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Last evening as I was coming home from Bridgetown when I happened upon the street in Price Hill that bears my family’s name. Don’t believe it was named after any of my relatives (considering our clan immigrated in 1955), but the spelling is the same. So, as I had thought about doing many times before and this time I actually did, I stopped and took a couple pictures. And there was an assemblage of local kids hanging around and they wasted no time asking who I was, if I was a police officer, if I was with the news and just generally what the hell I was doing there. After answering their questions and explaining that my name was the same name that was on that sign, they were more relaxed and asked if I would take their picture. Antionetta (left, red coat) asked me if I would e-mail her the photo. I also corrected their pronunciation of the street’s name. They had always called “Wezt-lells” or something like that. Now I think I helped them give it the true German American pronunciation.

This past weekend began a significant moment in the life of this Blogger. In reality it’s something I have been prepared to see happen for many years, but somehow with some luck, it took 16 long years to really take place. Fort Scott Camps, where I attended as a kid – and loved so dearly – has been sold to be turned into a 950-home subdivision. The camp closed in 1989.
This past weekend the Crosby Township Fire Department used the first building to be removed – the Girls’ Lodge – as a practice burn to ready their firefighters for real fires. It was dramatic to watch – for anyone to watch – with the fire roaring to the sky, and smoke billowing and enveloping the fire trucks, firefighters and bystanders nearby. It was also heartbreaking to see the beginning to an end of such a big part of my life.
With a pile of wood placed just inside the doorway of the old building with white siding and a green shingled roof with green-painted trim, right in the middle of a building where I went to at least one senior dance (and so clearly remember hearing Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” for the first time, prompting me to go out and buy the 45), the firefighters poured gasoline on the stack and dropped a match.
There the orange flames began and quickly grew higher and larger and hotter and spread inside this place full of memories. This place was also the place where perched on the hillside was a stone patio overlooking the Great Miami River. There I remembered I would look to see my best friend Alan’s house on the hill opposite and feel some comfort when the inevitable homesickness of being at an overnight camp without Mom and Dad set in.
I can’t believe it’s now that I am experiencing this loss. Until now nearly every building and the two swimming pools at the former camp remained untouched. The person who bought the camp from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati used it has his home, a sprawling 400-plus-acre ranch with buildings used for entertaining guests and storing old tractors, farm equipment and motorcycles and other various items he had collected. It’s amazing to be there now, aside from the deterioration of the swimming pools and the grass growing out of the tennis courts, the place has actually been maintained. Buildings, for the most part, have received paint, the grass has been mowed and the doors and windows are still there. Some cabin names, until recently, still stood over cabin doorways. It’s still virtually the same Fort Scott Camps that I remembered as a child.
I could go on and on about the many, many positive memories and first experiences I had at that place – shooting a BB gun for the first time, hitting a bulls-eye in archery for the first time, riding horses through the vast wilderness, sleeping alone in the woods as the final trial for my naturalist badge, or learning to be an actor – or to act goofy – in a drama class that I so dearly loved (and won awards for my silliness and, I guess, skills). I learned to swim better there, too. Competing against the Girls’ Camp in the Sunday Swim Meet, and doing not-so-badly that I could hold my head high as I came out of the pool – even if I hadn’t won the race.
Or those “Junior-Midget Dances”. “Midgets” and “Juniors” were the names given to the youngest and second-youngest campers at Fort Scott, respectively. It was a pre-pubescent romp through the teen years at age eight – and I loved it – replete with Top 40 music and a deejay and dimmed lights and slow dancing and pretty girls. It was great, even if I was scared to death to ask any woman (ahem, girl) to dance with me. It was romantic, it was summer and it was my childhood.
I still have a little Kinney Shoes shoebox (remember Kinney?) filled with mementos of my summers there. A green ribbon with the gold-stamped lettering “Fort Scott Camps, The Place to Be in ’83”. That’s 1983, kiddies. My “Character Rating Card” that was my counselor’s report card to my parents about my behavior while I was in his cabin. I always took pride in getting high marks there. I have copies of the hand-drawn map carefully outlining the trails and campsites in the Fort Scott forest. The famous “Grubers” spot – I can remember that campsite without even looking. I kept one bumper sticker, the ones for sale in the Fort Scott boys’ canteen store that had in green letters with a big red heart, “I (heart) Fort Scott”. You used to see them all around town on station wagons and minivans and family cars. You could leave town and go to Columbus or Indianapolis and see them there, too.
Or the legend of Pottinger, the mythic man who lived just beyond the camp’s borders and hated so much when he found Fort Scott campers trespassing on his property that he’d load salt pellets in his shotgun and shoot campers in the butt if he could. It was enough to keep us scared from wandering off camp property, the logical intent of the legend for our counselors charged with our care, unrealized by our little imaginative minds.
