Florida Boy

Timm in the pool in back of our house in Winter Haven, 1972. He hold up a watermelon, which we called galooshmakers when we threw them into the pool and played with them. The treat was feasting on sweet cold watermelon after a day in the pool.

In 1971 the family minus Dad moved from the northern suburbs of Chicago to Winter Haven in Florida. These pictures of Timm are from those two or so years we lived there before moving back to Chicago. Timm would be 7 or 8 years old, still in the high mass of childhood, taking to the high heat of Florida with a half-clothed joy.

For me, it was the time I entered puberty, and my memories of those years are colored by the stained glass of hormones in first flush and full roar -- call it the sexual ferocity of the waking individual. But for Timm the time was still innocent, despite whatever thorns of history had wound round him by then -- a time for discovery and play outside the house.

When I look at these pictures, I feel bad for kids today who imprison themselves in dim bedrooms playing video games, texting friends on their cell phones and surfing the endless waves of the Internet: No wonder a third of the kids today are obese, unhealthy, headed already into diabetes, and, for all of that networking, less communicative and engaged than ever. Back then we couldn't wait to get outside and play.

For us Cohea kids, that desire -- fed by years of play outside that wonderful house in Evanston, with the large side hill that transformed into a sledding hill in winter -- was amplified to a joyful howl with the screened swimming pool out back of the Winter Haven house. It was the perfect place to celebrate summer. Every afternoon in was a pool party with half the kids in the neighborhood in attendance. Timm was in that pool from sunup to sundown, a grinning tadpole or minnow loopy in the shallow end while Will and I dove at full gallop into the deep end.

When Timm with Mother and Molly in 1974 after the final breakup of the parents' marriage, it was to Orlando and to a different Florida -- older, grimmer in some ways, infected by the wayward humors of puberty. No swimming pool in which to summer. Childhood had substantially ended for Timm, in the outside sense of things -- though as I get to know Timm through what remains here of him, I suspect he carried in his heart those brilliant summer afternoons in Florida standing neck-deep in the pool, blue waters everywhere, the pool pump's drone mixed with the soaring trill of insects, with hours of play yet ahead -- perhaps forever.

A typical pool party. Timm is in the pool at the lower left, sister Molly is the tall girl in back. This must have been Timm's 8th birthday party.

Timm with brother Will in his boat, parked here in the front yard. Dogs Shep and Monte (the poodle) are also on board.

Going for a spin in the boat with Will on the lake that was about a half mile from our house. Timm flashes a victory sign.

Timm (far left, posing Shep for the camera) with some friends in the front yard. Mom didn't think this was a Halloween picture, just some of Timm's unsual antics.

Dad, visiting for Christmas in 1971, helps Timm assemble some Tinkertoys.


Let's title this one, "How to win friends and influence people." Timm tries the Neanderthal method of dating.

Timm at the Jetty Park beach near Port Canaveral. Mom wrote the following note beneath this picture when she assembled the photo album: "Beach bums who get Florida sand in their shoes always return." One Christmas she sent me in Spokane (where I lived for a number of years) the gift of two vials containing sand and shells and that message. I did pour some of that sand into my sneakers, and I did eventually return to Florida.