Predawn

Predawns. Love is something you do.

First thing this morning is the corrected date for starting our new Wednesday programs at Holy Nativity: September 25th, not 18th. +Time post for yesterday is corrected.

75 F and 51% for August predawn is tolerable enough to return to the outside back screen porch for the first time since spring. Occasional car passes by on 9th Street, some poor soul on the way to work. Love: First Daughter gets the newspaper from the street, brings it over and lays it on our back porch. 

Part of life is predawns. Navy years, in motels on our way home from Wherever to Panama City, Linda rousing our family while it is yet pitch black dark outside and having us on the road by quarter-to-four. That always happened rushing home to PC, never on the way back to Wherever.

Mid-nineteen-forties in the 1937 Chevrolet fish truck with my father, on the way to south Florida to pick up bream or perch, early morning dark, still tasting egg breakfast my mother had fixed for me, now an hour later huddled in my jacket and scrunching down on the floorboard of the truck, a converted army ambulance from World War II, because it’s chilly in the predawn and the truck has no heater. On the firewall between passenger cab and engine compartment is a grill that can be slid open, allowing in a bit of the engine’s warmth, enough to keep off the shivers. From time to time, hearing the sound of the ring-tail-goofus, an elusive animal with wheels instead of legs, that runs alongside the truck just out of sight in the woods. The R-T-G has brown fur and is identifiable by the black ring around its bushy tail. They are so shy and elusive that no one has ever seen one, but you know there’s one out there when you hear that sound. I never was able to catch my father making the noise, but I was always pretty sure it was him. But with the ring-tail-goofus you never know for sure. 

Danang harbor early 1970 topside predawn. Navy divers swimming around the ship all night long against sappers attaching explosives to the hull. In the nearby mountains, U.S. planes dropping explosives on a target. Down here at pierside I see the flash, seconds later comes the whump.

Before dawn, January 13, 1993. 
The baby’s here. 
Boy or girl? 
Come see. 
I have to know right now. 
You have a little girl. ... Does anyone want to hold her? 
Yes, me, I do. Get away, woman, you can hold her later. 

Love is a feeling. Bonding with a child.

Lights come on, a bell chimes. Cabin attendant announces Good morning! Breakfast is being served, we will be landing in Sydney in less than an hour. Qantas has the most interesting meals. Stretch, rub eyes, look out the window, blackness. Light shortly, Sydney Harbor and the Opera House come into view, then blue swimming pools and red tile roofs below, wet from predawn rain. Just for this approach and landing, I always asked for a window seat on the left side.

Predawn quiet in the hospice house the gurgling rattle stops. I call Linda in from the hallway and we have the prayers at time of death. Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world, in the Name of God the Father who created you, in the Name ...

Out of season, a memory. In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary ...

T+

About Love that is a feeling. Bonding with a child, I've found that the child, growing, growing, grown and gone, gets over it; but I never do, never have. It's the sort of love that seems to go only one way. It's a heartbreaker!