How I spent Christmas afternoon, the 2025 edition

Six years ago on Christmas Eve morning, my wife, Betty, got out of the shower and almost immediately passed out on the bathroom floor. It wasn’t the first time she had inexplicably lost consciousness for a few seconds. Extensive testing over a period of months however – up to and including wearing a portable cardiac monitor for two weeks – had failed to undercover a cause. This time, though, the fall resulted in a serious scalp wound and Betty was transported to Newton Wellesley Hospital.

There, she lost consciousness again – this time in front of medical professionals. Over the course of three hours, her heart would stop beating for up to thirteen seconds. Against her wishes (“I’ll come back after Christmas! I promise!”), she was admitted. A few hours later surgeons would thread the wiring for a temporary external pacemaker through her arteries. However, no surgical team was available for Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. On Boxing Day (December 26 for those not familiar with the UK custom) a permanent pacemaker was installed. After one more night, this time in recovery, she was released.  The pacemaker has been doing its job ever since.

I spent most of those three days at Betty’s side and, because a good part of it was while she slept or was under medication sedation, I had the opportunity to interact with the hospital staff. I learned something that, in hindsight, ought to be obvious: hospitals do everything possible to discharge patients for major holidays. They do so both to allow for minimal staffing and to avoid undue stress on both patients and patient families. My ‘thank you’ to the on-duty staff on December 26 was a tray of full-size chocolate croissants from a wonderful bakery in Wellesley.

But I also tucked away an IOU. Unless you are under sedation, stays in a cardiac intensive care unit are ones of unrelieved boredom for the patient which, in turn, raises anxiety levels. Someday, I would like to do something to brighten the spirits of those ICU patients who were too ill to be even temporarily discharged… or who had no one to go home to.

17 of the Cardiotonics. That's Dr. Michel 
in the white coat. (The accordion is also
a giveaway)

I got that opportunity this Christmas afternoon. Jill Schiff, a member of the Wednesday Walkers of which I am a part has, for more than a decade, been a part of the Cardiotonics, which come together once a year on Christmas Day to sing carols and holiday songs to patients and staff in the cardiac care building at MassGeneralBrigham’s Longwood campus.

The instigator of the group – which has been in existence for fifteen years, is Dr. Thomas Michel, a cardiovascular medicine specialist at the hospital. In addition, Michel is a professor of medicine (Biochemistry) at Harvard Medical School and the associate director of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program. He is also an accomplished accordion player; his instrument’s name is Rosie.

Roughly 20 of us – the size of the group would change as members were called away to medical duties – assembled at 2 p.m. As near as I can tell, I was one of only two participants who were not active or retired medical professionals; and one of only six who were there for the first time. In addition to the accordion, we were joined by a violinist who was not only competent on his chosen instrument, but able to play Christmas carols by ear, including making key changes on the fly when dictated by Dr. Michel.

In a patient's room. It's well-nigh impossible
to capture twenty carolers in one photo.
That's Dr. Michel with the accordion.

Most of the group being old hands, we practiced for about two minutes, using Dona Nobis Pacem as a guide to which of us were sopranos, altos, tenors, basses… and who should just hum along. There was also distributed a 20-page book of traditional and modern holiday songs.

 From there, we went in search of an audience. Dr, Michel had seen most of the patients on the floors we visited as part of his rounds within the last 24 hours. He knew which patients were receptive, but always asked if they would like to hear a song and, if so, what would be their choice. We would immediately launch into the one preferred by the patient. Surprising few of the patients had visitors when we were there.

One of patients requested 'Jingle Bell Rock'.
His wife, apparently moved by the rendition,
got up and did some impromptu dancing.

We did this for three hours. The patient rooms – all singles – in the Shapiro Building are spacious, and they needed to be to accommodate all the singers and instruments. We were not especially rough the beginning but, after the first half-dozen rooms, we had cohered into a first-class group of carolers, reeling off multiple verses of ‘Joy to the World’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ and ‘Frosty the Snowman’. I wisely hummed along to Ma’oz Tzur (Rock of Ages), a traditional Hanukkah song (the Cardiotonics membership included Christians, Jews, and Muslims).

