Keeping Up Appearances
I grew up among Episcopalians and military types. The military is all about appearances. My mother’s father, General “Bagpipes” Magruder, wore a suit and bow tie .
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The Volleyball Player and the Cowboy
I step into the maw of the cavernous Orlando Convention Center and am assaulted by the screaming of at least five hundred teenage girls. The air is peppered with arcing white volleyballs.
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Come Back, Huck Finn
When I was fourteen, boys were abundant on street corners and empty lots. They were shooed out the back door on a summer’s morning and not expected back until supper time.
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“The Doctor Will See You Now….”
I have shoes older than my new primary care doctor. He has a pageboy haircut, like Prince Valiant…
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Election Day
“I’m worried about you,” my sister Peg said. “Are you sure you’ll be safe?” I had just finished telling her I had volunteered to be a poll watcher.
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Get a Job
I envy men who have had a profession, men who always wanted to be an actuary or a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike. I was born into a military family. My father, both grandfathers, a grandfather’s brother, my brother, three of my cousins, and a brother-in-law were military officers.
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Being the Big Kahuna
I held the gavel suspended in mid-air. It was my last meeting as Chair of the St. Petersburg Urban Detritus Society (SPUDS). I held fire on gaveling the annual membership meeting to an end
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The Curveball and the Star-Spangled Banner
From the time I waddled out onto the Little League field to settle in behind home plate wearing shin guards, chest protector, and catcher’s mask, I was hooked on baseball
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My Father’s Shoes
In my shoeshine box, they will find: two shine brushes (brown, black); two polish brushes (ditto); three cans of polish (cordovan, brown, black); a bottle of saddle soap; and three shine cloths (one filched from the Woodstock Inn in Vermont and one from the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, VA).
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These Boots Are Made For Working
It was the noon hour and at the base of the bridge, in the shadow of the arch, construction men ate their lunches, legs flung out in front, backs against the concrete slab. lunch boxes at their side, empanadas in their hands.
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It’s Not About the Fish
The 7-Eleven door burst open, bell jangling. A scrawny, one-legged, shirtless, bearded man in tattered pants clumped through on his one leg and a crutch. Eyes bulging, he shouted and waved his free arm.
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A Dog’s Diary
Using a Brain-Computer Interface App (BCIA) as envisioned by Elon Musk, the Craiglit.life technology department was able to transcribe the personal diary of a Labrador Retriever into the publishing empire’s mainframe computer
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What Would George Say?
Gazing out over the rubble of our elected officialdom, I reflect we have come on hard times manners-wise and civility-wise.
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Can We Talk?
A recent Economist article suggests that American men come up short when it comes to friends, guy friends specifically. American heroes ride solo. Think Gary Cooper in High Noon, Jack Reacher, Spider Man, The Hulk, or Cleatus, the Fox Sports animatronic figure with laser eyeballs.
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Anticipation
From the moment a kindly catfish found its way to the end of my line and sent a tentative tap, tap up through my fishing pole to my six-year-old hands, I have been consumed by fishing.
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The Couch Chronicles
This is where the foot rubbing mentioned in my last post occurs. Many readers have inquired if they can bring their feet to the couch to get in on the action. Sorry, but my contract, annually renewed, is with My Life’s Editor. At our age, other than TV watching, foot rubbing is about all that…
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Unplug and Reboot
Last night My Life’s Editor and I settled into our couch in our TV room to watch Mr. Djokovic play Mr. Zverev in the US Open semi-final. I sat back, she laid out lengthwise on the couch and plopped her feet on my lap, in foot rub mode. Foot rubs get my contract renewed each…
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Dear Mr. Craig
bigBlue Airways August 15, 2021 Dear Mr. Craig, We were pleased to be your travel experience of choice on your Saturday, August 8, BigBlue flight to Orlando. We admit the flight might have been unanticipated by you when on the prior day, August 7, you were seated comfortably on flight #931 for Tampa awaiting takeoff…
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True Confesssions
I have a confession to make. The cover photo on You’ll Need a Guide, available from Amazon for a paltry amount, shows me gleefully displaying a rainbow trout to the camera. The photo leads the reader to believe that trout leap into my hands on a regular basis. Steady yourself: I do not always catch…
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Another Trip, Another time
I backed My Life’s Editor’s molten orange CRV into a post yesterday in St. Augustine. The good news is the boxes with cupcakes and brownies from the Casa de Sueños B&B survived undamaged. My justification for backing into the post was that herself had brought up a map on the “Driver Information Interface” screen, rather…
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“Downtown, Everything’s waiting for you”
Five years ago, My Life’s Editor and I unloaded half our books and all our brown furniture (rejected by kids and consignment shops) and moved into a condo in the beating heart of St. Pete. “So, how do you like living, ah, downtown?” a friend asks, dubious, as if he meant to say, “How do…
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Patience
Decades ago, when I was in my salad years, a psychologist studied his summary report on me, looked up from his desk and said, “You should never be a watch repairman.” A watch repairman, bent over a watch case, tweezers in hand, would try to insert a tiny screw or a coil. It would drop…
