle, then to Washington, D.C. Later, it took us to Ann Arbor Michigan, St. Louis Missouri and West Palm Beach, Florida. By the late 1980s, it had begun to show its age. It needed a new radiator, but we couldn't afford one. We once had to travel from Tampa Bay to West Palm Beach during the middle of August. The only way to keep the car from overheating was to turn on the heater full blast [which drew some of the heat off the engine and into the car]. That was a long, HOT trip across Alligator Alley! We gave the car to Tracey's family, and David ended up wrecking it on a rainy highway.

It gave us good, reliable transportation. It also turned out to be the only brand new car we ever bought.

I was three years old when we left Beirut Lebanon for Washington, D.C. While most of the memories are cloudy, a few distinct remembrances remain to this day, some 46 years later.

We lived in an apartment house right on the Mediterranean Sea. Often, we would swim in the sea during the morning, and then after a lunch and short nap, we would head to the mountains for a day of skiing. As I remember, the trip took thirty minutes as the most. The photo above shows the close proximity between the sea and the mountains above the city.

Beirut had a cornice around the city. The cornice was a walkway that bordered the Mediterranean. In the evening, the people would put on their nice clothes and walk the cornice, enjoying the warm evening as well as the cool ocean breeze.

Along the way, tradesman sold their wares. a I particularly remember one peanut vendor, who would wrap his roasted peanuts in a cone made of newspaper. He had a trained monkey who was trained to take the money from the customer. The man was very old, and wore a fez hat. I'm the litle kid on the right in the above picture.

Take a look at this picture I found on another person's blog. It's a picture of that same cornice taken 45 years later. Look at the people still walking in the cool summer's eve. Look at the vendor selling his wares.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.