If there were two moments that will remain in memory for a very long time, they came toward the end of our tour. One occurred when the spouse of a patient teared up as we finished ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’. “You can’t imagine what this means to both of us,” she said to the group. “Your being here gives me hope.” Those tears told me hers were not idle words.

The second came at the very end, after we had sung our last carol. Dr, Michel recognized a staff member on duty, sitting at the nurse’s station. “I remember you,” he said to her. “You sang ‘Oh, Holy Night’ in French. Would you be willing to do it again?”

She would, and she did, to a violin and accordion accompaniment. It was hauntingly beautiful.

At 5 p.m., we prepared to go out separate ways, Dr. Michel asked us to say our names one more time and opine as to whether we would be back next year. I think my exact words were, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Autumn Garden Cleanup - the 2025 Edition

Today was autumn garden cleanup day at our Homegrown National Park in Medfield, Massachusetts.  The most amazing part is that it started at 10 a.m. and was over at 2 p.m. Four hours is likely a record that will stand for a long time.

My neighbors have either raked or blown (or both) their leaves at least half a dozen times (or had a service do it for them). My leaves aren’t going anywhere: they’re going to home for insects and pollinators for this winter. By spring (if we get a sufficient amount of snow), they’ll be largely composted, and I’ll need only clear them from the walkways.

The Magnolia bed was first on the agenda simply because I have to look at it as I pull into the driveway. The bed bordering the driveway is three layers deep: Amsonia, Veronia, and Vernonia closest to the driveway; more Vernonia (especially 'Iron Butterfly' ), and peonies in the middle layer, and Pyncantheum (mountain mints) in the rear.

Amazingly, it took less than 45 minutes to take it all down, including leaving the thick Amsonia stalks at least 14 inches long. Those stalks are hollow, and large enough to provide a home for, say, bees. The best part, though, is I don't have to look at yellowing plants any more.

The sun garden was the other major time consumer. It is now approximately 300 square feet of flowering perennials - rudbeckia, betony, oxyeye daisies, monarda, asclepias, and Carolina lupines.  But, the plants fell into two categories: spent, and those still with seedheads.

The solution was to cut down the perennials, but leave the seedheads where they fell for those plants that could still provide sustenance for birds and other creatures; but carry away everything else. Cutting was made somewhat more difficult because things like daisies and rudbeckia already have next year's greens in place.

The sidewalk bed looked, at first glance, like it needed nothing more than to be swept. That's when I noticed, with all its leaves off, the growth spurt our spicebush (Lindera benzoin) had put on over the summer.... think five additional feet on a shrub that claimed its height topped out at seven feet and would remain 'compact'.

Twenty minutes later, I had brought its height back to its prescribed level and shaped it at the same time. The more fundamental problem is that the recommended three foot distance from sidewalk to center stem is inadequate. This spicebush wants to stretch out; and its lateral growth also is impeding two viburnums (maple leaf and cranberry) from reaching their potential. I'll kick that can down the road for another year.

The back of the driveway presents its own challenge. It's where the bulk of the snow goes from the parking turnaround. In snowy years, the pile at the back can get to six feet. Perennial debris left underneath that snow will rot and become a petri dish for disease.

So, of course, that area, too, needed to be taken down to stubble. It all looks very nice, though I admit I miss the gorgeous gold Amsonia that occupies the space in the autumn. 

The rear garden took no time at all to clear because, well, it's just fallen leaves. And, I'm perfectly content to let those leaves lie where they are. If we get any decent amount of snow, those leaves will be partly composted by next spring. I'll need only rake them out of the paths.

The nicest part of the cleanup was that what happens on Pine Street stays on Pine Street. Every load of cut-down perennials was carted to a brush pile that is on our property but adjacent to the abutting conservation land. The brush pile will provide winter shelter to garden wildlife. Over time, it will break down into soil, with some intermediate stops.