Counselors. I can remember my first. Brian O’Neil. Then came Michael Busic. Dennis Knippenberg. The names seem as fresh as those people were so bigger-than-life and so “old” when I was a kid. I’m now probably ten years older than they were then. Hard to imagine. Then there were those other legends of camp, those counselors who weren’t your own, but they taught all the cool classes and became legends themselves. Tom Beiting. That name pops into my mind so readily, it’s scary. His Indian powwows where he wore Native American dress and jumped over the heads of campers sitting around a campfire from a darkened woods and then ran around the fire, jumping over it and chanting the way we all thought Indians might have chanted, all of us entertained and mystified by his presence. I think I’d ask him for his autograph if I saw him today. I kind of wish I had back then.
“Stretch” – this tall guy. A great counselor. What was his real name? Did he even have a real name? He was just Stretch to us and that was just fine with him.
Laura Beiting, Mary Ann Beiting. That whole Beiting family – they were legends. Of course, Laura, Miss Beiting. Had I only been a little older and she a little younger, a marriage proposal would’ve been in order. Those crushes when you’re 10, 11, 12 years old are so funny.
So many memories of a place that I was so terrified to go to my first year that my Mom canceled at the last minute until I was more ready the next year. But even that next summer, when they had actually got me in the car and drove that five minutes to camp (I lived across the river and up the hill from camp), came the moment my parents walked away from the cabin and I still cried. My counselor saved me and told me to try playing with the other boys, which I did and forgot momentarily that I couldn’t go and run into Mommy’s arms. Then, when I got home two weeks later I laid in my bed and cried, begging my parents to take me back. I was in love, the first of many times my heart would be broken in my life. Not even the first time my heart would be broken as it was related to that camp. But it was life and it taught me about it.
***
Within a half-hour the building was a smoldering pile of smoking gray and white ash, with two gray, now black smoke-stained chimneys standing on opposite ends, that patio still intact. The home of my friend – where someone else’s family now lives – even more visible with the winter’s barren trees opening a clearer sight line from where I stood, a safe distance away.
While it burned in it’s blazing hot, orange brilliance, evoking this mixed-emotion of neat-o and profound sadness, in the bitter cold just feet away in safety from the comforting warmth of the smoldering building, I said a prayer. It was a prayer for the Church that once owned this great place and let it die despite the desperate cries of those who had built it, loved it and made it what it was. It was a prayer for all the bad decisions the Roman Catholic Church has made in the last 80 or so years, the ones that have not benefited anyone but themselves and have hurt thousands of people, some much more serious than the decision to close a summer camp.
I have started to realize that in my life I will see lots of change. I guess when you hit your 30s you start to realize that not everything will last forever and that things do change. Mortality means change and that things come and go in life and many do not ever stay forever. The unexpected does happen. People let you down. Organizations and routines you count on change and sometimes get worse. Some get sweeter and better. People get greedy or maybe just don’t see things the way you do, and you move on or they do, too. People and places come into your life at the right time and then leave before you realize they’re gone, the impact already made, the mark left, the memory made. The good comes to fill in when the bad seems so heavy. And just the opposite sometimes, too.
I wonder why it took me so long to realize this sometimes. But I think someone, somewhere, some Higher Power, let me realize it when they knew I’d be ready. This burning, tearing down of camp is happening when they knew I would be ready to let go. Doesn’t make it any easier, though. But I can see that chapter, that passage now for what it’s worth, for the good, the bad. I can see it for the doors the past 16 years that it opened and the experiences I might never have had if Fort Scott stayed open.
I asked the firefighter heading up the practice burn how long it would be before they came and hauled away the remaining parts of the building and cleared the spot for the builders.
“They’ll just come with a bulldozer and spread it around and work it into the dirt,” he said. Really, I thought. Like a spreading of the ashes of a dead person, forever making this building and the memories and positive experiences that happened in it part of the ground around it. Fitting, I thought. Very fitting. Perfect, even.
The photos turned out great, something I’ll be able to use for my portfolio as I build my career in journalism. One more time this place gave back to me I think, looking through the awesome shots on the little LCD screen on the back of my camera. I’m happy to know they’ll be burning down more buildings there, and the firefighters have invited me back. It’s neat to watch. Can’t wait. More buildings that will be a part of the ground again. The next to burn? The place where I saw “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for the first time. It’ll be cold outside and hot near the building. I’ll bring the hot chocolate and raise a toast to what once was before I watch it return to the ground.

