Turning

When in late May or early June 1955 I arrived home from my sophomore year at college for summer vacation, things had changed permanently. And while I didn't realize its significance at the Time, bits of its significance still keep occurring to me two-thirds of a century later. It was a Time of turning for me; in what some years later folks who considered themselves up to the minute but had never heard of Thomas Kuhn would trendily term paradigm shift. 

What stood out to me then that I most often remember now and have commented on any number of Times, is not what would have been most significant to others in my family - - that first Sunday morning of my 1955 summer when, heading for church in the green 1948 Dodge sedan that later was my second car and then Linda and my first car of dozens, at the imaginary Yield where Massalina Drive and Hamilton Avenue are momentarily One, instead of turning left on Massalina for St Andrew's Episcopal Church that had been my lifelong nurturing and safe place, my father turned right onto Hamilton and headed for a stranger that was becoming Holy Nativity Episcopal Church. 

That particular event of summer 1955 has gripped me all the years since: what for me at that moment was turning the wrong way! It has turned out beautifully in life, but at the Time, to me, in my heart and mind, age nineteen going on twenty, I had been, without my knowledge, without it having been discussed, peremptorily taken from the spiritual shelter and family where I'd been loved all my life, now driven a few blocks to find myself parked in a sand lot facing a small, ugly new concrete block building squatting in a clearing of scrub oaks. 

They told me it was Our new church. Our. My parishioner status as Baptized Member and Confirmed Communicant had been moved. I was nonplussed. Shaken. 

It was a Year of Turning for me. Like much of 1955, including earlier under strong awareness of parental pressure for my own fault, changing my college major from pre-theology to business administration, and events yet to come that summer, 1955 was a Time of shift.

Aside, witness and ongoing testimony to my sister's determination and success in life of being herself and nobody else's, that Gina refused to allow her membership to be transferred. Over our next sixty-six years in life together, she reminded me of that any number of times. Nobody's object, Gina was her own person all the way. 

An aside because she keeps coming to mind, not letting myself wander too far from my intended path here.

My compass for this morning was set when I decided to use a different typeface. Right now it's Geneva, which to me looks like my customary Helvetica but spreads out a little larger and clearer (though Geneva may not take on Blogger). In any case, I looked up the difference between typeface and font, clicked some links, read about typesetting, and remembered my father typesetting. Typesetting by hand, picking letter by letter from a tray, and also typesetting with the bubbling hot liquid lead of the Linotype monster in his print shop - - and all of it came together for me to realize that there was lots more turning for me that summer of 1955 than just changing churches. Major life changes, as I said, paradigm shift. 

That summer, I came home to find out that my father had closed his seafood business. It had been his occupation all my life except during WW2 when he went off to U S Maritime Service officer school and then served the rest of the war as an engine room officer aboard a tanker plying the Gulf of Mexico where German U-boats were prowling. I remember, age maybe two or three, standing on the floor in the backseat, behind my mother as she drove (1935 Chevrolet Master Deluxe coach, a black two door sedan with white sidewalk tires and yellow spoke wheel), we picked up my father after work at the ice plant that was on the Bay a few blocks south of Harrison Avenue, now that large empty lot shaded with magnificent oak trees that you drive past on the Bay side of West Beach Drive just west of what was Commercial Bank, where the clock is. I'm talking second half of the 1930s. 

A few years later, after Pearl Harbor, I was aware of hushed conversation between my mother and father as they realized he had limited life choices, including waiting to be drafted or taking his own action: in the process that included our going to Mobile for him to sign up, and where I had my first dinner in a Laritz Cafeteria with a pat of real butter (by then rationed and unavailable in grocery stores), and before he left for New London, Connecticut, he sold his new Chevrolet truck that had been parked outside our dining room window - - I stood at the window and watched as the truck's new owner drove it away. From that moment my father was temporarily not in the fish business. When the war ended he came home to resume and from then until 1955 he was, we were, in the fish business, which I loved. 

For me, turning. Summer 1953 my final year at summer camp. Summer 1954 I worked at Edgewater Gulf Beach Apartments seven days a week (causes one to lose track of days and weeks on the calendar) until going to Birmingham to have my heart murmur evaluated by a cardiologist. Summer 1955 I worked marking timber to be cut for the paper mill. Later that summer I worked in my father's new occupation as a printer. The printing plant, Kelley Press, located in StAndrews on Beck Avenue, northeast corner of Beck and 12th Street. I'm looking at the spot as I type: it's long years vacant, a parking lot for The Shrimp Boat across Beck Avenue, another story, memory.

Significant things happened to/for me that summer, things recorded, things personal and private that stick in my mind as part of life's Turning and never going back. As, now and then, as this morning, I may pause to look back. More of Robert Frost, I guess, roads not taken, as he said, telling this with a sigh, ages and ages hence. Remember the poem?    

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

enough ...

T

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Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

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