Four hours after I began cutting the Amsonia by the garage, I realized I had nothing more that needed to be done. It doesn't mean I won't find lots of clean-up tasks. It just means that the things that were 'gotta do's' were done the day before Thanksgiving.

Now, that's something to be thankful for.

(Alright, a confession: there is a parking pad at the very front of the property that will be raked free of leaves. They, too, will go into the brush pile.)

The Upside of Downed Trees

There is nothing quite so jarring as walking out of your home at the first light of morning to find a 50-foot-long debris field of trees in your driveway. But, that’s exactly what I found three days ago when I went out to fetch the newspapers in my driveway.

The pine was basically hollow

 A cold front had come through overnight with forecasted strong winds out of the northeast. Sometime during the night, one of those gusts became the last gasp for a towering, but badly aging 50-foot-tall white pine on my neighbor’s property. The tree snapped off about 15 feet off the ground, revealing a huge, empty chamber that once had been the tree’s heartwood and pith; surrounded by a few inches thickness of still-living outer bark, inner bark, and sapwood.

The ornamental plum, 
stripped of all branches

As it fell, though, the tree smashed through two deciduous trees. One was a Norway maple (no loss), the other a beautiful, 40-foot-tall ornamental plum that had a dazzling spring bloom and lovely fall foliage. The pine’s weight and still-growing upper breadth effectively cleaved the two trees of all of their branches, leaving only tall trunks.

 Everything else was on my driveway.

The debris field stretched 50 feet

I may or may not still own a chainsaw. If I do, I have no idea where it is and I don’t keep the gas/oil mixture it requires to run. But I do have two exceedingly sharp corona saws, and so I went to work clearing enough of a pathway so I could get my car out of the garage. That took an hour. Just as I was finishing, my neighbor came over; astonished at what had happened, profuse in apology for not seeing the carnage, and saying he would get all the debris off my property using his pickup and chains.

The ornamental plum in its heyday

He did a very thorough job; even clearing the brush from what had been a twenty-foot-wide no-mans-land between our two properties. I would have pitched in but was otherwise obliged to help make ‘dump runs’ between the Community Garden and town transfer station as part of the season-end clean-up of the garden.

When I got back, I was astonished at the transformation: for the first time in a decade, the sun was shining on our perennial border.

As you can see from the shadows,
the perennial border was in shade

When Betty laid out the garden that we would have in lieu of grass, she knew there was only a narrow strip of soil between the edge of our driveway and the property line we share with our neighbor. But, it was 70 feet long and deserved to be filled with visually arresting shrubs and perennials. Our neighbor’s trees were eleven years younger and so what she chose and we planted was a mix of tall-ish flowering perennials that required six to eight hours a day of sunlight. We also built two, four-foot-by-eight-foot raised beds in which we planned to grow strawberries and leaf vegetables.

With the trees gone, there's now
hope for our raised beds.

Nature, however, took its course. To create our garden, we took down roughly 40 pines on our property (all, I might add, of a similar vintage to the one that crashed over). We filled the space with young trees and shrubs. The trees in our neighbor’s no-man’s-land promptly reached out for the now-ample sunshine to their south. Within three years, our raised beds no longer got enough sun even for a crop of lettuce. The sun-seeking perennials that did not die out began reaching out into the driveway for light. Much of the border was re-planted with shade-tolerant perennials.

 I’m now faced with a wonderful opportunity of re-planting the border with brighter, more sun-loving perennials. Yes, it will be a lot of work. So what?

 Who knew there was such an upside to having three downed trees?

Bogged Down in Andover, and Loving Every Minute of It

On Saturday morning, I discovered just how much I still have to learn about horticulture. And the gaps in my knowledge of glaciation. And, even of apples. And I had fun doing it.

Double-click for a full-screen image

The Trustees of Reservations has more than 120 properties under its care. Those properties encompass nearly 29,000 acres in Massachusetts. Until Saturday, I was unaware of the existence of the Charles W. Ward Reservation. It is more than a square mile (729 acres to be exact) spread out across the towns of Andover and North Andover, some 30 miles north of Boston.

