Hunting the elusive candy cane

Having spent more than half of my working life in the field of recreation and parks, I thought I had heard of, participated in or personally organized every special event known to mankind.

But my hat is off to the folks of the Bengies-Chase Recreation Council, who made me sit up and smile upon finding news of an upcoming special event being held the weekend after Thanksgiving.

The rec council will hold its Candy Cane Hunt on Saturday, Nov. 30, at Eastern Regional Park, 11723 Eastern Ave. in Chase. Registration will be held beginning at 8:30 a.m. and hunts for children in a variety of age groups (2 and under; 3-4; 5-6;7-8; and 9-11) will begin promptly at 9 a.m. Hunts will be staggered from 9 a.m. to noon, depending on age group, according to a notice from the council.

Other holiday-related activities will be held throughout the morning and participants are encouraged to bring donations for the council’s hat and mitten tree.

I have many fond memories of working with Bengies-Chase, both as a part-time rec leader in the late 1970s and early 1980s and as the rec community supervisor in the 1990s. Special events, including the council’s annual Easter egg hunt, the haunted house that once transformed the Bengies Community Building, and bon fires at Miami Beach (affectionately referred to by staff as Miami Beach North), all bring back memories of fun, camaraderie and the occasional debacle.

At some point, in the later 1970s, the council still used real eggs for the Easter egg hunt. The Golden Age clubs that met at the community building traditionally helped hard boil and dye the eggs used for the event. Early on the morning of the hunt, I was one of many people who helped spread the eggs across the campus of Seneca Elementary School. After someone accidentally dropped an egg while attempting to hide it, we were horrified to learn the egg was raw. It turned out many of the eggs were raw — the result of one person putting a pot of eggs on the stove and anther person promptly taking it off to place another pot on the heat.

I think the use of plastic eggs filled with treats began the following year!

In any case, the idea of a candy cane hunt is new to me and I think it’s wonderful the staff and volunteers of Bengies-Chase are burning the creative oil to come up with new and different activities for the community. 

The event is free to all. For more information, call the rec council office, 410-887-5349.

And don’t forget your donations for the hat and mitten tree.

Remembering the unthinkable

As hard as it is to believe, today is the one-year anniversary of the shootings at the Capital-Gazette newspaper offices in Annapolis.

One year ago today, five heroes of the people, five saviors of truth, five shiners of light on darkness, lost their lives.

Journalists Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara and Wendi Winters and sales assistant Rebecca Smith died June 28, 2018, when a gunman with a reported long-standing grudge against the paper entered the building and started shooting.

We as a society have become somewhat hardened to the news of another mass shooting on American soil because they have sadly become all too common. But when news of this shooting hit the local airwaves, I distinctly remember my heart skipping a beat. The blood drained from my face and all I could do was suck in my breath and wait for more details.

I instantly thought of Rob, whose work I had admired from afar for years, and Gerald and John, both of whom I had met over my years as a journalist.

I sat in front of a television for hours, waiting for more details to be released and for the dead to be identified. As the list of names was read, I started crying and couldn’t stop. It was almost inevitable, given the small size of the staff, that I would know some, if not all, of the victims.

As I sat and tried to come to grips with this shooting in my professional community, I began to feel somewhat guilty over becoming hardened to the news of such acts. Listening to news readers list the names of people I knew made me realize that, whether a shooting was in Georgia, or Kentucky, or Massachusetts, or (insert state/town here), the readings of those victims elicited the same response from people in those communities. We forget that these dead people are more than just a list of names; they are spouses, parents, offspring, siblings, aunts, uncles, neighbors, colleagues and friends.

Every time there is a mass shooting, members of that community are sitting in front of a television, sobbing hysterically over the mention of names of people they knew. We lose sight of that and I have been much more in tune to that personal loss since the Capital Gazette shootings.

I don’t want to get too political here, because I don’t want to disrespect the memories of my fallen colleagues, but it needs to be said that the Annapolis massacre occurred just a couple of days after both our president and right-wing conspiracy theorist Milos Yiannopolis referred once again to journalists as the “enemy of the people.”

