Last week I took another trip to my home town of Venice, Florida. I visited the first weekend of May of this year, the first time I had been there since my 20th class reunion in 1995. Things had changed a lot in that time. Things had not changed so much in the two months between these visits. I considered this a working trip. I am planning on writting a collaborative book on growing up in Venice with my friend, Medea Isphording Bern. We both grew up there in the 1960s and graduated from high school in 1975. Both of us attended Epiphany Catholic School, then Venice High. As towns go, Venice was not too large, not too small, though most of the people who graduated from high school left for more interesting places. Now, as a science fiction writer, most of the interesting places I visit are in my mind. While I still plan to travel, and see as much of this world as I can before my transference to whatever awaits after life, if anything, I would like to call a quiet place my base of operations. Venice fits the bill. I looked up our old house on Groveland Ave, next to Mundy Park, the location of my earlist memories. That would be a nice place to call home, and it’s over two meters above the high tide mark. If Global Warming is BS that’s not important. If it’s real, it’s vital.
When I was a child I really wasn’t interested in the variery of houses in the city. There were some that were very cool, but mostly they were just places where friends and enemies lived, some to be visited, some avoided. This time I drove all over the town, taking pictures of all the now cool to me houses. Many were built in the fifties and sixties, and represent a variety of styles. Then there are the older houses, from the 1920s and up. When I was a child I never really paid attention to the way the city was laid out by design. Streets were just things to get from point A to B and nothing else. Now the mirror image layout on both sides of Venice Ave were of great interest to this visitor. This time I took pictures of many of those houses. At another point I drove by a housing development on East Venice Avenue, what used to be called Farm Road, when there actually were farms out there. Ten or more houses in a row, all with the same roof line, all with the same screened porch on the same side of the house. How boring.
It is looking like I will be able to live wherever I want, as long as I am putting books up on the internet and selling enough of them to make a living. The trip stirred up so many more memories, and those images will be transfered to paper by early next year. No, I am not giving up writing science fiction and fantasy. But sometimes it is nice to get close to reality and explore personal history.