I was invited by Grow Native Massachusetts, about which I have written previously) to be part of their annual ‘Ramble’. Fifteen hardy souls with hiking shoes gathered outside a house on a hilltop – excuse me, a drumlin – to explore a nearby rare quaking bog.

That's Boston in the distance

The first thing I noticed was the view. A drumlin, for the uninitiated, is a glacial deposit. As the Ice Age passed its peak 11,000 years ago, rock-laden glaciers – once a mile thick - retreated north from the coast of what would become Massachusetts. Occasionally, part of a glacier would melt, leaving behind a pile of stones collected centuries earlier. One of those deposits became a 300-foot-high hill. Looking south, I had a clear view of Boston’s skyline, with seemingly only a forest between where I was standing and the city. The vista will stay in my mind for a long time.

A boardwalk through the bog

There are 13 miles of trails on the Reservation, but our specific destination was a hundred or so feet below us: a quaking bog in a kettle hole. Translation: as glaciers retreated, they also scraped the ground bare. Occasionally, they left a large, saucer-shaped stone depression called a kettle hole. Rain would fill the kettle hole to a maximum depth of a few feet and, at its fringes, vegetation would establish itself. Over the centuries, the vegetation would gradually grow deeper into the kettle hole, putting down an advancing layer of sediment in the form of rotted leaves and such. But with no outlet for water, the oxygen in the water became depleted and, where there is no oxygen, the sediment never breaks down; it just accumulates and solidifies – sort of.

One of our guides, in orange,
identifies bag-specific plants

The result is a bog. On top, there are trees, shrubs, ferns, moss (lots of moss), and ground covers. It is all quite dense and beautiful to look at. But stepping on it is a bad idea. What looks solid on top is largely an illusion. To that end, Trustees of Reservations built a winding boardwalk through the bog. Two experts – volunteers from the Trustees – led us deeper into the bog and identified the highly specialized plants that had learned to thrive in this most unusual of environments. I managed to confidently mis-identify more than a dozen plants and shrubs before I learned to listen rather than speak.

The ‘quaking’ part of the bog came as we approached its center: to Pine Hole Pond, an acre-sized pool of open water that remained un-colonized. Here, driving footers into the bog was pointless: there was nothing solid below the vegetation. So, everything floated, even though we were ostensibly amid dense vegetation. 

Pine Hole Pond, the last 'uncolonized' 
part of the bog

I managed to keep my footing, but there is something quite disturbing about feeling the ground under your feet ‘quake’ as you walk.

One of our guides, who has lived in the area most of his life, related the extent to which the bog pond is shrinking. He opined that it will disappear in a few decades. A warming climate emboldens species to grow more aggressively. More than 90% of the pond has been ‘colonized’ over the centuries. Pulling out vegetation might delay the inevitable, but not change the outcome.

We returned to the hilltop to enjoy the view and to discuss among ourselves what we had learned.

Our luncheon spot atop a drumlin;
a beautiful space forever preserved.

At the same time, I was curious how more than a square mile of prime land had managed never to be developed. Our guide provided the answer. A wealthy colonist, Nicholas Holt, purchased much of the land in the early 18^th Century as a means of escaping the overly religious environment of Andover. Generations of his family farmed the site, leaving behind one of the most intact system of stone walls in the region. In the nineteen-teens, the Ward family acquired the estate; then about 500 acres. They were dedicated naturalists who sought to preserve the land and keep it in trust.

The first parcels were conveyed to Trustees of Reservations in 1940 with the death of Charles Ward. His family continued to gift additional parcels for the next 50 years, and Trustees purchased additional land to ‘fill in’ the Reservation. As the accompanying map shows, it is a remarkable achievement to have conserved such a large site so close to a major city.

Oh, and as to the apples, both the Holt and the Ward families had extensive apple orchards on the property. In the past decade, Trustees has sought to honor that legacy by planting small orchards. The apple variety chosen was the Baldwin, which was first identified in the Merrimack Valley in the 1850s. A few of the century-plus-old Baldwin trees are still producing. I confidently identified the apple as a Macintosh. I was gently corrected.