I would be foolish to say there is a direct connection between that rhetoric and the shootings, because there simply is not proof. But the shooter’s beef with the paper was many years old, and his allegations of defamation against the paper had been dismissed in court on many years ago as well. So why the timing now to shoot these people? Why not five years ago? The timing is suspect, in any case.

Journalists are not the enemy of the people. They are the people; they often live in the communities they write about. Their children attend the local schools, they worship in the churches, they shop in the stores, they dine in the restaurants, they’re patients of local doctors and dentists. They throw cookouts with their neighbors, they plan vacations together, they support youth rec leagues and community theater. They are not the enemy.

But I don’t want to dwell on that, as I said. I want to pay respect to the memories of five every day people who got up on the morning of June 28, 2018, went to work and didn’t return home to their loved ones.

Much has been written over the past year about the loss of the Capital Gazette staffers. They have been honored with a special Pulitzer award and have been memorialized at the Newseum. Fallen journalists, dubbed "The Guardians,” were named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Their stories have been told, their survivors have shared more intimate memories and their work has been acknowledged and honored.

It’s interesting that the one person I didn’t know at all — sales assistant Rebecca Smith — is the person I got to know the best in the aftermath of the shootings. Rebecca was a member of the Greater Dundalk community and I was honored to write the article for the East County Times that shared both the news details of the shootings and details of Rebecca’s life that helped paint a personal picture of who she was as a significant other, colleague, neighbor and friend.

I made sure to include her in anything I wrote or said about the victims of the attack. Many news accounts tended to discount Rebecca because she wasn’t a journalist. When the Newseum added the names of Fischman, Hiaasen, McNamare and Winters to the Fallen Journalists wall earlier this month, many news accounts didn’t even mention that a fifth, non-journalist also died in the attack.

I saw one news account that mentioned the names of the four dead journalists and added that a “sales assistant also died,” without mentioning Rebecca’s name.

I’m sure her journalist colleagues would have been quite upset with that treatment.

A newspaper staff is much like any other professional team in that each person’s job is important to the overall mission; a weak spot anywhere affects the quality everywhere. While journalists tend to get the public attention and are the ones with their names on their work, the advertising folks are the ones who bring in the money that gives us the space to print our work.

I once worked in a newsroom where the owner of the paper reminded us all the time that reporters cost him money and advertising folks made him money. The ad staff often had catered lunch or treats brought in to meetings, or held receptions that involved food. It was a standing joke that right before the leftovers needed to go in the trash, they would miraculously appear on the kitchenette counter in the newsroom for the writing staff to share.

No matter how close the food was to a mouldering mess, it was quickly consumed because, well, because no journalist ever turned down free food.

In all of the accounts I have seen of this incident, as written by Capital Gazette survivors and others, it strikes me that this group was a particularly tight-knit team who got along, socialized together after work and genuinely liked each other.

The loss of all five individuals matters and my heart still breaks a year later for that loss of talent, passion, skills and leadership, and for the loss of community champions that left Annapolis without some important voices and cheerleaders.

We lose sight of how important a community paper is and how much we depend on those often underpaid, overworked writers who share the stories larger news outlets often overlook. We only notice how much we depended on those voices after they are silenced.

Most often, the voices are silenced by the closure of a newspaper. To have those voices silenced by workplace violence is relatively new to us here in the U.S. The news of journalists targeted and killed because of their work happens in other, “less civilized” nations, we think, but could never happen here.

It is shocking then, when it does happen here, and is something we should never forget.

So here’s to remembering Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters, and here’s to appreciating those points of light in all of our communities.

Press on, Annapolis!

Blogger's confession:

Because of my emotional connection to this incident, I find myself, even at one year later, unable to write as clearly or as eloquently as I would like in my effort to honor these fallen colleagues. For some much better-written coverage, including columns written by Capital staffers and Maria Hiaasen, Rob’s widow, please visit https://www.capitalgazette.com.

Be sure to also visit Paul Gillespie’s beautiful, sensitive and poignant collection of portraits. You won’t be sorry.

O, those hapless O's!

Oh, those hapless Baltimore Orioles!

We knew the team was going to suck this year. At least  I did. And I’m too old to buy in to the “rebuilding” bull being marketed once again. I’ve been through too many “rebuilding” years to believe it will ever really happen. I just smile when I hear the young or naive fans talk about "rebuilding." 

