Morning came timely today and dawn gloriously welcomed me. I wanted to find wonder the world. To discover every lost fascination.

I am breaking fast in a very fancy-shmancy restaurant here at the Torel Avantgarde. IT IS a pretentious name for a hotel. But earned. This place is really impressive. Situated on the ancient wall looking down on the Douro river in Porto. This place is an extravagance and our gateway to our 3 months in Europe.

Morning dew glistens on the ancient tile roofs below me. Amidst the old homes is a striking derelict. Roof collapsed, stucco walls are bald and crumbling. The iron terraces, once striking in their ornateness, are now just rusted calligraphy. A record of once better times.

It’s hard to see but there the grand old dame sits.

Isn’t that true of all of us though? The older we get, the more the flesh slides into disrepair. We call it character because time does make us more interesting. But given the choice, I know we’re rather stay ravishing and boring-looking.

White Christmas drifts out of a speaker nearby. These are pre-holiday days.

A church up the hill rang me awake some hours ago and now sits a silent sentinel over its subjects.

An orange tree pregnant with winter fruit is my breakfast companion this luscious morning. It is not much for conversation, but I find it enthralling nonetheless.

Between my fruited neighbor and me, a flowing hedge row of sage contributes visually and aromatically to our scene.

And in front and below, stone houses cascade down ancient cobblestone where the streets splash into a finger of the Atlantic that snaked its way inland where is blends with the fresh water pouring high out of the Sierra de Urbión mountains.

Jealous more of my eggs and ham than my reverie. A massive gull has landed on a nearby handrail and does a circus balancing act in hopes that my appreciation will deliver it a boon.

I am sorry, bird-friend, there’ll be no scraps left for thee. You’ll have take your show on the road.

Winter in Porto is a very pleasant affair, especially the days. The sun warms as the breeze crisps cold and a little biting. Pedestrians everywhere celebrate their holiday. Everyone is happy and festive. The faces and countenance seems altogether different from home. Even frustration here seems less like loss of control or being overridden with emotion and more like a natural expression of circumstance.

The Douro below

A sailboat is pushing up the river in the dancing sunlight. I wonder how the captain feels this Sunday morning.

He is living his dream. Is he content? Is he striving for more? Is he single and hoping for a wife? Or married and praying for children or grandchildren. Or that the ones he has be successful and happy. Perhaps he just longs for a bigger sailboat.

Everyone wants something they don’t have.

Aspiration.

But what is happiness? Not having what you want, but wanting what you have!

And so, the artist works. What else is he to do? What appears luxurious and opulent to a mortal Is tortuous existence for the creative mind.

This moment, like ever, is passing too quickly. I wish only I had a companion with which to share it. Mine is still socked in sleep, stuck on that old clock. I am determined to shift to this new zone.

But, it ain’t easy!

At some later time she will stir and then we will laugh together, eyes dancing in the sunlight as I tell her about boats and oranges and birds.

And one day, long from now, I’ll say ‘remember when?’ And she’ll nod, just like I do when I oversleep and she gets the eggs, the oranges and the river.

Originally published 2025-12-15 04:32:47

I’m reflective of our time in Iberia tonight. Which puts me in mind of my 2010 week in Rome. I doubt I’ll ever be able to relive that time.

I love Roman Holiday. The film is anything but silent, yet when I visited Rome in the fall of 2010, I discovered a quiet reverence that emerges late at night—especially in the piazzas, where mist settles on the cobblestones and the noise of the day finally gives way to stillness.

Rome is so saturated with iconic imagery that no single vision can define it: the Colosseum, the Vatican, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps. A city of many faces and thousands of years, it offers as many impressions as it has visitors. But once you’ve walked its streets—smelled the roasting chestnuts, watched lovers linger near ancient stone—Rome distills itself to a single memory.

For me, it was a stenciled portrait of Audrey Hepburn.

We had spent the afternoon beneath golden leaves in the park outside Villa Borghese, then made our way through the winding streets back to our lodging near the Pantheon. It was late, quiet. We passed through an alley when a lime-green graffiti tag caught my eye. There she was—Audrey, staring out from the wall like a ghost of cinema past, etched into the stone like she’d always belonged there.

The first thing I did when I got home was cut my own stencil of Audrey Hepburn.

