Selah
Summertime and the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high
Your daddy's rich and your ma is good lookin'
So hush, little baby, don't you cry
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high
Your daddy's rich and your ma is good lookin'
So hush, little baby, don't you cry
One of these mornin's, you're gonna rise up singin'
Then you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky
But 'til that mornin', there is nothin' can harm you
With Daddy and Mummy, Mummy standing by
Don't you, don't you cry
Then you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky
But 'til that mornin', there is nothin' can harm you
With Daddy and Mummy, Mummy standing by
Don't you, don't you cry
Nothing sets a boy free like school's out for the summer. Three long months ahead, months for ... game.
Conversely, to me as a boy, nothing was heavier or more inexorable than the gathering doom of Labor Day and Labor Day Tuesday: overcast, dark clouds, thunder, the bottom dropped out, give up barefoot, put on shoes, trudge off to school, abandon hope all ye who enter here. Start counting days until Christmas Vacation and Summer. The cycle. Like the Israelites of the Book of Judges, we live in cycles, always knowing what comes next. Interrupting or breaking a cycle is disorienting, and I specifically remember the day of a cycle broken.
On September 3, 1957, the inexorability of Labor Day Tuesday died for me! Graduated UFla in May, newly married in June, I was two months into Navy OCS that up to that moment had felt like summer camp on the New England shore but became the foundation of my new cycle. A 20-year Navy life in which not only was nothing the same ever again, but what was never the same changed every two or three years with PCS to a new duty station. My being was still in its old cycle. That chilly, windy morning in Newport, Rhode island, life dawned with the sense I should be starting school, then the jarring realization that Labor Day Tuesday would never come again, never again would summer be a boy’s inalienable right. I was grown up, an adult, twenty-one. Eleven days from twenty-two. Facing life.
That September morning dawns again every time I go upstairs in Tassy’s house, where Linda and I spent the last two days. At the top of the stairs on a table is my official Navy photograph taken that fading summer 1957. Photo day at OCS: officer candidates who would commission and not ship off to Great Lakes for boot camp were lined up, stuffed into a dress white uniform jacket that tied at the back for efficiency, shoulder boards snapped on, hat seated properly but not yet tilted jauntily, sit on the stool, hands in lap, look at the birdie, do not blink, FLASH: Ensign Weller.
Inducted into a new cycle. Below: my stateroom, second deck, other side, starboard bow, somewhere aft of the 7, my top bunk against the skin of the ship. The ten feet up and down pitch to pitch would make an old sea dog seasick.
Half an hour before midnight, a sailor from the bridge wakens my roommate for the midwatch. He must be dressed and on the bridge in fifteen minutes. A laidback and easygoing Harvard graduate who is hating the Navy and can’t wait to return for grad school, Don is my best friend and drinking buddy. He curses me bitterly as I sigh, roll over, and go back to sleep. The cursing continues as he slams the stateroom door and stomps up the ladder. I hear and feel every wave that rushes by 0.5 inch from my ear. Leviathan is closer than my hat on the foot of my bunk. In the slushing sound, even the foam bubbles break noisily. dang dang dang dang now this is a drill, this is a drill, general quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations dang dang dang dang becomes part of my new cycle grab my hat and head for crypto.
It will cycle the next twenty years of my life. There will be interludes as in the Book of Revelation. Selah in Psalms.
Would I do it over? What would I change? This may be game but it isn’t Solitaire gamed for backup and replay. It still may be game, but it isn’t yet Our Town with the narrator arranging for me to relive the one day of my choice, what day would it be? Emily went back to her twelfth birthday. Where would I go, where will I go? Not back to sea.
School's out.
When I was seventeen, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We'd hide from the lights
On the village green
When I was seventeen
--- --- ---
But now the days are short, I'm in the autumn of my years
And I think of my life as vintage wine
From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
It poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year
Sing, Frank.
TW