best wishes to a swell guy
Following doctor's advice, we have a new machine, an under-desk elliptical, to help with foot ankle lower leg exercise and related blood flow. It arrived Monday, I set it up in front of a chair in the living room, and we both used it to initiate it into the household. Running on 30-minute stints, it can be operated manually or select one of three automatic programs. To start out, we each used the manual setting with next to lowest speed. We have hopes for it, health-wise.
Hope and some personal effort to encourage hope are integral with life at this extreme old age. That day during recess back in, I think it was fifth grade, school year 1945-46 at Cove School, when I contemplated the inconceivably distant Year 2000, and that I would be an unimaginably ancient 65 years old, it never occurred to me that I would be here still loving Town and Bay at age 90, yet here I am.
That was a couple of years before Linda Peters and family moved here from Mobile, coming to St Andrew's Episcopal Church and Linda a year behind me at Cove School. I was in seventh then eighth grade and aware of her, a year younger, that new girl.
My junior year at Bay High I'd started driving our station wagon around the Cove every Sunday evening to pick up other teens who were going to our church youth group meeting, and delivering everyone home later. Linda was in the Sunday evening youth group carpool, usually nine of us in the station wagon's three rows of seats, but that was it. Literally. In fact, recently I got out my 1952 Pelican, our Bay High annual for my junior year and, flipping through and looking at who'd I'd gotten to sign it, found the note,
"Best wishes to a swell guy. Linda."
Neither of us had any idea what was ahead and there was no "spontaneous attraction," we just sort of drifted into it during the Sunday evening rides to church youth group when Linda moved from sitting in the middle seat with another boy to sitting in the front seat by me, the driver. That fall semester of the 1952-53 school year we paired off, went to all the winter season dances and balls together. My recollection, which might be disproved, is that I took a big gamble and wrote "I love you" in Linda's 1953 Pelican. A year after her "Best wishes to a swell guy" note, we were "going steady" was the term.
A year after that, I was "a college man" and Linda had my KA fraternity pin.
We both had "other adventures" before it all settled down (nomesane?), but I'm not going there this morning.
The summer of 1956, Linda transferred from her college in Virginia to the University of Florida with me, we went to summer school together so I could help her with C-42, the required math course she needed to start as a junior in the fall semester; and I took the most useful course of my entire life, Typing 101. We enjoyed a happy summer together, and the following summer, June 1957, we were married at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church. Linda was 20, I was 21.
We had twenty years in the U S Navy, then more than forty years clergy life in the Episcopal Church, from which we are still slowing retiring. Linda turned 89 in July and I turned 90 last month, and here we are in 7H, happy as clams. At least, I'm happy as a clam, Linda can start her own blog.
Trying to make these +Time blogposts a little shorter.
RSF&PTL
T90
posted Monday evening for Tuesday morning.
pic clipped from "BC" comic strip online.