To most people, it means nothing. But to me, it’s a private seal. A reminder of that trip, that night, that reverent stillness. Of a city always caught between the ancient and the modern—where history echoes, but sometimes whispers.

I fantasize about an entire book written, designed, cut and hand painted as stencils. But I’m a HUGE fan of hand-made/written books.

Not sure they’d find mass appeal.

Artists have a problem: they are addicted to art supplies. It’s like a drug. Paints, brushes, papers, books, pencils, sharpeners, pastels, pens. Pens. Pens. Markers.

It’s crazy. Two things happen with them:

You’re really excited and immediately make whatever new thing into your primary stable of tools.

Then, everything else lies fallow.

Paints dry out. Papers get stained. Markers get forgotten.

Tonight, we’re initiating a new ceremony. Starting with the pens and markers we’re going to dump then ALL into one big bin and watch an old movie while we got through them and TEST each one as for it’s keep-worthiness. We’ll separate them into three categories.

1. KEEP KEEP KEEP. this thing is amaze amaze amaze.
2. Eh, it’s okay, but I’m never going to use it, will you? GIVE IT AWAY!! Our loss is your gain! Well, someones. We’ll probably give them to kids so they can draw on their parent’s wall’s with a $20 Molotow 15mm marker instead of the 4¢ they usually use.
3. Trash: dry junk, unrecoverable.

Think it will be a fun ritual and I’ll do away with carrying around 30-40 markers that I rarely or never use.

May 7, 2026 I started a new book. This is number 70. Two previous editions are stuck in the German postal system. If you speak German and want to help me navigate the DHL/german postal system, please reach out they’ve had then for 6 months!!

I own all of Austin Kleon’s books. He’s on the same plane as Lynda Barry for motivating you to ‘Just Go Do It’!

I am an artist. I am a poet. I am a writer. I am a lover and a romantic. STOP trying to be everything to everyone.

The sun keeps coming up.

Read this book. it will help you accept your skills for what they are: BEAUTIFUL. Art isn’t about good and bad, it’s about fun. The VERY BEST artists are having a good time. If you had fun making it: IT. IS. GOOD.

Go, make something and play. We are made in God’s image, how can what we create be anything but amazing.

Austin is also here on Substack. Worth a follow and a read.

Visit Austin Kleon’s Website, tell him I sent ya’. That and a nickel will net you 5¢

AUSTIN KLEON’S WEBSITE

While you’re at it: buy Lynda Barry’s Books like ‘What It Is

“Most of the old moles I know wish they had listened less to their fears and more to their dreams.”

eople, you know, survive. You gotta survive. But then you have to know when to step away from that survival. Because see, life is not—it's never going to be the same. It's always changing. And it's not always comfortable. And you have to take a chance and a risk and the chance and risk you have to take is on you, right? It's investing in you... The universe is ready to catch you. But you have to take the step

The first book I ever published.

About 15 years ago, we went to upstate Pennsylvania to attend a visual storytelling workshop with Marshall Arisman, godfather of visual storytelling at SVA in NYC. I talked about this some in yesterday’s post. It was a terrific experience, one that I have longed to repeat ever since. It was a week of talking about image-making and how to use that capacity to form a narrative.

While I struggled some with trying to hard to render finished work during the week, The Fury of Mauch Chunk was a high point for me. It is about man’s interaction with nature there in the valley and how they grew too fast and too careless until the town caught fire and burned out the entire village.

Some things you let float by
Others, you hope to catch and hold on to

In 2011, we attended a workshop in Pennsylvania. While visiting the tiny town of Jim Thorpe, we stayed in a charming B&B on the north side of the river. The innkeeper, Mary, was a sweet retiree from New Jersey making a go of it with the home she had inherited from her mother. Except for being a bit overbearing, she was great. And a good cook.

Mary insisted that we be at breakfast at 9 o’clock sharp. This isn’t unusual for a B&B—breakfast is usually at a set time—but Mary required us to be at the table at 9:00 a.m., no earlier, no later. This posed a particular problem for us, as we had class each day at the studio across town at 8 a.m. We tried to explain our predicament and begged off breakfast, but Mary wouldn’t have it. She seemed genuinely hurt by the idea.