I recently watched “Shakespeare in Love” again. It’s one of my favorite movies, though it has been several years since I have watched it beginning to end. I was reminded once again at how wonderful – truly beauitfully written, acted (less Ben Affleck), directed and photographed- that movie really is. The ending though is so good, so touching, without being overly dribbly, that I thought I’d post the script here.

I’m a person who tends to romanticize too much about the world, which is why maybe I like this ending so much. Whatever the reason I find I like it, hopefully you’ll find your own.

A gaggle of the QUEEN'S favoured courtiers wait by her
carriage. WESSEX is hurrying down the exterior staircase
as the QUEEN emerges from the theatre. During the
following a general egress from the Auditorium is taking
place, including some of the actors crowding to see her
off. WESSEX bows out of breath.

                           WESSEX
                 Your Majesty!

                           QUEEN
                 Why, Lord Wessex! Lost your wife so
soon?

                           WESSEX
                 Indeed I am a bride short. How is this
to end?

VIOLA has come out of the theatre, amongst some of the
other players. The QUEEN catches her eye.

                           QUEEN
                 As stories must when love's
denied--with tears and a journey. Those
whom God has joined in marriage, not
even I can put asunder.

                           QUEEN (CONT'D)
                     (she turns to VIOLA)
Lord Wessex, as I foretold, has lost
his wife in the play- house--go make
your farewell and send her out. It's
time to settle accounts.
(to WESSEX)
How much was the wager?

                           WESSEX
                 Fifty shillings.
(the QUEEN gives him a look)
Pounds.

                           QUEEN
                 Give it to Master Kent. He will see it
rightfully home. WESSEX gives his
purse to VIOLA.

                           QUEEN (CONT'D)
                     (to VIOLA)
And tell Shakespeare something more
cheerful next time for Twelfth Night.

The QUEEN proceeds towards her carriage. There is an
enormous puddle between her and her carriage. The QUEEN
hesitates for a fraction and then marches through the
puddle as cloaks descend upon it.

                           QUEEN (CONT'D)
                 Too late, too late.

She splashes her way into her carriage, which departs.

       INT. THE CURTAIN THEATRE. STAGE. DAY.

                           WILL
                     (heartbroken, testing her
name)
My Lady Wessex?

VIOLA nods, heartbroken too. For a long moment they
cannot say anything to each other. The she holds up
Wessex's purse.

                           VIOLA
                 A hired player no longer. Fifty
pounds, Will, for the poet of true
love.

                           WILL
                 I am done with theatre. The playhouse
is for dreamers. Look where the dream
has brought us.

                           VIOLA
                 It was we ourselves did that. And for
my life to come I would not have it
otherwise.

                           WILL
                 I have hurt you and I am sorry for it.

                           VIOLA
                 If my hurt is to be that you will
write no more, then I shall be the
sorrier.

WILL looks at her.

                           VIOLA (CONT'D)
                 The Queen commands a comedy, Will for
Twelfth Night.

                           WILL
                     (harshly)
A comedy! What will my hero be but the
saddest wretch in the kingdom, sick
with love?

                           VIOLA
                 An excellent beginning
(a beat)
Let him be…a duke. And your heroine?

                           WILL
                     (bitterly)
Sold in marriage and half way to
America.

                           VIOLA
                     (adjusting)
At sea, then--a voyage to a new
world?…she lands upon a vast and empty
shore. She is brought to the
duke…Orsino.

                           WILL
                     (despite himself)
Orsino…good name

                           VIOLA
                 But fearful of her virtue, she comes
to him dressed as a boy

                           WILL
                     (Catching it)
and thus unable to declare her love

Pause. They look at each other. Suddenly the conversation
seems to be about them.

                           VIOLA
                 But all ends well.

                           WILL
                 How does it?

                           VIOLA
                 I don't know. It's a mystery

WILL half smiles. Then he's serious. They look deeply at
each other…and rush into each other's arm.