While I didn’t expect the team to finish above last place, I did expect them to lose fewer games this year than last … which, as you may recall, was a near-record 115 games in the L column. But it sure looks like they are on pace to beat that number.

So I’m back to cheering like I was toward the end of last year … embracing the philosophy of if you’re going to do something, be the best ever. Set records. Have folks talking about you (remember, any attention is good attention).

The Orioles are so bad, they are garnering national media attention for all the wrong reasons.

Take, for example, this headline from a recent Onion article: “Norfolk Tides Third Baseman Sent Down To Baltimore Orioles.”

Photo Credit: The Onion

The story begins with this: “Hoping to give the still-developing prospect more time to find his game, the Norfolk Tides announced Wednesday that third-baseman Anderson Feliz would be sent down to the Baltimore Orioles.”

Anderson, according to the satirical piece, is dealing with injuries and is in a bit of a slump, so management decided to send him to Baltimore to “build up his confidence.” The plan is to have Anderson continue to work on the fundamentals needed to play consistently in Triple A competition.

It’s cute and a fun little read. How nice of the Orioles to provide such fodder for comedy writers.

Writer Ted Berg had some fun at the expense of the Birds and their fans when he wrote a USA Today sports column titled “At least you’re not a Baltimore Orioles fan.”

Unless, of course, you are. Berg writes: “But no matter how bad it gets this year — and for roughly half of MLB teams, it’s already pretty bad — you can take solace in this: Al least you’re not a fan of the 2019 Baltimore Orioles.”

He then highlights some possible record-breaking performances the team might achieve: They remain on pace to shatter the all-time mark for home runs allowed in a season; they currently have the worst record in MLB with (at the time) 21 wins and 51 losses (since the article was published June 18, the Orioles have “improved” to a record of 22-58 (through June 26); they became the fourth-fastest team THIS CENTURY to lose 50 games (and two of the other teams were also the Orioles, according to Berg.

He laments the team trading away Manny Machado, who he refers to as “the best player they’ve developed since Cal Ripken, and notes that only one of the five players received in exchange for Machado is playing well. Manny just visited Baltimore asa member of the San Diego Padres and killed us with his bat and his glove. No surprise there.

So, the main take-away seems to be that if you’re going to be bad, be the best (worst?) bad you can possibly be.

Perhaps Michael Givens can set the record for the most blown saves. Chris Davis can take two titles with Most Strikeouts Ever and Lowest Batting Average Ever. Maybe a third title could be Highest Paycheck Given for Lousy Performance. The collective pitching staff can be proud of the most homers ever given up by a team. Maybe the team can even boast about having the largest single-season decline in ticket sales. Think about it — the possibilities are endless.

Gotta go — need to rest up for tonight's game!

Fly like an 'Iggle'

The Dundalk Eagle is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. 

This milestone and subsequent anniversaries will always have a connection to my life and career in journalism.

After working a largely unfulfilling government job for too many years of my relative youth, I threw caution to the wind and in April 1999, applied for a reporter position at the Eagle.

A second interview resulted in a job offer and I started at the paper on May 5. My first issue - that of May 13, 1999 - celebrated the "Iggle's" 30th anniversary and paid homage both to the vision and perseverance of founder Kimbel Oelke and the storied history, people, organizations and events of Greater Dundalk.

I had two bylines in the paper that week as the result of two evening assignments on my first day. I first covered an event at the North Point Library and then headed to a fundraiser at Sparrows Point Middle School.

My more senior reporter colleagues wrote much of the anniversary coverage that they had been working on for several weeks.

As a result of that career change, I began paying closer attention to local media coverage and I read the work of other reporters as on-the-job training. I learned to craft better leads, how to build stories and what questions to ask, all by reading the work of others.

Much has changed in those 20 years, in terms of the creation and delivery of news content, even if many of the messages remain the same. The Columbine High School shootings were still a raw, painful current event in May 1999, and 20 years later, it seems as though we read about a domestic mass shooting at least weekly.