As the week went by, she devised various schemes to keep us at breakfast, offering coupons to other local spots or encouraging us to adjust our schedule to fit her morning ritual. I began to suspect her motives as she spoke constantly about her “fine china,” recently acquired from an estate sale—“an entire matched set! Have you ever heard of such an amazing accomplishment?”

At one point, we even found ourselves photographing her breakfast table settings, promising to send her the photos. For some reason, we never did. They were good photos, but we’ve been procrastinating for three years. She shouldn’t give up, though—it could still happen.

Over time, we became friends with Mary. She got on my nerves, but then again, most people do. I have a passive-aggressive personality with a deep streak of sociopathy. The more difficult someone is, the harder I smile and make polite conversation, only to complain about it bitterly later. My wife loves it. The more intense the personality, the more she bends like a reed and laughs at my take on the situation.

Our room at the inn was tiny. Old homes generally have spacious rooms, but this B&B had been remodeled to serve as a hotel, meaning a carpenter had added a full bath in the bedroom, swallowing precious real estate with walls and doors. This was particularly challenging for two artists sharing the space and constantly working on projects, trying to get the most out of the workshop. Thankfully, I managed not to destroy the room with spilled paint or other disasters.

I was suspicious and slightly jealous of the other guests, certain their rooms were bigger than ours. They only stayed for a day or two at most, while we were there for the full seven days. Perhaps that meant we were given a less ideal spot in exchange for a longer stay.

The beauty of Mary and the B&B shone through when we needed an extra night. Our plan had been to leave and head back to Philly on Friday evening after the final critique. But, by then, we’d found all sorts of reasons not to leave the quaint little town. Unfortunately, Mary, the enterprising warden she was, had already booked our room for the weekend. We were homeless.

We pleaded for recommendations, but Mary just looked at us with forlorn, puppy-dog eyes. Shaking her head no, we thanked her and said we’d be back for our bags at the end of the day.

At lunch, Mary called. Heartbroken, she told us how much she liked us and wished she could help. Finally, she made an offer: the attic.

Most people (myself included) think of attics as sweltering, drafty spaces full of ductwork and insulation. But this was different—Mary had remodeled it to live in while converting the house into a B&B.

“When you come by to pick up your luggage, you can check it out. If you don’t like it, no harm done. If you do, you’re welcome to stay for the night.”

What did we have to lose? I’d been nice to her for a week; one last look couldn’t hurt.

The door to the attic was a curious one, about a foot off the ground at the far end of the stairway where we’d stayed all week. I’d assumed it was a utility closet, not realizing it was the bridge to Terabithia. As soon as Mary opened it, we saw the carpet—no longer the carefully chosen decorator rugs but instead a short, royal blue sculpted carpet that brought back memories of childhood. Things only got better as we climbed a very steep, narrow stairwell that lifted us into what felt like a secret hideaway.

The attic was a magical space, fully finished with two-foot-high walls and a vaulted ceiling just high enough for me to stand upright. It was equipped with an air conditioner, a full bath, and quirky, eclectic furnishings. The room’s layout consisted of four long areas, each more eccentric than the last.

Despite being filled with stored boxes, it was easily the best room in the house.

I told Mary she should rent it out to creatives, just as it was (minus the boxes), and call it “the Artist’s Suite.” I doubt she ever did, but she should have.

We had a ball. It was like camping in luxury—a perfect finish to a perfect week in Jim Thorpe, PA.

I was not a good brother to my sisters. As the oldest, and a boy, I see now that I had an obligation to help them and protect them. Instead, I mostly I did my best to avoid both of my little sisters.

I was an angry and violent little child. There are a lot of reasons for this. Genetics (thanks Scott-Irish temper) certainly play a part. More than ever, I see the generational trauma that families like mine experience and manage to pass from parent to child over and over again.

This is less an indictment of my parents than an acknowledgment that we are all living in a rigged system. Each generation hands a big bag of love to their children and to that is attached the 800lb gorilla of the line’s worst traits.

These images are mostly of my middle little sister. There’s one or two of the youngest. They were part of a project I did to cope with the attack Misty suffered that left her permanently brain damaged from a hypoxic brain injury (look it up).

Misty’s always been blessed with good genetics of aging well and being attractive. But sadly, she didn’t get the lottery of how to choose men. We don’t know what happened to her. But indications are he may hve been involved. I can’t say, it’s not an accusation. At least not in print.

