Louis Roney: Constant reminders

• The quite startling effect of living where I grew up comes from the fact that in Winter Park on all sides of me are constant reminders from the far distant past of people, places, and things which will never be gone from my memory. Old classmates have often asked me to search my recollective treasury to find yet another story about old times. Every era has its scribes, those voices who shape the words to make them into the language of history – over but not forgotten. The Hemingways, the Sinclair Lewis, the Robert Frosts, all contributed to the tapestry of their recent past in indelible ways.

• When I was a boy in Florida, the state had a population of 1 and a half million inhabitants – about half as many people as Georgia. The Florida I returned to, and in which I have lived since 1980, has some 19 million inhabitants! I predict that Florida’s future population will run well over 50 million and even approach 100 million during our lifetime as more and more economically able people decide to spend their later years in the Florida sunshine.... Florida real estate is headed nowhere but UP! As Will Rogers said, “Buy real estate, they ain’t makin’ it any more.”

• When we were kids in Florida, we practically lived outdoors. We always had our bathing suits handy and could easily walk or bike to Lake Virginia and swim off Rollins College’s two big docks. We were given junior lifesaving courses while we were in grammar school and senior lifesaving courses in high school. All of us kids were educated to know the basics of lifesaving and how to swim well. Often we kids managed to go the 50 miles over to Coronado Beach where we could spend the whole day in the Atlantic surf. There was a great restaurant in Daytona Beach, which sadly is no longer operating, where we would enjoy a delicious seafood supper. We kids literally had all the pleasures that our rich Yankee visitors traveled to Florida to enjoy. A friend of mine and I once rashly decided to bicycle all the way from Winter Park to Daytona Beach and back – a trip which had looked deceivingly easy when viewed sitting on the tailgate of a truck. Our leg muscles benefited greatly from our constant use of bicycles. Those days almost none of us had the use of our family’s cars. Too bad kids of today don’t have the pleasure of really being immersed in the out-of-doors.

If you would like to have a concrete example of what the fourth dimension is, just read further. I say this as a person who came back to his high school hometown after more than forty years in Europe. The setting is the same, but the fourth dimension – time – changes everything. I remember riding my bicycle down brick streets in the evening and suddenly recalling a world that looks familiar, but whose past reality is very much alive. The memories in my mind are alive, but so am I, the guy living in the present. One thing that most of us may regret at one time or another is that we can’t go back and change things for the better that didn’t end up quite as we had wished in the past. We can put ourselves on the same stage set, wear the same clothes we once wore, but further interference with the long-ago is unreal. I remind myself often that this is not a rehearsal, it’s life! Sometimes we can conveniently arrange things so that the past may not be entirely obliterated, but it remains a rerun. A favorite old song goes: “We looked at each other in the same way then, but who knows where or when.” The deceiver – time – makes us think that we can relive things that are, in reality, lost forever but which appear to us to be within easy reach.

• “The duty of an upright administration is to pursue its course steadily, to know nothing of family dissentions, and to cherish the good principles of both parties.” – Thomas Jefferson