Image courtesy of Dundalk Eagle Facebook page

The art of journalism has changed, thanks to the evolution of increasingly powerful and speedy computers, smart phones and other devices, to say nothing of digital cameras.

When I first started at the Eagle, we still shot with film cameras. I'd take my trusty Pentax K 1000 to an event, shoot photos, do my interviews and, on my way back to the North Center Place office, drop the film at Rite Aid's hour processing desk. It was always disappointing to discover that, in each of 10 images, at least one person always had closed eyes.

I worked full time for the Eagle as a reporter, columnist and associate editor until late 2007 and was fortunate to continue writing the Talk of the Town column as a freelancer through 2008.

Over those years, I had the privilege of sitting in living rooms, classrooms and board rooms, covering events and meetings in every nook and cranny in Turner Station, Dundalk, Edgemere and Fort Howard. From parades and festivals to community meetings and political events and elections, the Eagle was there.

During my Eagle tenure, I was honored to win more writing and photography awards than I can remember from state, regional and national journalism organizations. Those awards as judged by my professional peers allowed me to slowly drop my feelings of not being a "real journalist," having been a recreation and parks supervisor for the first half of my working life.

I grew accustomed to people saying the Eagle covered their lives from cradle to grave. For many residents, their scrapbooks started with a clipping of a birth announcement and continued with kindergarten graduation photos, Little League team action, dance recital recaps, news of academic and athletic awards, high school and college graduations, job promotions, engagement and wedding announcements, followed by the birth announcements of their own children and obituaries for their parents. All published by the loyal local newspaper.

I have special memories of a few memorable people I was honored to meet through my Eagle travels.

I "discovered "  now world-famous, highly decorated Paralympic swimmer Jessica Long. The Middle River resident was a plucky 11-year-old when I met her. The double, below-the-knee amputee was a member of the Dundalk-Eastfield Swim Club, a local recreation council team that practiced at CCBC Dundalk. She competed against normally abled swimmers, and while she never won races, she consistently honed her technique and lowered her race times.

It didn't take the U.S. Olympic Committee's Paralympic division long to notice her. As a 12-year-old, she was the youngest member of the Paralympic team to go to Athens in 2004. While the experts told her to set realistic goals and use the meet as a learning experience, she came home from Greece with three gold medals tucked carefully in her suitcase.

She has since competed in the Paralympics in Beijing, London and Rio de Janiero and is training for 2020's gathering in Tokyo. She has traveled the world, made lifelong friends and met presidents at the White House as a result of her Paralympic experience.

I also spent many column inches covering a local community college chancellor who was an unpopular leader who was perceived as being too authoritarian and intimidated folks who were "not on his train." I was celebrated by the community when he "resigned."

While Jessica's story is more high profile than most, it is symbolic of the tens of thousands of stories the Eagle has shared with the community in its 50 glorious years. From quirky hobbies to volunteerism, from unique jobs to community activism, everyone has a story and community journalism specializes in telling the stories that won't end up in a major metropolitan daily.

The creation of the Eagle is itself a story of passion, dedication and perhaps a bit of temporary insanity.

As shared by Oelke family members, Mr. Oelke had grown increasingly frustrated by a local paper that was giving a smaller and smaller voice to Dundalk as it spread out to cover other parts of Baltimore County. The legend holds that, after mulling his options, Mr. Oelke asked for his beloved wife Mary's blessing to essentially sink their life savings in a new venture to be known as the Dundalk Eagle.

To say it was a big risk for the couple, who would eventually have 11 children, is an understatement.

But obviously the experiment took, with the paper enjoying a high circulation rate and successful advertising sales through the salad years of journalism.

The Eagle was owned by Oelke's heirs until 2015, when it was sold to an out-of-state publishing group with newspapers in many different states.

Much has been said over at least the past 10 years about the perceived changes in Eagle coverage. Because of a cruel economy, the pages are physically smaller and there are fewer of them in each issue. (I have memories of staff struggling to fill 56- and 64-page issues). 

There are fewer writers now on staff (during my tenure, the paper boasted four full-time reporters, a photographer, an editor and an editorial assistant/community announcement writer). Seven full-time editorial staff members for a community weekly! Unheard of today.