My Not-So-Secret Life as a Guinea Pig

 

That's me, ready to get zapped

Just over five years ago, I came across a Facebook post offering $50 to provide a blood draw, a saliva sample, and answer a few questions about my health.  I’ve never been one to turn down easy money, and so I ventured into a building in Boston’s Longwood Medical Center complex of hospitals and labs. I did no flinch during the blood draw (I’m a long-time blood donor) and I took the questions seriously. Because I asked, I was told my ‘blind samples’ were part of creating a profile of a projected 40,000 random individuals.

Maybe it was because I asked a lot of questions (including how ‘random’ a sample could be if it drew its participants from Facebook users who had enough time on their hands and the wherewithal to travel into the city to participate), but I was asked if I might be interested in other studies. As I am always looking for a potential book story line, I said ‘sure’.

Fifteen or 20 studies later, I am now on call sheets. There is a notebook on me somewhere that says I am apparently a rara avis in the world of biomedical research. I am over 70, I have had no major illnesses or surgeries, I take only a single prescription drug (for cholesterol), I have no tattoos or miscellaneous metal parts in my body, I do not have a fear of enclosed spaces, I know how to lie still and follow instructions, and I show up on time.

Some of these are done in hospitals, some are at MIT, but the preponderance of the studies I’m involved with are at the MassGeneral Research Institute located at the Charlestown Navy Yard (CNY) in Boston. Today, if you’re looking for evidence of the presence of the U.S. Navy, it’s in the form of ‘Old Ironsides’, which is anchored at the west end of the Yard.

I’ve been in three of MassGeneral’s buildings at CNY, but the one that stops me in my tracks every time is a full block in size and eleven stories tall. For a century, the Navy made steel cables in it. Now, it is roughly a million square feet of biomedical research.  As the photos show, MassGeneral stripped the building back to its skeleton and re-built it for science. The ground floor is lots of MRI machines, meeting rooms, a very nice cafeteria and what passes for public space in a building where entry is strictly by key card.  Above the first floor? Lab space and testing rooms.

The study I’m about to complete involves TMS – transcranial magnetic stimulation. Several years ago, researchers found placing a powerful magnet on the head of someone suffering from depression, and focusing it on the very specific part of the brain that is linked to that emotional state, made a demonstrable and measurable improvement in the subject’s behavior and mood. The efficacy is sufficiently ‘replicable’ – meaning it really works in practice – that TMS for depression is now covered by insurance and Medicare. The Principal Investigator for the study with which I’m associated is looking at other areas where TMS might have efficacy. That’s all I think I’m allowed to say on the subject.

For me, the highlight of any new project is getting to meet the ‘research coordinators’. Every year, MassGeneral brings in extraordinarily bright college graduates who are keenly interested in the life sciences, but who are uncertain where their longer-term interests lie. Do they want to go to medical school? Pursue a PhD? In return for doing the ‘grunt work’ of escorting participants like me around, performing labs, and spending many hours entering data and creating schedules; they get the opportunity to see the cutting edge of science being created. They also get to sit in on talks and symposia. They get to ask questions. It’s a two- or three-year contract, after which you’re kicked out of the nest and expected to fly on your own (but with an exceptionally prestigious bullet point on your med or graduate school application).

Being an on-call guinea pig is not something I expected to occupy me in retirement, but I have my reasons for continuing to volunteer. Whenever I’m called, I jokingly ask the recruiter each time if the chances of spontaneous combustion are above or below 30%. I know I’m in demand when one quickly responded, “It’s a little over 30%, but that’s why we called you. We figured you’d still say ‘yes’.”

Paradise Found

I’m taking a detour away from gardening topics today to ponder something I read on the Internet (and, yes, I know treating things on the Internet seriously is the beginning of an excursion into a rabbit hole from which there is no extraction). The subject of the post was ‘What is Paradise’.  The author posted a vintage-20^th-century photo of a palm tree by the water and explained why this was his or her ideal place.

