Time

Pardon My Interruptions

“General aboard.”

“Good morning. Be easy, men. How’s everybody doing?”

Pair of egrets flying low, the after one squawking like his mama might get away.

“Care for coffee, General?”

There goes an osprey clutching a fish.

Early morning scene and lines in the television movie The Day After as the general arrives and is briefed by a major while the plane lifts off for the day. Turns out to have been the first day of the rest of their lives. 

Jason Robards is the surgeon. Setting is a small town in Kansas, which when all is said and done is really what American is all about. Missile silo out in the near pasture.

One large Navy craft heading out for another busy day at sea. 

The movie was shown in 1983 when we seriously were arrogant enough to believe we were that important, opposing governments and political and economic systems, actually to destroy all humanity and “this fragile earth, our island home” as a habitable place. Everything was ready, and we really would have pushed the buttons. But we didn’t do that to you. 

Flight of pelicans eye level and close, flying east, it’s that time of day.

Well do I remember how it was. Our doubtful future was so ordinary, clear and certain that we went about our daily lives and trusted creation to the governments. It’s still that way, except religions instead of political and economic systems. Just as we get to the point where four times as many Buick cars are sold in China as in America, we are still there. At least I am: I want a president who would have pushed all the buttons and utterly destroyed that part of the earth when news came how ISIS treated one American daughter. IDK, there may be somebody like me, one nutcase candidate in that pack of loonies. For the love of God, Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. 

Another flight of pelicans in v-formation, about sixteen of them, a foot off the surface of St. Andrew Bay.

Humans don’t learn from history ancient or modern. Here’s this piddling little earth — if you don’t know it, check out an online cosmology site and find us, a speck of dirt in one little circle of light among a universe or multiverse of billions upon billions of galaxies — and we believe this rubbish and that insanity about ourselves and how important our side is, and our point of view.

From my perch this morning, it’s a gift of Grace where, opposite to the transubstantiated Sacrament, we’re not the substance but the accident, yet we’d destroy the village in order to save it.

Time. Not for God in eternity or for the seemingly endlessness of our expanding universe, Time is a creation of the human imagination. It only becomes real when we wish there were more of it. A seventy-nine year old man looking across St. Andrew Bay at eighty and remembering how it was to be seventeen. In an Iranian neighborhood, a girl and boy with their first crushes, hoping the world governments’ nuclear accord will give them time to grow up and make love at least one time before Netanyahu launches. That’s what it’s all about. Time. 



Another large Navy craft heading out for a hard day’s work at sea. The first one is across the Bay just entering the Pass. They’ll be back, as I say, ready for a frosted mug when the Happy Hour bell rings. Ah, those were the days. 



This place, this life, is so incredibly, changingly beautiful 24/7 from moment to moment that my iPhone camera can’t capture every scene. I’m so glad no buttons have been pushed so far.

Egrets stalking the shoreline for minnows. 



This is how my day is going so far.

Mullet jumping a few yards out.



TW+ grateful for a day or so more of +Time for myself and my girls and boys. And God's. Allah's.