Fewer writers naturally means fewer events can be covered and fewer invitations are accepted. A smaller page count means less room to tell stories.

But let me tell you this, as the Eagle celebrates this significant milestone. No matter who owns the paper, no matter how few pages each issue contains, no matter how many stories don't get told, it is important to support it. 

Subscribe to the print edition. If you're an environmentalist and don't want the physical paper, subscribe to the online version. The Eagle has a fairly user-friendly website, which also offers an electronic version, page for page, of each week's paper.

Because here's the deal. This country is losing too many papers, which translates to too many communities losing their media voices. In addition to never learning about a resident's collection of owls, the loss of papers and journalists snuffs out the light needed to expose crime and corruption.

We are living through a good example of the results of competent, old-fashioned, shoe-leather investigative reporting.

The discovery of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh's perceived unsavory transactions with the University of Maryland Medical System is the result of Baltimore Sun reporters digging through UMMS Board of Directors records.

Their reporting uncovered the financial trail involving the purchase of books authored by Pugh, and shined a light on the conflict of interest involved.

Without reporting like that, corruption will not get uncovered. I would dare say that corruption would increase without the threat of reporters digging deep into obscure, boring reports.

While every other news outlet picked up on the work of the Sun reporters, it's important to acknowledge that the Sun bankrolled those reporters and provided them with paychecks while allowing them the needed time to dig out that story. 

I hear less informed folks say that journalism will never go away, and then they point to bloggers, YouTubers and Instagrammers as examples to support their argument.

I disagree. I don't know a single blogger or vlogger putting in 40 hours a week performing real, credible, researched and vetted journalism. Most, if not all, of those folks have full-time jobs elsewhere and are hobbyists when it comes to writing. Many are deliberately inflammatory and write essays or produce videos designed to stir up crap, pit groups against one another and spread false information.

No community paper can do it all. There will always be folks who are disappointed that the editor didn't buy their story pitch; that a photo didn't get published as quickly as they wanted; or that a story missed the mark.

But any community paper is better than no community paper. Support the Dundalk Eagle (or whatever your local paper is) while it's still here to support.

I personally know all too well the pain of a news outlet closing. I'm involuntarily retired because of the East County Times' demise. And I know the loss suffered by the community, which lost a well-written, objective, accurate voice for a diverse community.

Fifty years for any mom-and-pop business to thrive and survive is an accomplishment of which to be proud. 

For a plucky, salt-of-the-earth community weekly to survive that long, to say nothing of weathering the past 15 cruel years, says the product is needed and wanted.

Local journalism might be on life support, but each of you has the opportunity to serve as an IV bag. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.

Support the patient while it's sick and can still recover. If the funeral's being planned, it's too late.

Congratulations to the Eagle's current and former owners and staff members. I'm proud to have played a small role in the history of such a storied and respected institution, and wish it at least 50 more years.

Space and time continuum?

Saturday night, I tuned in to the last half of the NCAA men's ice hockey championship game between the University of Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs and the University of Massachusetts Minutemen.

In and of itself, watching the game is not news- or blog-worthy. I’m not one of those people to write about every little thing I do, see or eat, so what I watch on television wouldn’t rank up there, either.

But how I came to be encouraged to watch the close game in progress (it was 1-0 Duluth when I tuned in), who I “watched” the game with and how that was accomplished is blog-worthy or, at the very least, a fun topic to write about.

My friend Lois Backscheider sent me an electronic message: “Are you watching? Bulldogs up by 1!”

After a few more messages involving the score and period, she implored me to find a television on which to watch the “nail-biter game.”

When I had located the channel and found the game, I let her know I was with her in spirit and would cheer on her beloved Dogs, since she’s an alum of the university.

University of Minnesota Duluth Pep Band. Photo by Clint Austin /Duluth News Tribune.

But here’s the background you need to know about Lois and how we came to know each other.

Known to me at the time as Miss Moline, Lois was my Journalism I teacher while I was in 10th grade at Overlea High School. She taught journalism and English classes and also served as the school newspaper advisor.

After finishing her career with Baltimore County Public Schools as the assistant principal at Lansdowne Middle School, Lois and her husband Denny in 1994 moved back to her home state of Minnesota to help care for an ailing parent.

