BC
So many things I want to say. Why? And What? What, but mainly Why? IDK, maybe like life events one could only discuss with a Navy buddy, but Why? Maybe BC they press to get out. IDK.
And yet, this is not the Time or place, is it.
Breakfast: I like my breakfast real strange, nomesane? hot & black coffee, lox and cream cheese smeared on saltines and seasoned with mushroom soy sauce. If I were properly Jewish instead of barely able to struggle through an OT text one Hebrew letter at a Time, it'd be a bagel instead of saltines. But I don't eat bagels BC they're even more unhealthy for me than plain white bread.
Had Kristen's car maintenance, complete brake job front and rear, done at Precision at 23rd & Airport Rd instead of the agonizing trip to Sansing in Pensacola. Well, the drive over is good, and the BMW service is impressive, and the oysters and mullet are perfect, especially when Walt & Judy join us. But the drive back always turns out to be dusk and dark driving through the Sheer Traffic Hell that now is called FortWalton, Destin, Sandestin. And this Time, the prospect of the drive back was so mind boggling yea unto frightening that I researched for local service shops with a qualified BMW mechanic.
Why a BMW? Because, dammit. Just Because, nomesane? For one Belovedy, a Mercedes, a Lincoln, an Acura and a Touareg in her Time. For another Belovedy, a Volvo and now a BMW. BC after a Chevrolet HHR and a Saturn Vue and a Volvo XC60, and me looking at Chev, GMC & Buick, she said Papa, I really don't want an America car, and when I said Mazda she said maybe we could look at a BMW, I don't mind if it's used.
While checking her BMW out of the service shop this morning, wearing my Navy cap, I briefly greeted a grizzly old guy, ancient but not quite as Timeless as me, wearing a Vietnam Veteran cap. During Vietnam, I was about 35 and he was more likely 20, so being I'm 87 now, maybe he's 72? Anyway, there's that, eh? It was Nov 1969 to June 1970, so, what? In the sixth decade ago, fifty-four years, I'd finished the part of Navy I'd loved, a destroyer, some shore duty, Univ of Michigan MBA, Naval War College, then/there into misery at sea before love again. Why does the misery stand out? BC that's the way the brain works, isn't it. Trauma stands out, whether it's mental/emotional anguish or physical pain. For me it was Time suffering fools not gladly. Nearly fifty-five years have passed and I still experience something in common with an elderly stranger in a baseball cap, something gut wrenching and very dark that's never welcome when it surfaces.
The season is Lent: still working through The Fire, The Fire and the Darkness, and Voices from The Third Reich, with one book to go, The German War. Why do I do these things to myself. No question mark BC it's a rhetorial question that doesn't demand an answer. But BC it's compelling or compulsive, not sure which or, indeed, the difference.
By Cahall's this morning for Chicken Pot Pie and four different desserts to share. Malinda and Kristen are coming for lunch (which at our house is Noon Dinner BC lunch is a word that in my childhood would have marked one as a Yankee and we were not that far out of the Confederacy. Our next door neighbors the Guy family had a relative, Bill's aunt, his mother's sister Maggie, raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the early years of the 20th century. Maggie had married a Yankee and moved to St Paul, Minnesota, yet when she came home to The South, she used to speak longingly of The Cause.
No, of course you don't understand. Lorrie Morgan, "I guess you had to be there" is good for a lot of confrontations in life.
Top image, the highway through Oppertsau and Opperzau whence my male line ancestor Andreas Wäller and family emigrated to America by ship in 1752.
On the line, one village in Westphalia the other in Palatinate, the villages were and are in Hamm protestant parish
where my ancestors were baptized.
Hamm, Germany was heavily bombed by the Allies during World War Two. My cousins.
All of which ties into my Lenten reading obsessions.
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Tuesday afternoon a film, movie "The Jesus Revolution" at VIP Theater, Panama City Mall. We didn't realize it's still there, but it is, different ownership chain, I guess. It's the same movie theater that was always in the Mall, but you go in the back door or, IDK, maybe you can go in the front, which is where the Food Court used to be, a great spot to get a quick and fun meal while shopping. We used to love Morrisons Cafeteria there. baked or broiled Spanish mackerel and a mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, avocado salad.
"The Jesus Revolution" chronicles the late 1960s early 1970s beginnings of a religious revival phenomenon that seems to have begun in California and spread around America, when members of the Hippies, the Flower Children (sort of a drugs and free love movement of young people hostile toward values of their elders, living together in communes or in cars (VW microbus) or wandering the streets) were led to Christ by converted youth leaders, were baptized, saved, and born again, and were to abandon their ways of sin for new life in Christ. Was it real or imaginary, lasting or transient? I don't know, but I have myself personally had a "religious experience" and it still rattles me to this day more than forty years on.
As for the Jesus Movement, Jesus Freaks, Lorrie Morgan again, "I guess you had to be there" on one side or the other: it was a Time when America was bitterly, sometimes violently, divided, Hippies waving the peace sign v official America waging the Vietnam War, us v them, antipathy between youth (teens and young twenties) and generation of parents and older. At 35 and a middle grade Navy officer I was outside the Hippie movement watching, but I had them in my department aboard ship during the Vietnam War. A group of them operated the ship's computer mainframe that was in my department, a climate controlled space that was generally off limits such that few people were allowed in there or could see and know the crew there; so I had no issue when they decorated the standard Navy gray painted bulkheads (walls, partitions) in their space with stick on flower symbols that marked the Hippie movement (Flower Children).
But the ship's captain went through there one day and when I had my nightly audience with him on the bridge that evening he had come unglued, sternly ordering me: "those flowers come down."
LCDR Weller: aye aye, Sir.
The truth was and still is that those enlisted men, young sailors running my computer room, and the Operations Officer's sailors in CIC, the Combat Information Center, were as a group of far higher intelligence than any officers aboard the ship. I knew then, and still remember the captain as stupid, a regulation Brown Shoe (unlike black shoe Navy, brown shoes usually were jerks only if they thought they were borderline possible for Flag if someone didn't collide their deep draft with another ship at sea), arrogant, a horse's ass; but orders is orders, nomesane? A Navy captain can wreak Hell with a subordinate lieutenant commander.
The Episcopal Church sometimes elects a priest like that who is a bishop like that. In fact, one such was bishop of an adjoining diocese, an arrogant obscenity who terrorized my priest friends.
Another was a retired "supply bishop" whom I had known as a jerk when he was a priest on faculty when I was in seminary, who later as a bishop was known to terrorize folks in the Confirmation class, reducing happy, excited children to tears: when my bishop scheduled him to visit my church, I called the bishop and asked him to change the schedule. When the bishop declined, I said "Well, if he comes, I will not be here that day." (From where I was in life and "career" at the Time, warn't and ain't no way a bishop could wreak Hell with priest me). Persisting, I asked that a much loved friend Bishop Don Patterson be sent instead, and finally that was arranged: it turned out to be one of the best and most memorable Episcopal Visitations of all my years as a parish priest! Another memorable Visitation had been when Bishop and Mrs Patterson came as our Episcopal Visitation at Trinity Apalachicola years earlier.
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Mind wandering today. Where, What, When, and mainly Why?
T