I'll fly away

devil’s workshop

Good morning, Self, today is the First of August: in Real Time a date and month to cherish because there is still a full month of summer vacation before school starts the day after Labor Day.

Five o’clock, dark and not early but nice. 74° 42% on 7H porch, in the east Venus piercing the black velvet. Not often, now and then I wish for my telescope; not back because I hope some child or old man is enjoying it as I did those years in Japan; anyway it and its accoutrements too bulky for 7H where we happily no longer have room for extras, but if I could go to my time-turner and have it for a few minutes, long enough to watch Saturn’s rings and four of Jupiter’s moons that I once enjoyed plotting night to night perched on my folding stool in the front yard those wee hours in Yokohama. For one thing, 1 August 1964 I was 28, still in that magical decade and not yet dreading turning 30. What happened? For those of us who are μακάριοι in old age, there’s time to look back gratefully, wistfully, longingly; even, if we want truly to waste time, contemplating what we would change if …

It’s imagination, right?, private and personal. If this were spring 1962 when the Navy let me choose Harvard, Stanford or Michigan because I was rated number one in my year-group, I …

… but no, then no …

Idle hands type rubbish, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, don’t go there, Lieutenant, this is not Real Time and you are no longer number one on anybody's list.

Yesterday I had company, who sat on the porch rail not at all wary of me for several minutes, posed for his picture while I talked to him, cawed contemptuously, and flew away before I was ready.

DThos+