Pax

It does not particularly bother me that, at the wickedly bewitched hour of oh-one-fifty-six I'm sitting out here on my seventh floor porch looking out into the past. It's the nineteen-teens, a hundred years ago out there, and facing east I see the long wharf with a tin structure, Bay Fisheries, my grandfather's fish house.



It's across from the house I just sold, where Mom and Pop live with their four children (Marguerite won't be born until 1917, a few months before tragedy strikes), Alfred, Evalyn, Ruth, and Carroll (my father, named Thomas Carroll Weller, GOK why they call him by his middle name Carroll instead of Thomas or Tom). 

BTW, I'm not making up a a story, nor even telling a story, I'm simply here in 2015 looking down to the east along the Bay shore, taking note of what I see, and don't be irritated or distracted if, since it's exactly a century ago, I drift in and out of tense, including the historical present; because after all this is part of the history of my own present. But it's not long anyway: the hour is wicked and in spite of two cups of hot, black coffee, I'm going back to bed momentarily, for a nap.

As I say, there's that wharf with the tin buildings. The 1936 hurricane will sweep it all away, but I can't control the past, much less worry right now about what happened in the past's future. 

Wharf, buildings, I can see a couple of fishing smacks from here in 2015, one of them the twin-masted schooner Annie&Jennie, just returning to port from the gulf with a large catch of snappers and groupers. Most interesting is that large squarerigger tied up at the wharf, a handsome seagoing vessel she is. 

It's certainly a peaceful scene. Quiet. Dark. Nothing out in the Bay except just flashing navigation lights, red ones and green ones. This is definitely not a story, it's just a scene and I'm there, here actually. If it were a story, this would be one of many ways into Narnia, and I could be drawn



 into the past and Aslan give me the task of preventing tragedy by making sure certain things don't happen after all. There's plenty of time.

The only sound is the whispering roar of air conditioning compressors up on the roof of this castle. And waves lapping the shore below me. 

God rest ye.

Thos+