Davis Point

Davis Point from 7H porch as I sip hot & black. I look out, across and over Davis Point numerous Times a day, or hour. It never fails to nudge me that I only have life because one bitter cold January night a hundred five years ago, my father's teenage brother Alfred sailed around Davis Point into a violent squall where the schooner, transiting the Old Pass, broke up, and Alfred died, to the total desolation of Mom and Pop, my grandparents whom I adored in our own Time together, and considered them only mine.

Mom told good stories. She was my favorite person, and the way she treated me kept me assured that I was hers. As a little boy twenty to twenty-five years after the Annie & Jennie wreck in 1918, it never occurred to me that it must have pierced Mom's heart every time I climbed into her lap and asked, "Tell me a story about Alfred."

My father said, "He was the apple of their eye." We can't help having favorites. I have loved and do love a few people as much as Mom and Pop loved Alfred. 

Ones I pray outlive me!

But I was looking at Davis Point, wasn't I. Yes, but the mind goes where it will, eh?

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Early activities this Thursday. Up, out into the darkness of 7H porch with a cuppa, to warm up and participate in the new day's arrival. 

Our cool, dark, dry nights are good for sleeping, but I'm a Northwest Florida Gulf Coast native for whom a hot and muggy July is part of my soul, nomesane? Eighty-seven, yes, but somewhere in there is a place I can hide, a place where I'm seventeen. I didn't realize it about Pop when he was this age, I thought he was just an old man, but with age has come, if not wisdom, realization: even at this age we are still in here - - remembering, loving, Being. 

During my last visit with Pop, a day in June 1963, he reminisced about Mom, and about Alfred.

We are still here. Still real.

RSF&PTL

T

 

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