Which got me to wondering what was my own perfect place. At the very ripe age of 76, I have come to the conclusion Paradise can exist in multiple places. It can exist in memory and it can exist in real time. It can be a place and it can be something that happened in a place that is otherwise pedestrian.

Me, in my back yard, age 11

My childhood back yard was paradise (except when it needed to be cleaned up after a hurricane; and it lost part of its glow when mowing it became my responsibility). But it was a special place where I was Boy King; tracking lizards, building treehouses (hint: Tamarind tree limbs break just by looking at them the wrong way) and eating oranges fresh off the tree.

I camped out in that back yard. It was at the age of 5 or 6 that, late one evening writing on a sheet of paper in a tent by flashlight, I discovered numbers are connected and keep increasing. I wrote from 1 to something like 600 just to make certain my discovery had no fatal flaw.

The Cape Florida lighthouse

Key Biscayne, the island south of Miami Beach and connected to the mainland by a causeway, was the paradise of my teen years. Not so much the large county park that occupied the north half of the island. Crandon Park had a fine beach but there were too many people. My preferred places were the stub of a beach at Bear Cut or the deserted, pre-state-park beach by the Cape Florida lighthouse at the southern tip of the island. These were places where only teens of a certain age could go (illegally, in the case of the lighthouse), and much kissing went on.

Our brownstone in Boerum Hill

Brooklyn was the paradise of my late twenties. I could not believe I actually lived there and owned a genuine brownstone on a street with a row of 19^th Century brownstones on either side of it. The Bergen Street subway station was just five minutes distant, and all of New York was a subway ride away; Betty and I made the most of every day: seeing shows, museums, and her beloved Yankees. We even saw a World Series game.

Me in the Marais, early 2000s

Paris and London were my twin paradises of my thirties, forties and fifties. Both cities were magical. I could not get enough of them. I invented reasons to go to them and I tried (unsuccessfully) to get myself transferred there by two employers. Both cities were (and still are) steeped in history yet attuned to ‘today’. The people were tolerant of our thick American accents and broken French.

On the beach at Hana, early 1980s

But paradise was also a small hotel on the island of Maui in a village called Hana. Betty and I discovered it in 1980 on our second trip to the Islands following an intensely disappointing first stay in Honolulu and Hilo. For more than twenty years following that encounter, for the last week in January and first week in February, we called it home; amid friends we never knew before that first visit. Alas, in the early 2000’s, a woman named Caroline Hunt also discovered it and decided it needed to be more ‘upscale’. She didn’t pave paradise; she just ruined it.

In my sixties and seventies, paradise is a small town in New England; one that logic and greed dictates ought not to exist, but does. Medfield has defied the odds and remained a village free of Big Box stores and cheek-by-jowl fast food emporiums. Its borders are watersheds and forested reservations, yet it is just 18 miles from the center of Boston. 

With my oldest friend,
Hank Rawlings,
2025, in Florida

But paradise is also a state of being. It is the sight of old friends and being in their presence after a too-long absence. Paradise is standing in front of a group of strangers and making them laugh. Paradise is working on my hands and knees in a native plant garden I helped bring into being; and co-managing an acre of vegetable gardens where 70 families not only are growing food for their own table, but placing their surplus in wheelbarrows every week to share with those less fortunate. Wherever there is joy, there is the potential for paradise.

Will there be other places I will come to think of as paradise? I only hope I have sufficient years remaining to find out. Seven decades ago, I traded the security of my back yard paradise for the opportunity to see and explore a wider world. I have spent time on six continents and stopped counting countries visited when I got to 50. I truly do not know if there are additional paradises out there, but I’m willing to give it a try.

Another August Afternoon, Long Ago, Still Very Much in Memory

My Mom, me, and that 1955 Pontiac. 
Don't ask me why I'm wearing what looks
like a waiter's jacket. I would have 
been 15 or 16 in this photo

Yesterday afternoon, I was driving on Route 128 – the circumferential expressway that wraps around Boston – and saw an overhead electric sign flashing the statistic that, in 2024, there were 6429 accidents in Massachusetts involving teenage drivers and 117 fatalities.