She lives with mom and dad now. They’re in their 70s and have been caring for her for 10 years. I’m not sure what teh short term will bring. But I’m confident on a long enough time line, she’ll be fine. It will probably work out better for her than me. After all, I still have the capacity to make bad decisions, and do so with great frequency.

If there’s a silver lining to her condition, it’s that she won’t ever make another bad one.

I love them both. Wish I could have been a better protector. More present. Closer. I didn’t know we’d end up on the shores we have. All that advice to take care of your family it turns out, is pretty good advice.

“D’ya realize how long you’ve been in Europe?” the Irish immigration officer asked.

“Well,” I smiled. “I like to think that I’m less in Europe at this point than it’s in me.”

He was not amused. “What the feck does that mean!? What are ya? Some kind of poet er somethin’?”

I smiled and did a little performative bow. Kindness and charm usually worked wonders. But this morning, after stepping off the ferry from Cherbourg, France to Dublin, Ireland, Officer O’Flynn was neither charitable nor open to kindness.

I’d just disembarked the overnight crossing. I was a little bit scared, but afraid to let it show. I’d wandered around with barely a plan for months and expected it to work here. All of a sudden, things were a bit too official when I least expected it.

“Well, I don’t care what ya do for a livin’… ya show up in my country—no return flight or trip, no forwarding address—just a ‘trust me’ attitude! How would you feel if I showed up in your country, hat in hand and a promise not to overstay?”

I had the feeling in my gut that my natural answer would not be received well: Why, welcome to Texas! Try Pecan Lodge BBQ—it’s a helluva good time! Stay out of Austin, it’s more California than Texas these days.

So instead I just smiled and eased out, “I can understand your point of view. I assure you, we mean no harm. Just here wrapping up an extended journey before heading back to Texas in the US.”

He flips through my passport book for the fourth time.

“So when did ya come into Europe?” he asks dismissively, flipping pages. “And why don’t you have any other stamps besides Spain?”

“December 10,” I answer. “And I went from Portugal to Spain to France to Italy to France to Italy to Switzerland to Italy to Switzerland to Italy to Switzerland to Germany to Liechtenstein to Germany to France over the course of more than two months, and not once has a crossing asked for anything. A few times I even stopped and asked them to review and stamp my passport. Always the same message: ‘We don’t do that here.’”

“I came with a return flight, but decided to overstay that and cancelled it, planning to rebook when I was out of time and energy for exploring the continent. Ireland is just the last leg, and I might add, the highlight of my trip. My Irish ancestors left here in 1844 and never looked back. I’m here for me, for my father, and for my art.”

O’Flynn is unmoved. Subtly rolls his eyes and stamps the book.

I light up. “Oh! Yay! Thank you. Don’t worry—I won’t disappoint your trust.”

The last thing I want is to get cross with the immigration police and get banned for life. I have a friend this happened to in North America. Left, and when he came back, his home of 30 years was locked out forever.

Wild.

But that’s the cost of romance. You can’t plan every grain of sand. That’s a pilot’s move; a pragmatists answer. Poets just wander around until they can’t stand it anymore. It’s a terrifying and electrifying state. You are building the bridge as you cross it, like a cartoon character.

This all occurs to me as I sit in a solarium in western Ireland. The ocean is POUNDING and ROARING a sixth of a mile away. Four donkeys graze in the rain next to a babbling brook that runs down and away from me to the sea. The ubiquitous stone walls divide the landscape beneath me into paddocks. How beautiful that they never adopted the grotesque barbed wire we run everywhere back in the United States.

This landscape is very much like Officer O’Flynn: hard and unforgiving, but with good reason. This island has stood for thousands of years and is fiercely independent. It’s not possible to hold one’s own without keeping your face to the wind. But underneath the harsh exterior is so much beauty that it is tear-inducing. Life everywhere. Celebrated with good beer (nay, great beer) and trad music.

I need to live here for a year. I am not yet bored, and until boredom sets in, creativity can’t truly flourish.

I want to live here, make love here, grow weary of the place and let it grow weary of me.

Typical for a romantic poet-essayist.

I think I’ll go for a walk.

Today I didn’t open myself
the way I do: heart and mind.

It feels like the day
has yet to begin.

But this is the life:
the way of duty.

The way of rules,
and things carried.

