Hum. Back in the late forties, early fifties, we built a house and lived down in Perrine (It’s spelled Perrine, but everybody pronounced it PEErine.) in Florida, between Miami and Homestead. It was piney woods country, not many houses back then, not too many people.

I was 11 or 12 at the time and had a dog, a Red Walker Foxhound, named Pal.

Well, as happens in the piney woods, Pal used to pick up ticks that had no trouble working past his short fur and sucking his blood until their butts were almost as big as a grape.

My uncle Norman, who grew up in south Florida and knew the country well, told me you don’t want to just grasp a tick and pull it off a dog as that leaves the head stuck under his skin and it festers becoming a running sore. He said the best way to get the tick out was to pour a little gasoline on it’s butt and it pops right out and you can stomp him dead then.

So, I siphoned off about a cup of gas from my dad’s truck and poured in right over Pal’s tick. Pal let out a yelp and took off running, it must have been at least a mile and a half down the road, turned around, came running back and fell over right at my feet.

Well, every time I’ve told this story, over the years, with at least five people listening, one of them would ask me; “Oh how terrible, was the poor dog dead?” and I’d explain to them; “No, he just ran out of gas.”

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I admit I'm smiling reading youngsters writing nostalgically about how nice south Florida was 20-30 years ago, way back in the ‘90s.

Mine was the Florida of the late '40s and the '50s.

I grew up in Coral Gables, then down in Naranja, then back up on Bird Road then on SW 34th Street, where our back yard ended the glades began, with nothing but glades from there up to Tampa.

Even in the Gables there were many vacant lots where we could set up sand lot baseball games.

Down in Naranga, our nearest neighbor had the ten acres next to us, next nearest neighbor was probably over three quarters of a mile away. I remember, when I went to Redland Elementary school, a kid that would walk to school, barefoot through the pineywoods with his shoes hanging by the laces around his neck, sitting on the steps, picking the sand spurs out of his feet before putting his shoes on to go in.

Bird Road; we were close enough to the race track, Tropical Park, that when the wind was right I could hear their loud speakers calling the horse races. There was a rock pit nearby, off the edge of Bird, were we'd go swimming. We shared the pit with a 6-7 foot gator, look for her, if she was basking of the far shore we'd be in the water, lose sight of her, we'd be up on the shore. We never talked about it, never made a decision to keep it a secret, but somehow the fact that we shared the rock pit with a gator was a subject that never came up talking to our parents.

Old Tom was, of course right, you can't go home again, but I moved to Alaska so my children could experience growing up pretty damn close to what I enjoyed in Florida. Yep the weather can be a mite cooler and the encounter stories they'd wait until long after to tell as were about bear and moose instead of alligators but they had a childhood much like the one I remember down in Dade County.