Drifting

All Of It 

Delightful out, 64F at the moment, slightest movement of air up here on the seventh floor, not enough to call a breeze, but not deathly still either. 32401 Weather site says “clear” but 96% humidity and there's a haze that I can’t call fog yet, on the otherwise clear Bay. Haze now fog later maybe, but it’s my jewel box of rubies, emeralds, and a few diamonds, sparkling on black velvet. I thought a searchlight was playing on the channel to the west of me, and expecting a ship watched a minute until nothing came round the corner of this tall building, so not. 

This may only be a perfect spring morning for a native Floridian. If there were a bell ringing on a harbor buoy, I’d be thinking of Newport again. The mind goes there often; I never know whether it’s the harbor, the lobsters and clams, the ferry, or the memories. We had two Navy tours of duty in Newport, RI and they were the best. In fact, I was so taken with Newport when I was there for OCS and subsequent TDY in 1957 and early 1958, that on my preference for duty card I requested a destroyer homeported in Newport. My detailer assigned me a Norfolk destroyer. He got the “N” right, seven letters, and one “O”  but okay, that sea duty turned out so well that on my first ship I transferred from USNR to Regular Navy, got an impossible below zone promotion to 0-3 out of it, a tour in Florida, my choice of Harvard, Stanford, or Michigan MBA, and eventually another assignment to Newport for the Naval War College.

Would I do it all again? Probably not, I’d give up early and go on to seminary; but then I wouldn’t have lived in Washington, DC and Pennsylvania, and would have gone to an Episcopal seminary instead of Gettysburg Lutheran. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world is the way the song goes, ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω. So yes, I’d do it again. All of it. 

At this hour on my Bay the mind doesn’t wander, it drifts. 

There’s that green light. If there were a land like Narnia, I could go there for a lifetime of years like the Pevensies did, and then be back here in my chair before typing the plus on my T. 

Got to go, my lasix is ringing.

T