                           WILL (CONT'D)
                 You will never age for me, nor fade,
nor die.

                           VIOLA
                 Nor you for me.

                           WILL
                 Good bye, my love, a thousand times
good bye.

                           VIOLA
                 Write me well.

She kisses him with finality. Then turns and runs from
him. WILL watches as she goes.

       INT. WILL'S ROOM. DAY.

A blank page. A hand is writing: TWELFTH NIGHT. We see
WILL sitting at his table.

                           WILL (VO)
                 My story starts at sea…a perilous
voyage to an unknown land…a shipwreck

       EXT. UNDERWATER. DAY.

Two figures plunge into the water

                           WILL (VO)
                 the wild waters roar and heave…the
brave vessel is dashed all to pieces,
and all the helpless souls within her
drowned

       INT. WILL'S ROOM. DAY.

WILL at his table writing

                           WILL (VO)
                 all save one … a lady

       EXT. UNDERWATER. DAY.

VIOLA in the water

                           WILL (VO)
                 whose soul is greater than the ocean …
and her spirit stronger than the sea's
embrace … not for her watery end, but
a new life beginning on a stranger
shore

       EXT. BEACH. DAY.

VIOLA is walking up a vast and empty beach ….

                           WILL (VO CONTINUED)
                 It will be a love story … for she will
be my heroine for all time

       INT. WILL'S ROOM. DAY.

WILL looks up from the table.

                           WILL (VO CONTINUED)
                 and her name will be … Viola.

He looks down at the paper, and writes: "Viola" Then:
"What country friends is this?"

       EXT. BEACH. DAY.

DISSOLVE slowly to VIOLA, walking away up the beach
towards her brave new world.

                             THE END

One of my favorite movies of all time is “Before Sunrise”. It’s fitting, albeit not really as good, sequel “Before Sunset” came out last year. Maybe you saw it or heard of it.

It’s worth noting the story is not really this movie’s strength – it’s the dialouge. And some of the lines are just beautiful and poignant. Scene 16 happens to be one of the best.

I am not sure what exatly made me think of this today and then proceed to want to post it here. Chalk it up to my easily-distracted brain, I guess. Enjoy.

The scene:

[Still in club. Playing pinball. Selene is playing, and she loses her ball. Both are drinking beer.]

Selene: [hitting the machine] Merde!

Jesse: [taking over, and starting playing] Well, um, we haven’t talked about this yet, but, are you dating anyone? You got a boyfriend waiting on you back in Paris, or anything like that?

Selene: No, not right now.

Jesse: not right — but you did! [he loses ball, she takes over]

Selene: We broke up about six months ago.

Jesse: Six months ago.

Selene: Yeah.

Jesse: I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not that sorry. But, uh, tell me about it.

Selene: Ah, no. No, no way, I can’t. Its really, really boring.

Jesse: C’mon, tell me about it.

Selene: Okay. I was really disappointed. I thought this one would last for a while. I mean he was very stupid, ugly, bad in bed, alcoholic, y’know

Jesse: Real prize-winner.

Selene: Yeah. [laughs] I was kind of giving him a favour, but he left me, saying I loved him too much, and, y’know, I was blocking his artistic expression, or some shit like that, y’know. But anyway, I was traumatized, and became [she loses ball. She shrugs, they switch] and became totally obsessed with him. And so I went to see this shrink, y’know, and it came out that I had written this little stupid story about this woman, trying to kill her boyfriend, and how she was gonna do it, y’know, with all the intricate details, of, y’know, how to do it, and not get caught, and

Jesse: She was gonna kill her boyfriend? [loses ball. Switch]

Selene: Yeah. Yeah, she was. I mean, its nothing I would do, but it was just some writing, y’know.

Jesse: Alright, no, no, I understand.

Selene: But anyway, this stupid shrink believed everything I was telling her, and it was my first time seeing her. She said she had to call the police.

Jesse: She had to call the police?

Selene: [loses ball. Switch] Yeah. She was, merde! she was totally convinced I was really gonna do it. y’know, even though I’d explained to her it was just some writing, y’know. She said, looking deep into my eyes, “The way you said it, I know you are going to do it, the way you said it.” She was totally out of her mind. It was my first and last session.

Jesse: Yeah, so what happened then?

Selene: I totally got over him, you know. But now I’m obsessed that he’s gonna die from an accident, or, you know, 1000 kms away, I’m gonna be the one accused. Why do you become obsessed with people you don’t really like that much, you know, I mean.

