the old eternal rocks
Breakfast, a thick sandwich of lots of sliced chicken with Swiss cheese melted on, and mayo-spread thin-sliced whole wheat toast; conscientiously salted with NoSalt, my substitute of potassium that as well as seasoning close to salt taste, should replace the potassium that I lose to it being a Furo80 day. Mug of hot & black. Life is Good.
In fact, life is good, better, best and I like being alive, a result of untold numbers of diverging roads in yellow woods that denied others the opportunity for life; which demands that I do my best with life and not let them down. Whoever they might have been.
Do you ever think of that, realizing that you just as easily might never have been, and others going their ways instead? Here at 7H, looking across St Andrews Bay over Davis Point, around which the twin-masted fishing schooner Annie & Jennie sailed that bitter cold January 6/7 midnight in 1918, with my father's brother Alfred on board, meeting a squall in the Old Pass, raised by a wave and slammed down on a reef, cracking her keel and the boat breaking up; all but two crew drowned, including Alfred.
My beloved grandparents' overwhelming grief and desolation, in Time giving up, selling The Old Place, and moving away from St Andrews to escape the sea. Wandering, my grandfather engaged here and there over the next few years, finally moving back "home" to Pensacola, where my father met my mother, emancipated her from her high school sweetheart Tom, eventually married and came to St Andrews, where his parents had returned earlier.
Those diverging roads gave me a chance at life instead of whoever and whatever would have been had Alfred not been lost with the A&J on that, her final voyage.
Living room windows here in 7H face across the Bay, a view spanning Davis Point to Courtney Point and across Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico; and Alfred is never out of my mind, never beyond my conscious awareness.
In Kawaguchi's little book "Before the coffee gets cold" one can go back in Time and do things differently and be more satisfied with it; though that journey can never change the present, though does stir new possibilities for the future. But if I could go back and change that night when Mom reluctantly went upstairs to what decades later was my bedroom, to waken Alfred for the fateful voyage - - I can't so I won't, but if I could, would I? I would say no, except that as a boy I loved my grandmother more than anyone in my life: would I save her that terrible grief if I could, at the cost of my own life and the lives of those I so love today - - ?
I'm just as glad it's an irrelevant question.
It never occurred to me to wonder how Mom felt all the Times as a little boy when I crawled up into her lap and begged, "tell me a story about Alfred" and she did.
Thankful for life, I like being alive.
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Which entices my mind off down a side trail. What will be next? In human history, unlike innocent animals who do not fear death because they did not eat a bite of the apple with Adam,
fear of death and the unknown has given rise to various notions and religious beliefs that evolved into certainties about streets of gold, or 72 virgins (it's a religion for and about men, we don't know how the virgins feel about it), and such. Currently, most Christians seem to believe that at death a soul leaves the body and is taken immediately into heaven - - or to purgatory as a place of cleansing in preparation for heaven,
and I'm okay with that for them. Christians have glommed onto the line at Luke 23:43 where Jesus tells the repentant thief, "This day you will be with me in paradise" as their prooftext, even though only Luke has Jesus say it. Although at Luke 16:19-31 Luke again does have Jesus telling about Lazarus feasting with Abraham while the Rich Man is dying of thirst in hades.
From my position as a professing Christian who is content to be not-knowing, I might be more at ease with what St Paul believed about people sleeping in Jesus (i.e., dead in the grave) until the Last Day when Jesus will come on the clouds and all the llving and dead meeting him in the air for judgment, and the "saved" joining Jesus in the new kingdom of God here on earth; a wildly imaginative scenario that's hard for a sometime amateur astronomer to cling to,
and, having myself experienced "death" of sorts in the absolute oblivion of deepest anesthesia, I'm okay with that, which seems far more realistic for the Time until the Last Day when earth is swallowed up by the sun and eventually the universe itself fizzles out into the nothingness of absolute zero.
And yet,
I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun's life-giving ray;
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks, The stable earth, the deep salt sea around the old eternal rocks.
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
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Top pic: forgot to commemorate my Navy retirement 46 years ago, 1 February 1978, being piped ashore into the rest of my life.
For life and Time,
RSF&PTL
Rev Commander (USN Retired) T88&c
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