Thanks to the connectedness provided by Facebook, Lois and I became FB friends after not seeing each other since I was a 15-year-old sophomore and she was a rookie teacher. 

Since we reconnected, we have discussed the changing face of journalism and the general delivery of news content. At the time, I was the education reporter for the Frederick News-Post and was long used to digital photography, writing stories on a laptop and filing the finished product to an in-house server where editors had the access needed to do their thing. 

I appreciated not having to go to a library to do research, nor did I have to go to the court house to view trial files or the police station to view charging documents, thanks to the Internet. Frederick County also streamed most of its government and Board of Education meetings online as well as aired them on the Frederick County cable station, which made life much easier on many reporters who needed to double check a quote from someone or verify some little factoid.

But as that sophomore during the school year of 1972-73, I could not have imagined a future with the world at our fingertips and the instantaneous delivery of not only news and photos but also the real-time personal communications that could take place.

So it was one of those awakening moments Saturday night when the gift of what was happening with my former high school teacher struck me.

Over the chasm of nearly 1,200 miles (to say nothing of nearly five decades), Lois and I were watching the same hockey game (thanks to satellite TV) and communicating in real time via Facebook’s Messenger service. She was nestled in her Hermantown home, cuddling with her two dogs after her husband abandoned the game to watch the NASCAR race, and I was watching from a neighborhood pub.

We cheered together when the Bulldogs scored their third and final goal, watched the kids representing her alma mater embrace the national championship trophy after finishing off the Minutemen, 3-0, and then bid each other a good night.

There’s a lot of negative things to be said about the Internet in general and social media networks specifically, and they are definitely tools that need to be used carefully, judiciously and safely.

But it’s moments like Saturday night that make me smile and appreciate the way social media lets us connect and build memories that couldn’t have otherwise happened, short of a well-planned and expensive vacation to make it happen in person.

A little journalism fun at the expense of local man

I realize this is a nerdy journalism thing, but I’ve been having a lot of fun watching the online responses to the challenge of Googling “Florida Man” and your birth date to come up with the story of your life.

Journalists have long made jokes about the ubiquitous presence of “local man.” Used in headlines across the country, Local Man and Local Woman manage to get themselves in more trouble than any one individual could or should be able to handle.

We’ve joked about Local Man’s apparently endless supply of cash that allows him to freely travel the country and how we think he would begin to learn from his mistakes.

While Local Man makes headlines in every little berg and hamlet across this expansive country, his antics always seem to ramp up in states like Texas and Florida, where his activities seem to be a little more creative than those in most other states.

So I laughed when Florida journalists recently felt the need to straighten the record regarding a man who had himself filmed as he baited and attacked a pelican while vacationing in Florida. Original headlines apparently referred to “Florida Man,” but as it turned out, the culprit was actually from Maryland. 

Social media posts immediately decried the identification of the pelican-attacking man as a Florida resident and made sure the world knew the man hailed from the Free State.

With a lot of the nation’s media focus on Maryland, Florida and the now widely hated man, a social media challenge was issued encouraging the Google search of Florida Man along with your birthday and the challenge went viral.

The results were hysterical.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Googled his Sept. 14 birthday to find “Shirtless Florida man is back to take Hurricane Florence because the Internet made it so.”

Meh.

It apparently doesn’t take much to de-escalate a police situation involving Florida man, as evidenced by the headline of “Slice of pizza convinced Gulf Breeze man to end police standoff.”

But some Florida residents will put themselves at peril trying to escape police, as proven by “Florida man jumps in canal of toxic blue-green algae fleeing a traffic stop, say police.”

Florida Man has been accused of exposing himself to an exotic dancer, putting semen in a coworker’s water, and hitting his pregnant girlfriend with a bag of tortilla chips during an argument over the unborn baby’s paternity.

The ambitious guy  has fought huge pythons, been attacked by a bear, and won a $451 million Mega Millions jackpot. He’s a busy, sometimes brave, sometimes belligerent but always entertaining sort of guy.

The Florida Man challenge took on a life of its own and became the subject of many newspaper articles explaining the popularity of the task and printing some of the results. Many reporters took to creating lists of the top headlines involving Florida Man, knowing that editors like writers to stay on top of trends and create “clickable” articles.