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My Lost Cause
Henry Adams (1838 – 1918), Harvard graduate and pedigreed Boston Brahmin, was a great-grandson of John Adams, the 2nd President, and a grandson of John Quincy Adams, the 6th President. American Studies majors are not permitted to receive their college diploma until they have read The Education of Henry Adams, his autobiography. The CliffsNotes version…
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Three Men In A Boat
Kip, my roommate from graduate school, called. In his ebullient have-I-got-a-deal-for-you style, he asked if I would like to join him and an Ormond Beach friend, Tom, to fish for snook in the Everglades National Park for a couple days. Kip and Tom are hard core fishermen. We would not be resting on a Barcalounger…
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Bingo and Molly
It is a rite of suburban passage that a beginner family, after stocking up on kids, decides to do the dog thing. Picture a toasty, happy, Christmas-card family smiling in their matching jammies with a dog appended. The presence of a dog squares the circle, certifies familyness. The Craig family was no exception. When Hutch…
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Team bonefish
In couch potato mode, trail mix bowl in my lap, I watched the Rays’ keystone combo, shortstop Willy Adames and second baseman Brandon Lowe, turn a double play. Willy dove for a grounder to his right, caught the ball in the webbing of his glove, braked, planted his right foot and slung the ball to…
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Glenna
Most days of COVID-19 I hang out in my pajamas until late morning. I slurp coffee, and scan the paper, looking for warm-hearted stories about siblings separated at birth, reunited at a smoked mullet festival. Monday mornings, however, I put on my long pants and drive to the Sunshine Senior Center, next to the St.…
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A Guitar and A fly rod
“Sounds pretty good,” said my crack guitar teacher, Douglas L. He was zooming me from two feet away, his angular face with soul patch framed in my laptop. I basked in his praise. If I were a dog my tail would have been wagging. It had taken me two months to subdue sixteen bars of…
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A Stick, A Wall, and a Ball
I had an OK childhood as a suburban kid. The exception was when my parents put me in organized sports. In Little League, I was a catcher – none of the other kids wanted to squat in the dirt, sweat and peer at the world through steel bars. One day when my team, the Tigers,…
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Of burgers, zits and unrequited love
One early June morning, summer of 1959, dressed in jeans, canvas sneakers and a clean Tee, I pedaled my German 5-speed (black with gold striping) to my first real job. On the Ft. Meade, MD military post where I lived, nothing was far from home. It took me 10 minutes to pull up to the…
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Shore Lunch
In a galaxy far away, when I was in my 40s, I would fish with my son, my brother, and friends on the Big Piney River in east central Missouri. This was not a glam-intensive fishing experience with guides in $250 Orvis and Patagonia outfits and a 5-star lodge featuring rib eye steaks with red-wine…
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What’s On Your bookshelf?
My Life’s Editor rose from the couch where we eat ice cream (Trader Joe’s Mint Chocolate Chip) and split chocolate bars (Moser Roth Dark Sea Salt Caramel) on alternate nights while we watch Judy Woodruff chat up the day’s notables. She got close to the 50-inch screen, squinted and said, “I can’t tell. It looks…
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learning at the feet of the sensei
Steve, the goateed one from Ohio, and I, the Old Road Peddler, waited on the Maximo Park boat ramp. We were tight, nervous – two guys inhaling their last smokes in a WWI trench, ready to go over the top. We had assembled our fly rods from the tip section down. Check. We had lined…
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With Mallets Toward None
My college classmate Jeff called from California. He was coming to Florida with his wife Diana to compete in a croquet tournament in Venice. We offered to provide a pull-out and relatively clean sheets at Casa Craig for a few nights. When I hung up, I thought “A croquet tournament?” Croquet was something we used…
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Fathers and Sons
My father, Bill Craig, was the personification of Lt. Col Bull Meecham, crack jet pilot and man’s man, in Pat Conroy’s “The Great Santini.” The difference being that my father was an army infantryman and, having two stars on his shoulders, outranked Bull. My father preferred bourbon, loved attractive women, could dance, fish and shoot…
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Saturday Morning Market
The Saturday Morning Market in St. Pete is where thousands of city folk congregate to shop for produce, buy tchotchkes, and eat, maybe a pulled pork sandwich from M & M BBQ or a breakfast plate from the “I got ’em” man. It is a place to see and be seen: men in straw hats,…
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The Trout Whisperer
Cashiers, North Carolina is where Floridians go in summer to escape from it all, then find themselves competing for a spaghetti squash at the Farmer’s Market on US 64 with a next-door neighbor from St. Petersburg. It is a place with more Land Rovers than Ford F-150s. Locals pronounce their burg’s name ”Cash – uhrs.”…
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Oh Say Can I See
I put down my coffee cup, took off my glasses and put my left hand over my left eye. I looked over at My Life’s Editor with my right eye. as she did the Sudoku at the breakfast table. There she was, her normal self. Then I put my right hand over my right eye…
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A Tale of Blood and a Lost Shoe
The tug on my foot was firm, about the sensation you get when you lace up your shoes. Only in this case a young doc, in a doc smock, was lacing up the wound on the sole of my foot. I sat on a gurney in the BayCare “doc-in-a-box” facility on 4th St. N. I…
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Marshall Craig 