first wakings

First overnight in our new home and slept until five o’clock, a welcome first sign, unlikely to begin a new pattern. First sight I expected to see on waking was the full array of green harbor lights, but sky is overcast, Bay foggy, and all to be seen is one red light at the point just to my right, where the channel turns north. 

My last first waking that seared the brain was July 1984, Apalachicola: roosters proclaiming dawn, feistily back and forth all over town, loud, fighting lustily to be First Rooster. Some memories are wonderfully clear and always.

Another early dawn in Apalachicola, a young man, son of a parishioner, knocking on the rectory door. Pickup parked out front, his overnight catch of shrimp in iced boxes, tiny feet moving rapidly as though they were still speeding along the bay bottom. Fresh Shrimp For Sale. 

Coming topside on the Navy destroyer our first morning in Guantanamo Bay, January 1959. A couple days earlier, driving snow as we sailed out of Norfolk, now familiar climate again: hot already, hot and muggy. The ship was in GTMO a month but sailors couldn’t go off base because Castro was in the mountains with his 26 of July Movement.

Wow, fog is thick now, very present, white, right in my face. Beautiful.

TW first thoughts in a new +Time