The message was aimed at teens; encouraging them to drive responsibly. But it struck a respondent chord in me; taking me back to another August afternoon 59 years ago.

'My' Burger King

In the summer of 1966 – the time between my junior and senior year at Miami Springs High School, I was working at the Burger King on Arthur Godfrey Road in Miami Beach.  On Tuesdays, I had the early shift – be at the restaurant at 8 a.m. to open up, and work until 2 p.m. 

August 16 started as just another day.  I was driving my mother’s hand-me-down 1955 Pontiac Chieftain, 3511 pounds of post-war Detroit automotive supremacy.  At work I scrubbed the broilers and loaded the shake machine.  I picked litter from out of the fringe of landscaping and then went to work on the counter at opening time.

Crandon Park in the 1960s

At 2 p.m. I was out the door, reaching for my car keys even as I punched my time card.  On those early shift days, I had one goal: to get to the beach as quickly as possible.  Miami has many beaches (including one just a mile east of the Burger King) but, to me, there was only one ‘real’ beach - Crandon Park.  But my path was not a direct one.  On that day as on so many others that summer, I planned to pick up the girl I was dating, and so my route took me first to a neighborhood near the Tamiami Airport on S.W. 107^th Avenue.  Thanks to the five-year-old Airport Expressway and the four-year-old Palmetto Bypass, plus luck with the drawbridge on the Rickenbacker Causeway, my circuitous, nearly 30-mile trip through Greater Miami took less than an hour.  We were parked and on the beach before WQAM’s 3 o’clock news.

The only thing I remember about the beach that day was that we had less than an hour before storm clouds began moving in from the west.  By a little after 4, we knew it was time to leave.  Having had only a little over an hour on the beach, we packed up and headed west, back across the Causeway and out Bird Road.  Somewhere along the way, it began raining.  A little before 5 o’clock I had dropped off my date and needed only to make the final trip back home through what was now a pounding, mid-summer south Florida rainstorm.

The site of the crash. I was
just four miles from home.

The Palmetto was my only real option: the lone alternative was 97^th Avenue, a two-lane gravel road that snaked through the swamp north of the Tamiami Trail.  With the rain coming down hard, I got on the Palmetto and started north.  In 1966, the Palmetto was a four-lane divided highway with a wide median strip, and with interchanges only on the eight-mile section south of Okeechobee Road.  The Palmetto had neither guard rails nor a center barrier – just that wide strip of grass.

I would have been at roughly N.W. 20^th Street when I felt my car lurch left.  It was odd that I would be hydroplaning because I had replaced my two front tires only a week earlier (using up an entire paycheck to do so).  Because of the rain and heavy traffic, I was traveling perhaps 35 miles an hour.  I tried to correct for the lurch but, by then, my front left wheel was off of the asphalt roadway and into the mud of the median strip.  The deceleration of one quadrant of the car caused the back end of the car to rotate counter-clockwise.

The Palmetto Bypass
under construction in
1960. No guardrails,
just a wide grass median

In the absence of guardrails, my car began a lazy spin across the median – probably thirty feet between the north and southbound lanes.  That probably slowed my forward momentum somewhat, but when I reached the southbound lanes, I still was traveling at least 25 miles per hour. 

My rotation had me pointed north when I reached the left, southbound lane.  There, I struck, head-on, a 1961 Ford Galaxie (curb weight roughly 3800 pounds) which was likely traveling, in the rain, at 40 miles per hour.

The Pontiac lacked seatbelts.  All I could do was brace myself, hands on the dashboard and feet against the firewall.  I remember the impact and its sound (exactly like the one in the movies).  Remarkably, I was uninjured, as was the driver of the other car (who was wearing a seatbelt).

