Beans and Other Memories

As promised, here are some digital scans from my parents' old slides, which I brought back with me from Florida. I hadn't seen any of these pictures in years, so it was fun to go through them. Some were quite surprising!

We start off with Beans, my parents' Boston terrier, from 1965. Apparently he fell asleep with his head resting in the crook of the coffee table legs. I can just hear my dad laughing about that.

These are my parents (center) with some of their friends at the University of Maryland, shortly before they were married in the summer of 1962. This picture blows my mind. They look so young -- and they were, 24 or 25.

Considering how the marriage worked out, I want to yell back in time, "DON'T DO IT!" But of course, then I wouldn't be here.

This was where my parents lived in Tampa in 1963 -- a house that was back then in the middle of open fields, but now backs up to University Square Mall and the congestion of Fowler Avenue. Here's what it looks like today.

I never lived in this house. Just before I was born, they moved out to suburban Pasco County, north of the city.

Here's my dad on his honeymoon in 1962. My parents went to Skyland, in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. I think he's sniffing an aquilegia flower, also known as columbine -- Dave and I have a couple of varieties in our garden now.

Here's my mom with Beans at Clearwater Beach in 1965. Mom isn't really a beach person, and as you can see, there wasn't a whole lot of sunbathing going on.

Here's Mom in her little pink Nash Metropolitan convertible, in Spring 1964. I think this was around the time they sold it. (You can also see it sitting in the carport of the house above.) Many years later Mom still talked about this car. She loved it.

This is my paternal grandfather, picking apricots (I think?) in California in 1963. I never met him -- he died a few years before I was born. He was a postman, and my dad said he always enjoyed that job, getting out and walking around and talking to people.

Finally, here's me with my younger brother in our lakeside back yard in 1971. I look skeptical, and my brother looks terrified! The puppies were no doubt the offspring of Boots, our dog at the time. Boots had several litters, from which we got several other dogs, including Honeybun, Gus and Paco. (This was before spay/neuter advocacy, so dogs just reproduced willy-nilly.)

There are many more slides -- more than I could ever blog -- but you get the idea! I'm glad to get some of them scanned for easier viewing in the digital age.