I came out of New York. My parents were living in Dobbs Ferry, in the only house they had ever owned, albeit briefly, when I was born, but the actual place of my birth was a hospital in Bronxville.

When I was three we lost the Dobbs Ferry house and moved into a big rental house in Hastings, on top of the highest hill in Westchester county, where we lived till I was six. That is where most of my primal memories seem to be focused -- the ones I'm conscious of. I don't remember anything about Dobbs Ferry -- just leaving it. Riding in the cab of the moving van with my five- or six-year-old big brother.

We moved out of the Hastings house on a cold february night and headed down to Washington, an unimaginable distance away. Our actual destination was Florida; Washington was just the toenail of the first leg of our trip.

I remember everything about that night. I remember the barrels filled with excelsior into which our dishes were packed to be put into storage. I remember the movingman stealing the four-bladed knife my father had given me for christmas. I remember where we stopped for dinner -- a place called Scotty's Diner, probably somewhere in New Jersey. Maybe it was the first time I ever ate out. We sat at a counter, and on the menus were pictured scotties -- scotch terriers -- just like the little black and white magnet dogs I had. And hours later we stopped for the night at the house of somebody who had a sign out saying "Rooms" or "Tourists."

We probably all shared a couple of rooms -- my parents, my sisters Jackie and Julie, and my brother Joey and I. (Our oldest sister, Winibee, had stayed behind in New York. She was a nurse and was working at Lenox Hill Hospital.) What I remember most clearly was that my father slept in an easy chair. How could a person sleep in a chair? That puzzled me. So did the bottle of red liquid on the dresser. I had never seen a bottle of mouthwash before. It tasted like licorice.

In the morning we pulled up in the driveway of my grandmother's home in Chevy Chase -- the Chevy Chase part of DC, that is. I remember pulling up there. Our long journey was ended, at least for the moment. We were going to stay at my grandmother's place for a week before continuing on to Florida.

We stayed there for three and a half years.

We finally drove down to Florida and stayed in Daytona Beach for nine months.

I liked it there, but then we came back to Washington and to Grams's house. And I didn't leave DC till I went off to Waltham, Massachusetts, to try to avoid the draft by doing graduate study in anthropology at Brandeis.

From there Maureen and I moved to Berkeley, and then to Hollywood, and then to Iowa City, where I lived for seventeen years while Joel was growing up. (I did go off to spend a couple of winters in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to be a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center).

For most of the past decade I was been living mostly in northern California. Berkeley for a year and a half, but mostly Santa Cruz and environs. Beautiful places. But now I have transplanted myself again — this time to my brother's house in Baldwin, New York, five miles from Carle Place — where one of our Carle ancestors owned 208 acres almost 300 years ago.

And from there — who would have guessed that I would fly to Russia?

[Nota bene: This page, like all the others in this site, is in progress. Please let me know if you find anything false, misleading, offensive, or intrusive to your privacy. Let me know too if there's a photo or something in the text that should be removed or something that should be added. I have not set up this site primarily for my own sake but for my family and friends -- and I welcome all corrections, additions, and suggestions about how to improve it!]

Home page
Parents
Win's photo albums
Siblings
Maureen
Joel
Friends
Places
   Daytona, 1950
      Julie in Daytona
      Joey returns to Daytona Beach
    Iowa City
    Joel and Tommy in Canadian Rockies, 1986
    Santa Cruz
      Big Creek
      Joel at Año Nuevo
    Joel and Unity at Yosemite
    Lois in Provincetown, 1994
    Tahoe 1996
    Winchester, Virginia
    With Svetlana in Russia, July 2000
Publications

Copyright © 1999, 2000 T. N. R. Rogers. All rights reserved. Last revised 17 sep 2000.