In 1984 we moved to Orlando. Orlando… Disney World. I was nine years old. I remember when my parents told us we were leaving our home in Massachusetts to live in Orlando, Florida my four sisters and I were presented with two major selling points for the idea. 1) Disney World 2) It’s hot in Florida. We were sold.
We were in Georgetown, MA at the time but the years leading up to that were spent bouncing back and forth between El Paso, Texas and Georgetown for my father’s job at Raytheon. Sometimes my memories of El Paso seem so far away in my mind that it feels more like I am remembering a dream I had when I was young. My strongest Texas memories are of road trips. We took perhaps hundreds of family road trips to places all over Texas and New Mexico. Beautiful and historic places. We visited ancient Indian cliff dwellings. We explored canyons, caves and mines in dessert ghost towns a hundred miles from nowhere. We watched missile launches and climbed over white sand dunes in New Mexico. We took regular weekend trips to the dessert just to look for Indian arrow heads. We would pile into our van and drive hours to visit a mountain range or to hike to a waterfall. One of the memories that connects me back to that time of my life the best in fact is a memory of what it was like to be laying on the couch at the very back of our van with my face pressed against the screen of the little slider windows open with the wind rushing at my face and looking down through the screen at the white stripe on the shoulder of the road buzzing along as we cruised down the highway in the middle of some dessert with the sun low in the sky. The world was enormous back then. Enormous and endless. My memories of life in El Paso are very faint, however. I remember almost nothing about our apartment there or the school I attended in El Paso for my first and second grade, friends, nothing. Well, almost nothing. I do remember a girl. She lived in the same apartment complex I did, Cielo Vista Apartments, and her name was Delfina. She was a Mexican girl who was my age. I remember experiencing my first feelings of love for this girl, Delfina. I was seven or eight years old. I remember being very distraught when it was decided that we would move back to Georgetown and I would have to leave El Paso without ever telling Delfina how I felt about her.
I remember even less about our life in Georgetown, MA. I have memories mostly of the general geography of Georgetown but I think most of my recollection of living in Massachusetts is from old pictures that I’ve seen so many times that they have become my memories. I guess that’s why taking photos is commonly referred to as ‘making memories’ to coin the old Kodak catch phrase. They really do have a way of literally becoming your actual memories in a very real way, which is good because I would have lost a lot of wonderful moments from my history if not for the pictures we took.
So I’m not necessarily exaggerating when I say that life, for myself anyway, seems to have begun when we moved to Orlando. That’s where the time line in my mind stretches back to. Before that I have to sort through my thoughts and separate the pictures and stories from what I actually remember.
Orlando
My family and I piled into our two-toned blue Ford Econoline conversion van, just as we had a thousand times before when we had taken all those weekend trips out to the middle of the desert, only this would be a one-way trip down I-95 from the cold and dark forested lands of New England to our new home in sun drenched Florida. People actually referred to Florida as the ‘Sunshine State’! I could hardly believe it. We were actually moving to a place known for it’s sunshine, warm weather, beaches, palm trees, alligators … and of course Disney World! I was going to live in a place that other people saved their money up just to visit. We were moving to Vacationland.
Orlando, Florida back in 1984 was alot different than it is now in 2011. I guess everything was alot different back then for that matter, the whole world was different, myself included, but Orlando was a much smaller town in those days than it is today. My parents had flown down a couple times to shop for a house ahead of our odyssey, so when we rolled into town we had a home waiting for us in southwest Orlando, more specifically the part of town known as the Dr. Phillips area. Home to celebrities, professional sports athletes and other very wealthy families Dr Phillips is kinda like the Beverly Hills of Orlando and, relatively speaking, we were ‘The Clampets’. I can remember the first time we pulled into the new neighborhood, Bay Lakes subdivision, and the excitement my sisters and I felt as we caught a glimpse of our new stomping grounds. From the entrance, out at the intersection of Sand Lake and Apopka Vinelend Rd, to our house was a little less than two miles of wide newly paved boulevard, lined with nice new homes, that brought us all the way around and to the other side of Lake Sloat. We passed by some kids out playing on the side of the road and I remember one of my sisters laughed and said something like, “Is that how Florida kids dress?”, I guess the local style was different than what we were used to up in New England.
Bay Lakes, like most of the neighborhoods in the Dr Phillips area, was a brand new subdivision. Many of the homes in the neighborhood were still being built, even more lots were still completely empty and even more lots were still orange groves that hadn’t yet been leveled, particularly on ‘our’ side of the lake. Our house had been finished only a few weeks before the day that we drove up to it for the first time. We were all so excited as we drove up to the driveway of our new digs. Our house was big and it was beautiful, inside and out. Our yard was also big, and in the backyard was our own little piece of Lake Sloat shoreline! All us kids felt like we had just won the lottery. Everything about our new lives was a huge step up from the ones we left. Where we came from seemed so very dated, cold and harsh compared to the shiny, new warmth and richness of the area we came to. We had woods in our back yard in Georgetown, but now we had a beautiful lake to swim in.
The houses on either side of ours were both less than half built. I eventually would spend many days climbing through the wooden frameworks of both of those houses, playing. I would climb up into their attics and explore them like I was spelunking a cave in some far away place like Indiana Jones.
… writing ;)