Prayers of wellness spill out.
Concern and worry for the soul,
Uncertainty about the abstract.

Worry comes.

You are enough.
Don’t forget it.

Ever.

A shepherding heart
Never forgets the protected.

In quiet spaces between.

One more day and
the sky has not yet fallen.

Because someone has propped
It for the benefit of us all.

Quiet sadness ambling with
Grocery bags in hand.
A mother’s kindnesses doing what
Little good they can.

When his anger flared
Young eyes could not resist
The rooms of meticulous smut,
And the circus of an exhibitionist. 

The stomachs knew before
The cats could understand,
In the days before
They found the feline's man.

None were as honest in affection,
If they stirred, it was surely brief.
For need is their only loyalty,
Hunger, the only grief.

The wind only
Understood
That the shouting
Had stopped.

The drippings of the
Mortal remains forevermore
Are still entombed
Beneath that
New vinyl floor.

And nobody
Told
The new
Tenants.

Everyone has weird neighbors. Some weirder than others.

I grew up in a strange place. The city, yes—odd enough—but oddity within oddity was my neighborhood. A cluster of about twelve houses dropped in the middle of an industrial district. My across-the-street neighbors weren’t people at all, but the city’s largest power transmission station. Massive towers, humming lines—an entire rusted empire of pylons feeding every dwelling in town.

Our human neighbors were like us: weirdos. Who picks a house in a place like this? Just people trying to exist. People who don’t fear breaking social norms because they were never part of them in the first place.

And our next-door neighbor, Mister Denton, fit right in.

To me, he was always very old. A bloated pear of a man—fat in the middle, narrow up top—shoes too big, athletic socks forever slouching, pants one slip away from abandoning all pretenses. His shirts were always greasy and mis-buttoned. His hair a wild swirl of salt and pepper. Coke-bottle glasses thick enough to bend the world.

Whenever he stood, he braced one hand—thumb down—on his hip, as though pushing against pain or gravity itself. I saw him often, trudging down our dirt road toward the grocery store with empty bags. I lost count of how many times my mom gave him a ride. In later years, she just took him groceries.

The few times I heard him speak—usually in Mom’s car—his voice surprised me. Soft, high-pitched for a man. Not squeaky, just delicate. The kind of voice that made the lingering smell of body odor even more memorable.

He was, without question, mentally ill.

His house was a WWII-era stucco box: tan walls cracked like dry earth, rotting window frames, and the back sheathed in brittle asbestos siding.

A four-foot chain-link fence separated his house from ours, overgrown with trumpet vine—a flimsy attempt at privacy. To curious children, it was less a barrier and more an invitation. His windows had no curtains, just greasy glass and rusty screens. The place practically begged to be peeked into.

And peek we did—especially when he started yelling at his cats. I never knew how many he had, but if smell is evidence, the answer was “far too many.”

When Mister Denton raged, he screamed at the top of his lungs: a shrill, high-pitched fury that sliced through the neighborhood. Usually something about feeding time. The ritual became a game—one kid sneaking to the window to report what they’d seen.

Most often we found him strutting around in nothing but slouching athletic socks, grimy flip-flops, and a sagging pair of dingy briefs. Only his coke-bottle glasses completed the ensemble.

Usually he wore the briefs.

Sometimes he didn’t.

Of the three windows we could safely peek into—the living room, the kitchen, and a small room that had become his “library”—the kitchen offered the most entertainment. Every counter was covered in open cans of cat food.

The library always fascinated me. A lifelong fantasy of mine has been a room filled floor-to-ceiling with books, and though small, Mister Denton had achieved that dream. It felt oddly extravagant for such a broken man.

In my imagination, his shelves held sci-fi epics and fantasy adventures—new worlds, distant galaxies, places far removed from our dusty street. That illusion shattered years later when, as a teenager helping roof his house, I was sent inside to sweep up debris.

I browsed his shelves.

The titles were… not what I expected.

Curiosity being what it is to cats (and boys

), I plucked one book off the shelf and flipped it open—only to land on a passage describing… well, something intimate happening on an airplane. Something far more adult and far more acrobatic than anything my teenage mind was prepared to process. I slammed the book shut, mortified, suddenly aware that the world held corners I had not yet imagined.

