Fall Back

So this is the Sunday morning of Fall Back and we’ve gone off Daylight Saving Time. My first memory of the delicious experience of the time change giving me an extra hour to sleep is of waking up in my cot in Charlie-Four Company barracks at Officers Candidate School, Newport, Rhode Island, 1957. To lie in bed actually, not to sleep. It all comes back.

A brand new university graduate learning to become a naval officer and then being that for twenty years active duty, and now fifty-five years continuous state of being.

We lived in Newport twice during those years, the second time at the Naval War College a dozen years later, 1968-69. Both times Rhode Island was for us Floridians a place of wonder, rocky seashore beauty, clams and lobsters, Narragansett Bay, the Jamestown Ferry, and seasons. Newport summers not so summery. July 1957 standing on the parade ground in formation as an OCSA, in a white sailor uniform with a sailor hat and my collar flapping in the wind, thinking the Newport summer is like an ice box with the door open. Chilly and windy.

Up early. No last minute sermon prep this morning, so working on my Adult Sunday School lesson. It was to be about the church’s liturgies for animals, but before we leave Mark, the Secret Gospel of Mark is too fascinating not to share, chasing around in two gospels, John and Mark.

Mind still on Newport, though never trading for St. Andrews Bay and the sea captains house my grandfather built a hundred years ago.

TW+