The Highway Patrol showed up.  I was asked if I needed to go to a hospital and I said ‘no’.  More troopers showed up – the accident likely backed up southbound traffic for miles.  Around 6:30, I was given a ride home and told I was lucky to be alive.  The trooper explained to my mother what had happened; that I had lost control of my car in the rain.  The car was totaled but, fortunately, there were no injuries.  The sole indication that something had happened was that I had a trickle of blood caused by a puncture wound on either knee.  I don’t remember my mother being angry; she was likely happy that I was still alive.

The next morning, August 17, I couldn’t bend my knees.  My mother took me to our family doctor.  He took one look at my knees, listened to the circumstances of the injury, and said I had likely torn cartilage in one or both knees.  This being decades before knee replacements or arthroscopic surgery, all he could do was wrap the knee and prescribe complete bed rest.

The morning after that, two state troopers knocked at the front door.  No citations had been issued at the accident scene and I thought I was about to be handed a stack of tickets for stupidity.  Instead, they asked that I take them through the accident (likely the reason I remember it so well all these years later).  They asked questions about the “lurch” and how I responded or tried to respond.  Then, one trooper said the tires looked new, and asked how long they had been on the car.  My mother produced the sales receipt, which they asked to keep to make a copy.  After an hour, they left and said they would be in touch.  All I knew was that I was relieved to not have a citation I would be working until October to pay.

By now, word had gotten around that I was confined to bed, and a stream of visitors came to cheer me up.  I celebrated my 17^th birthday that way.

On Monday – this would have been August 22, I had a different visitor.  He was from an insurance company, though not from State Farm, which was my carrier.  He was sorry to hear about my accident and wanted to “clear the record”.  My car, he said, was worth $250 and I had likely incurred another $100 in doctor’s bills (the amount was considerably lower, but neither I nor my mother said anything).  He produced a legal document.  In return for $350, my family would hold the tire company harmless in my accident.  My mother signed.

Through the Miami Springs Police Department, my mother would learn that the state police had not just assumed this was a case of a teenager not knowing how to drive in the rain.  My front left tire had more or less exploded, and new tires weren’t supposed to do that.  They contacted the tire manufacturer for an explanation, and the tire company (I have no idea which one it was, and the paperwork disappeared long ago) got out in front of the problem – by getting me to sign away my legal standing.

A '56 Chevy BelAir. Mine definitely
did not have whitewall tires.

I got a 1956 Chevy BelAir out of the deal.  Later that week, my doctor pronounced me healed.  It was too close to the start of the school year to go back to work.  It turns out, of course, that I wasn’t really healed.  The accident had torn out a chunk of cartilage from my knee, leaving behind an imperfect fit between my femur and tibia.  Within a few weeks, I would hear a distinctive “popping” sound when I walked.  Almost sixty years later, I still can occasionally hear that click.

All teenagers believe they are immortal and I was no different.  Of course, I had walked away from an accident that could just as easily have killed or crippled me.  I did not at first perceive that I had been given a gift.

With each passing decade, though, I look on that afternoon as a turning point.  Through whatever cosmic force you believe is responsible for such things (including luck), I walked away from a crash involving more than 7,000 pounds of metal going from 60 miles per hour to an instantaneous stop that could ended my life a few days short of my seventeenth birthday.  And, had it not ended my life, it could have left me crippled.

But I came away with a “pop” in one knee, an appreciation for life, and a need to make a difference.  When I look back at what I have accomplished, the business career end of things disappears in a puff of smoke.  In the great scheme of things, it makes not a whit of difference that, for 35 years, I helped companies do something or other.  Writing 16 books that amuse people (and even give them something to think about) and speaking about gardening from a spouse’s point of view is a better contribution.  The volunteer work I have engaged in since my retirement – including being the ‘healthy control’ in clinical studies that take up a lot of my time these days - has also given me a sense of purpose because what I am doing directly helps other people.

Betty, far left, receiving National Garden
Clubs' Volunteer of the Year award

But the single most important thing I have done with my life is to help and support my wife, Betty, to be the incredible person that she became. I freely acknowledge I got much better at being a supportive spouse when I retired from that corporate world almost 20 years ago. Especially during the last five years, I can finally say I’ve earned my keep.