Sunday
Sunday morning: clear, black and beautiful outside and across StAndrewsBay, lightning in clouds south over the Gulf of Mexico that are closer than yesterday’s and seem to be moving my way.
Sunday morning: so? With my LG cup of fresh ground black coffee, one large square of dark chocolate that for convenience I break into four smaller bites. Growing up, I loved a Hershey bar, especially with almonds. Now it’s all dark, and this chocolate bar is embedded with sprinkles of sea salt. What happens to taste? My taste in chocolate has gone to dark and the salt sweetens it; in shoes, whereas as a boy, besides my pair of high dark blue what I always called “tennis shoes” I had one pair of brown shoes that, after age twelve when my pay for working at the fish house was raised from two dollars a week to six, then to seven dollars and I was given responsibility for buying all my clothes, I had one pair of brown shoes that, when they were worn out I had new heels and half-soles installed at McGraw’s, then when the traveling salesman came round to the fish house saying, it was always the same line even though he’d been round dozens of times over the years and I knew full well who he was and what he sold, “My name’s Xxxx, I sell those good Knapp shoes,” and I ordered another identical pair at, my recollection is they cost me $2.40 and came in the mail a week later but It may have been seven dollars, now I have eight pairs of shoes that I wear, all SAS, the oldest pair Linda bought for me at the SAS store in a Birmingham mall in 1999, the next two oldest pairs at the same store in 2000, the other four pairs I bought at an SAS store in Atlanta in 2004 when I was there for prostate cancer zapping, my shoes and everything else last me long years, and my taste in shoes is that they don't have shoe laces, four pairs slip on, three pairs have straps and only one beautiful and supremely comfortable brown pair that I never wear because they lace and tie.
The dark blue cloth tennis shoes? Sometimes they were black cloth. They were my daily drivers for school, play and work that at night stayed under the edge of my bed upstairs until they had ripened such that, in order for me to be able to stay in the bedroom, I had to hang them outside the upstairs bedroom window overnight. Walt may remember that.
Sunday still and I never got round to the texts for today, but here’s the prayer:
O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that we may know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Sump'm don't add up. I need to get in there and count those shoes. There's also a pair of black Florsheim shoes, slip-ons, that the Ladies of the Church gave me at Trinity, Apalachicola when they saw holes in the soles of my shoes as I knelt at the Altar.