Jesse: I don’t know.

Selene: So, how about you?

Jesse: What?

Selene: Are you with anyone?

Jesse: Umm, its funny how we managed to avoid this subject for so long, isn’t it?

Selene: Yeah, but now you have to tell me.

Jesse: Well, I kind of see this all (****) as this, uh, escape for two people who don’t know how to be alone, y’know, or, uh. I mean, y’know its funny. People always talk about how love is this totally unselfish, giving thing, but if you think about it, y’know, there’s nothing more selfish.

Selene: Yeah, I know. So, she just broke up with you?

Jesse: What? [loses ball, switch]

Selene: You sound like you’ve just been hurt, or something.

Jesse: No…. do I?

Selene: Yeah.

Jesse: Alright. Um, Big confession, y’know. I should have told you the earlier, or something, but, y’know… I didn’t just come to Europe just to hang out, and read Hemingway in Paris, and shit like that, y’know. I saved up my money all spring to, uh, fly to Madrid, and spend the summer with my girlfriend, who has been on this —

Selene: Your girlfriend? [she loses ball. They switch]

Jesse: My EX-girlfriend, who has been on this asinine art history program for the last year. Anyway, I got here, right, and now we’re re-united, at long last, and we went out to dinner, our first night, ah, with six of her friends. Pedro, Antonio, Gonzalo, Maria, Suzie, from home, y’know. She pretty much managed to avoid being alone with me for the first couple of days we were there, and I stuck around for a while, just to kind of let it really sink in that she wished I hadn’t come. So I bought the cheapest flight out of Europe, this one leaving out of Vienna tomorrow, but it didn’t leave for a couple of weeks. So, I bought this Eurail pass, y’know. Y’know–y’know what’s the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you? Its when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with, and you realize that that is how little they’re thinking about you, y’know. [loses ball]. Y’know, you’d like to think that you’re both in all this pain, but really, they’re just, Hey, I’m glad you’re gone. [They switch]

Selene: I know. You should look at bright colours.

Jesse: What?

Selene: That’s what the shrink told me, y’know. I was paying her 900 francs an hour, to hear that I was a homicidal maniac, and that I could eliminate (****) my obsession if I would concentrate on bright colours.

Jesse: Yeah, well did it work?

Selene: Well, [loses ball, switch]

Jesse: Didn’t help your pinball, did it?

Selene: No. Yeah, well, you know. I haven’t… I haven’t killed anyone lately.

Jesse: Not lately? Well, that’s good, you’re cured, then.

This time of year and the coming next two months are my favorite of the entire year. The weather is cool but not too cold. The air seems cleaner and crisper and more breathable than other seasons. My favorite part, though? The colors. First the oranges, the browns, the dark yellows, the bright yellows, the dark greens and the earthy tones of the trees as their leaves turn bright colors and fall to the ground. I also love the rows of corn turned brown, ready for harvesting for herd feed. Then the farmer on his tractor harvesting that corn, row-by-row as the sun sets on the horizon.
Later on the weather turns cooler and up pops red, green, blue, yellow of twinkling Christmas lights – plus the pine smell of a tree just cut off the tree farm. There are just so many images and smells and memories representative of this season and I love ’em all.
So, that’s why today I woke up, packed the camera and headed West, to Indiana. Other than going to the family cabin in southern Kentucky, southeastern Indiana is so beautiful in the fall. I went to see it and photograph what I could, trying to capture a bit of what I love.
Today I found people fishing off a floating pier at Brookville Lake.
I also went back to Metamora, Ind. – where I used to love to go with my Mom, sister, my friend Alan and my Mom’s friends when we were kids. It was so magical in the fall and up closer to Christmas. I was disappointed to see it had lost much of its charm – replaced with kitschy little shops filled with future-landfill-filler gift shops.
I stopped in Okeana – near my cousins’ farm – and saw horses grazing beside an old train trestle. I always loved that train trestle and vaguely remember my Grandfather telling me that a train once derailed on it and fell to the ground. I’m not sure if it’s used regularly anymore, last used to haul “dirty dirt” from the Fernald Uranium Processing Plant environmental clean-up near Ross, Ohio to Utah for disposal in the late 1990s.
I wound up the evening with my Mom and dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Les Flick’s Homelike Inn.
What a relaxing day after the hectic couple weeks I had finishing up work on the SPJ banquet and then the banquet itself Friday night.