A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was born. In southern Florida. 

When I was two my parents moved to the panhandle, just outside the bustling "city" of Tallahassee. Far enough away to be considered "the boondocks" by its standards. It was the '70s so it wasn't the romanticized southern living depicted in movies and literature, but it was the Deep South. There weren't many old plantations where I lived, though, after my parents divorced when I was four, my father moved 20 miles away and much deeper into the Deep South where remnants of plantations were everywhere. In the Florida Panhandle, 20-miles can be a world of difference. 

I split my time between my father's farmhouse outside of Quincy, in an area appropriately called "Sawdust Community," and my mother's typical '70s-style home in a subdivision outside of Tallahassee called "Plantation Woods." Her house was in a neighborhood developed on an old pecan plantation, so there were pecans everywhere. My father had moved in with his future wife, whose family had owned the farm for generations. The family was a large part of the community of Quincy and their reunions were enormous, effectively shutting down the town so that relatives could attend. She was one of seven children. My father came from a smaller family, with one older brother living outside of NYC.

When I stayed with him it was another world. The house was old, creaky, with no central heat or air conditioning. It had one gas heater, the size of three toasters piled up, and one exhausted window AC in the family room. Other than that, it was all box fans and heating blankets. In the winter I'd run to the family room and stand by the heater, warming up my backside and jeans, and then lying under a quilt on the couch. In the summer it was thin sheets, a box fan in the window, and the roaring sound of cicadas over the whirring of the fan.

The house was on a red-clay dirt road, surrounded by fields and with a small beaver-created lake. There were dilapidated tobacco barns, those used for drying the leaves, as well as abandoned houses and slaves quarters overrun with young trees and thick underbrush. Encountering rattlesnakes while exploring was all too common. Never bit, though. We had an altering number of dogs, often strays that would just show up and that lived under the house. They were good at spotting dangers when I was exploring. Always just me and the dogs, wandering through pastures and woods. At night it was pitch black, with no street lights or city lights on the horizon. It could be eerie at times. But, you could see the Milky Way in the summer night sky, and it was always fun watching summer lightning illuminate the angry mass of distant clouds. These are what I think about when I reminisce about the South, and the food.

At 19 I left Florida to move to Boulder, CO. If you had asked me months prior to the move where I would be living in a year, I would have responded "Tallahassee." Thus, it might seem to many as if it was impulsive. Maybe it was, I was 19. Now, if you 'd asked me four months prior to the move where I wanted to live, at that time it was anywhere but Florida. And Colorado was many things, but most importantly it was definitely not Florida.

One night, three months prior to the move and the Thursday before the week of spring break, I was hanging out with a friend and his sister at the local Whataburger, our usual hang after going out to Club Park Avenue. We were talking about plans for spring break, I had none, but they were taking a bus to visit their brother in Boulder, CO. I had never been. It dawned on us that they could refund their bus tickets for gas money and I could drive them there. So Shawn (the guy on the left in the picture below), his sister Shannon, and I drove out to Boulder the next day. 

We drove straight through....

Waking to the Flat Irons....

Shawn and I moved there three months after getting back from spring break....

After 6 months in Boulder, Shawn ended up moving back to Tallahassee, and I ended up moving to Capitol Hill in Denver. We lost touch with one another....

San Francisco, CA

Portland, OR

Portland, ME

Portland, OR

Eugene, OR

University of Oregon

this happened....

Stuttgart

Marbach am Neckar

Frankfurt am Main

SUNY Stony Brook

Father's passing in 2007

Research grant 2007-2008

The New School

Joey and the Surrogacy

Break

SUNY Stony Brook