Hundreds of such books surrounded me—Trailer Park Temptresses, Nurses in Heat, The Peach Orchard Diaries, Naughty Nights on Flight 69. Endless stacks of the same. My fantasy of the eccentric scholar evaporated. Mister Denton was simply a lonely man with a lonely man’s library.

It all made sense.

To my knowledge, his interest in lurid books never translated to attention toward children—a huge relief in hindsight. We ran wild in that little kingdom, day and night, unsupervised and unbothered.

I always felt sorry for him. He lived utterly alone. If he had family, they never visited. My mother was the only person who consistently looked in on him.

It was her kindness that led her to discover his body. I’m vague on the timing—I’m not sure if I was still living at home or already married—but I vividly remember the glimpse through the rusted screen door: his swollen blue-black body and the overwhelming smell of decay.

Thankfully, I have no recollection of how the cats handled his death.

That was more than thirty years ago. And yet I still think of him whenever I see the house beside my parents’. His first name is gone from memory, other details too. But a small piece remains.

As all of us remain, briefly, in the memories of those who shared our worlds.

I wish I had brighter memories of the man who lived beside us for two decades, but reclusive souls rarely shine their light outward.

Mister Denton, should we meet again in some restored place, I hope you’ll tell me how you remember your strange little neighbors on that dirt road in the north of Texas.

Fire on the hill

I stopped by my Dad’s to say hi. He was watching TV. He’d been doing that a lot the last few months. It was a shift from his lifelong obsession with ‘doing something’. Anything, really, but mostly making stuff. Metal things, wood things, rebuilding car engines, rebuilding whole cars, building fences, or building buildings—the list goes on and on.

At 75 he had neck surgery to mitigate spinal stenosis; that is when the spinal column ossifies and begins to encroach on the spinal nerve. Too much and it causes pain. To much of THAT and you can end up paralyzed.

Right after the surgeries, remember him telling me he was having vivid dreams of panthers attacking him from behind and biting his neck! The worst pain he’d ever felt, he said.

It makes me think of that old joke that God invented the pain of childbirth so that a woman would know what it’s like for a man to catch a cold.

Haha.

I’m sure it was miserable. He said if he could do it over, he wouldn’t do it. Preferring to role the paralysis dice.

When I walked in, he was watching Forrest Gump. As we chatted, the scene came on where Forrest is humping through the jungle with his platoon in chest deep water saying:

“One day it started raining, and it didn’t quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain... and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night.”

It is a great scene and we were just in silence watching it play out. While Tom Hanks is talking about the rain from below, my dad tells me the story of burning down the mess hall by accident:

“It never rained much when I was in Viet Nam. Not like they show in Forrest Gump. I mean, it was green, but not as as green as they make it. And it did rain… I bogged down a 5-ton in the mud once… so it could be come a muddy mess at times.

We had taken this hill, it was a flat-top, hill-972, so we could launch artillery from our 6-guns. We had ‘em set up at the top. We were using the anti-rock platforms that I had designed and they worked great. They kept the cannons from rocking back and forth and digging big holes. I shoulda’ patented those when I got back, I’d be a millionaire. Though, I doubt there’s much call for that sort of thing state-side. I was just glad we didn’t have to dig ‘em out when we finally pulled out of a camp.

A little further down the hill we sat up base. We just carved it out of the jungle hillside. And lived in the middle of nowhere. A little pop-up town.

We were watching a movie one night, and someone shouted that the mess hall was on fire. Fire’s are all-hands affairs, you grab whatever’s got water in it and you become a firefighter.

Setting up base was always a hectic affair. The sooner we were dug in, the sooner we could keep our heads down, our eyes up and get on with the task of living in Viet Nam.

Which is why, some genuine filled up the water cans with gasoline.

The fire was going pretty good when the call went out. We were scrambling looking everywhere for water. Like I said, green, but not wet like they show in Gump. Finally! Someone found a stash of what we all thought was water. We grabbed every single one of those jerry-can and started dumping.

WHOOSH!!!

Gasoline doesn’t burn the vapors do. Explosively.

The flames shot up into the night sky. And somewhere in the illumination was the dummy who’d put fuel in jerry cans meant for water.

Needless to say, the mess was a goner. Those tents weren’t much, but they were the difference between civilization and not.

Even now, 50 years later I can still see those flames like it was yesterday.