Time

Long years ago, toward the End and yet at the Beginning of a favorite part of another life and lifetime, let the reader understand, I was in charge of a training program with junior Navy officer and young Civil Service interns at training sites in six or eight locations nationwide. The officers were on their first shore duty tours, and the civilians I, with a selection board, had hired right out of colleges around the country. They were all outstanding young people, and I remember that one of them had her college major in Mandarin Chinese. Anyway, from time to time, as part of oversight, I traveled TDY from my office in WashDC to visit them, meet with each trainee and discuss their program and their progress with their supervisors.

We had three west coast locations, one being Puget Sound, Washington, meaning I flew into SeaTac and either drove a rental car from the airport, down, around and up to the naval base. Or drove up to Seattle and took the ferry across. Along with San Francisco, it was probably the place I most enjoyed visiting. 

Visiting with the senior officers at each location, some longtime Navy colleagues, and renewing friendships, was as rewarding as my relationships with the interns, and I remember that whoever was my contact at Seattle lived on Whidbey Island, where he had been stationed another time and still had a home. He told me about the peacefulness of the place that he loved notwithstanding the constant overcast and drizzle, and about walking along the shore and digging quahogs, a clam, when the tide was low. 

Looking back, I would like to have been stationed there, just as much as the London assignment that was on my preference for duty card twenty years but never came for me. I would trade either and both for the supposedly "career-enhancing" shore and sea duty tours I actually held. 

Like many people and much of life, my regret, if I am looking back, is not having had, in my first forty years, the perspective that has developed in my second forty, of loving and appreciating creation. In that regard I remember a contemporary with me at the University of Michigan who, when assignment time came, told his detailer (the officer who makes your assignments), "you know me, Earl, it is never the location, it is always the job, and the harder the better." Joe stayed and made admiral. I beat a hasty exit as a commander at twenty years and that, as Robert Frost said, "has made all the difference".

Charles LaFond & Kai the Dog no longer live on a farm in a green area of New Mexico, but now by the sea on Whidbey Island on the coast of Washington state. He, they, love it there, not only the extreme natural beauty, but the privacy and solitude. Walks. The sea. The air. The salt. The quiet. I remember it as one of creation's special places. LaFond, who thinks he is old at 55, and I wish a hundred twenty years like me, recently wrote that he saw, and thought he would even like to move to, a tiny island where he and Kai the Dog were the only occupants. While much preferring a wife to a dog, I could envy his life there in a tiny cabin by the sea. Except that I try not to covet. 

And anyway, I'm close: what he has is almost exactly the isolation and privacy that I enjoy here at 7H. Plus, I'm settled and home where I probably should have been all my years, not just the first twenty and the second forty! 

Happy. And close enough to Apalachicola to go back from Time to Time.

T