Gratitude

It didn’t happen this morning because I’m awake and staying awake, but the annual fall change off Daylight Saving Time invariably reminds me. Of 1957: recently turned 22, I was in a four-man room of Navy barracks at OCS in Newport, Rhode Island. A chilly New England morning, snuggling luxuriously back down under the wool blanket into my warm cot for another hour of my first of many autumn mornings away from St. Andrews Bay for years to come. 

That Sunday morning I obviously had the duty, otherwise I would have been with Linda. She was at the upstairs apartment of the Damon house in Kingston, RI. But for the duty, Saturday morning at liberty call I would have caught a ride downtown and taken the ferry to Jamestown, where she and the green Dodge would be waiting. Drive west on Route 138 across the high Jamestown Bridge to south on US 1, continue west on 138 to Kingston. About opposite the University of Rhode Island campus, turn left on South Road and a little ways to the house where the Damon family had lived while David's father was a professor at the university. 

The driveway was on the right side of the house, park in the back yard by the outside wooden staircase. By those years the Damon family was long gone and the downstairs was rented. The wooden stairs led to the little upstairs apartment that probably had been for renting to students. My memory of it is the four burner electric range, the vintage before coil elements: one of the solid elements kept falling through.

First rector of Holy Nativity, Father Damon is our Malinda’s godfather. Because, thanks to him and his generosity and lovingkindness in lending us that house, we have Malinda. 

And Ray, and Kristen.

Tom