Cantaloupe & Spontaneous Wednesday

I love life spontaneous. I like living life on the spur of the moment. While I studiously avoid starting a paragraph, much less an article, in the first person singular, just this once I'll do it as a symbol of spontaneity. Why do I avoid “I”? Because it marks one as self-centered and one’s conversation and writing as egotistical, and one's being as boring. (Humpty Dumpty would say, “yes, one, but not two, two can do it”. But HD is correct if for no other reason than that two would begin with we not one). But as I was saying, why not begin with “I”? "I" reminds me of the insufferably egotistical author who, having bored an acquaintance to death for half an hour at a cocktail party, said to his object, “But enough about me, I’m tired of talking about me, let’s talk about you, I want to hear about you. What did you think of my latest book?”

That’s where the “I word” takes me. But I do love life spontaneous. Fairly different, Linda likes everything planned, organized and working from a list. Her desk is like her life. I can’t even get to my desk. Which bothers me not at all. I didn’t realize it about myself my years in the Navy, because at sea there was always a sailor to keep things orderly; and on shore duty my secretary never let anything lie in my In Box or on my desk very long. But on 2 Feb 1978, the day after I retired from the Navy and set up a desk and business office at home, I realized that life was going to be chaos, as it has been so ever since.

Yesterday on the spur of the moment, we drove over to Pensacola to visit a friend of three decades, Mary Virginia Robinson. After many long and vigorous years of life in Apalachicola, and in the Trinity Church choir, and as cashier and senior vice president at the local bank, and as church treasurer at my recruiting 25 or so years ago after she retired from the bank at age 65, Mary Virginia is retired to Pensacola, where Fred and Frances live. The retirement home where she lives is top notch, and at -- I believe she’s 93 -- MV looks great and carries on as lively a conversation as ever. In fact, we arrived just at lunchtime, unplanned, unexpected, but to her absolute delight, so the staff moved her into the executive dining room for our visit, and served her lunch there. Baked chicken breast with mushroom gravy, red beets in a separate bowl. Ice tea, a glass of milk, and a slice of key lime pie. So vigorous was her happy chat with us that she only managed to eat a quarter of the chicken and beets, but she did sip the tea, and she ate every bite of the pie. Mary Virginia has been a dear friend for a long time.

After we retired from parish ministry, 1998, MV began dropping by here from time to time when she was in town, usually with a plastic grocery bag of recent issues of The Living Church magazine, knowing that we didn’t subscribe but enjoyed keeping up with goings-on in the Episcopal Church at large. From 1984 through 1998, every week when the weekly magazine arrived in her post office box, she had read it at the stand up table in the post office -- which was also where she paid her bills the instant they arrived, while also visiting with friends who came to the post office to get their mail -- read The Living Church latest issue, then drop by the rectory and give us that latest copy of the magazine. MV did not approve of waste, including the waste of only one person reading a magazine, and she told me that we should not subscribe. She gave up herTLC subscription several years ago, but in the years she did come by the house, if we weren’t here, she enjoyed visiting with my mother, and mama always enjoyed MV. If nobody was home at our house, we always knew Mary Virginia had been by when there was a plastic grocery bag of The Living Church magazines hanging on the back door knob.

Spontaneously then, leaving the retirement home after visiting MV, the traffic on Davis Hwy was too heavy to turn left, we turned right on Davis, drove north to the next light, turned right, drove to 9th Avenue, south on 9th Avenue to Cervantes in East Hill, and west on Cervantes, across the bridge to East Pensacola Heights at Bayou Texar (ta-HAAR), up the hill, left at the light, left at Strong Street down to the bayou and to the Oyster Barn.

Actually, that wasn’t quite our route, spontaneously, one block before Cervantes, we turned left onto E. Strong Street and drove through the East Hill neighborhood and past the house at 1317 where my mother grew up, and where I so dearly loved visiting my Gentry grandparents and cousins who lived there. The modest little house where my grandparents moved about 1914 is no longer as huge as it was when I was a child. But there was the sidewalk around the block where I learned to skate and to ride a bike (we had dirt roads and no sidewalks around Massalina Bayou in the Cove when I was a boy, where Robert and I walked last Tuesday morning). The corner at 13th Avenue and E. Strong Street where in my early years there always sat parked an enormous sedan from the late 1920s, a car with the wooden spoke wheels.

At the Oyster Barn, which is out on a pier we had a booth right on the bayou. The OB, BTW, has marks inside showing the water level for various hurricanes over the years. We had the mullet dinner, and I had two dozen steamed, the second dozen in honor of Madge, who telephoned me from the HNEC church office just as my oysters were arriving at table. Lovely, large oysters, but not Apalachicola oysters, and not salty, I had to add salt, but WTH I can take a lasix this morning, eh?

A spontaneous day, thence home, cup of coffee, a quick nap, and off to Stations of the Cross at HNEC.

Fruit for supper: a dozen bites of whatever you call that orange melon, I never can remember the name of it. Pills, early to bed.

Cantaloupe, that’s it.