E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

My love for and attachment to Florida and it's true natives goes way back: to when I was six years old, in fact, and my dad got pneumonia. His company--then a global telephone monopoly--while perhaps unaware of the irony of themselves being the cause of his illness (second-hand smoke)--felt sufficient guilt, it seems, to send him to Florida for six months to recover. I, being at the time a footloose five year old, had little choice but to leave my safe home in suburban New Jersey, along with my kindergarten schoolmates and white middle-class neighborhood gang (another story) and tag along to experience, for the first time, an alien world. I might as well have been a (really) young Luke Skywalker on Dagobah. Nothing was familiar: not the empty dunes on the coast of the strange teal-blue sea that didn't even have real waves except sometimes (I was accustomed to the Jersey shore, which had real waves on which I'd later learn to body surf). The dunes were protected by a sea wa