An online search of the challenge brings up a huge lists of articles, as well as the occasional advice to not participate in searches that reveal personal information like your birth date.

To give equal opportunity, I discovered a headline about the Florida woman who thought she had food poisoning after eating bad Chinese food and ended up giving birth to a healthy, full-term baby that she supposedly didn’t know she was carrying. The Pensacola News Journal ran the story under the headline of “Pensacola woman mistakes 37-week pregnancy for bad Chinese food.”

My birthday search brought up several wild and crazy Florida Man headlines, including “Florida man says he only grabbed his mother by head to kiss her,” from the Brevard Times; “Florida man stood in fire chanting gibberish,” from the Bradenton Herald; and “Teens who laughed and recorded a drowning man in his final moments won’t face charges,” from CNN.

But my favorite headline I found in my search was “Florida man wasn’t drinking while driving, just at stop signs.” Those born on July 12 can claim it for themselves.

Please feel free to share your results if you have taken (or now will take) the Florida man challenge. 

Have fun!

A blessing and a curse

One of the best things about living in a small town is knowing just about everyone. A "quick trip" to the grocery store for one or two items can stretch into hours because of the friendly conversations held in every aisle and every department with neighbors, friends and store employees.

But when tragedy strikes your little town, knowing everyone becomes a liability because chances are you know the people involved. And if you don't, you know someone who does.

Such was the case Sunday morning when word spread that one of Edgemere's favorite daughters and shining personalities was the victim of a domestic murder-suicide.

And to further drive home that small town philosophy, I spent time with Ami Garrison that ended up being among her last hours on this earth.

Ami Garrison
Photo courtesy of Ami's Facebook page

Ami was at Edgemere's Bay Shore Bar and Grill on Saturday supporting a fundraiser for some Loyola Blakefield students planning a mission/language immersion trip to Chile and Peru this summer.

She had her daughter Alexis with her, and she was her usual bubbly, smiling, happy self. She bragged — in a loving, motherly way — about her daughter's strong work ethic and her recent job move from Food Lion to Pompeian Olive Oil Co.

The mother and daughter also talked of Alexis' upcoming 21st birthday and their plans to celebrate the milestone at Robbie's, their family-owned pub on Sparrows Point Road.

After painting a wine glass with a festive St. Patrick's Day motif and supporting an accompanying raffle, Ami and her designated driver settled in with some friends at the bar to celebrate the Irish holiday.

Again, with everyone knowing everyone else, Ami made the rounds with hugs, laughs and chats with most customers. She probably hugged every person in the bar when she left to go home.

Just a little while later, word spread about police activity on Willow Avenue — a possible domestic barricade situation. 

And the breathtaking news the next morning that the barricade escalated to a murder-suicide and the beautiful soul named Ami Garrison was dead at the hands of her boyfriend.

The community has already wrapped its arms around Ami's family, including her children, Alexis and James ("Bub"), her parents Ed and Kathy, and sister Brandy, and her many friends, colleagues and extended family members.

It is a familiar embrace for the family that was uplifted and supported about 11 years ago when Ami was badly injured in a horrific car crash. She suffered a severe brain injury, among many other physical injuries and wasn't expected to survive.

But survive she did and many considered her a walking miracle.

Her ability to thrive after such an experience makes her sudden and violent death at the hands of another all the harder to understand. I know none of us is guaranteed anything beyond the current moment, but I have problems with Ami benefitting from the combination of modern science, prayer and perseverance and surviving a potentially fatal crash only to have her life taken by anger and/or other negative emotions.

It is unnerving but also oddly gratifying to know that I shared time and space with Ami during what ended up being her last happy, fun hours in this life.

I'm sickened that her last moments were probably filled with terror but I have to take solace in her afternoon and early evening spent supporting her community, laughing and chatting with friends and throwing back a few beers and Irish Car Bombs in celebration of St. Patrick's Day.

After Ami had recovered from the crash, she got a rather large tattoo of angel wings inked on her back.

Many believe she now has her own set of real angel wings.

Godspeed, my friend.