the time-turner: too little too late
Written a week or so ago and has been biding time on this MacBook laptop. Updated.
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Sunday evening past sundown, I’m facing east toward the line of lights downtown, but looking south out toward the Gulf. It’s my blog, isn’t it, so no matter if any readers are bored with me rehashing family history and stories again. My eyes pickup the marina at Landmark, where Bay Fisheries Company wharf was until, what 1936? Bill Lee told me about diving up salvage for my grandfather after a hurricane destroyed the fishhouse, and I’m pretty sure he said it was 1936. After that, Pop's fishhouse was at the end of 12th Street in St. Andrews, exactly where Gracie Rae’s of the Shrimp Boat is today. That was my play and stomping ground as a young boy. Walt and me. Linda's mother Lucy Peters painted the watercolor scene for my parents in the late 1940s or early 1950s and it hung over our mantlepiece our growing up years. This morning it's in our foyer.
See, the mind wanders, not aimless but free. I was going someplace. From my 7th floor porch, my eye starts at the Landmark marina which becomes Bay Fisheries wharf. Several fishing smacks, twin masted schooners, are tied up at the pier. January 1918 and a bitter cold night, but the Annie & Jennie needs rudder work that cannot be done locally, so a crew of five, including her skipper and including my uncle Alfred as the owner’s son, are leaving after midnight to take her down the coast to Carrabelle for repairs. Alf is 18.
Mom, my grandmother and Alf’s mother, is anxious about the voyage and wants Alf to go to Carrabelle by train, but he and Pop scoff at her anxiety and Alf laughs at his doting and overprotective mother.
I should be in Alfred’s bedroom or out on his upstairs front porch rehearsing this memory, but I’ve told it so many times from there, and heard Mom tell it, and Pop too, and my heart aches for them even a hundred years on; and other than the mental work, which is inevitable, unavoidable and continuous, I don’t think I could bear to go through it again and write again from there, Alf’s house, my house, that night where it all happened. Ghosts aren’t there but memories are more haunting than the spirits of the dead. So I’m seeing it from here the porch of my 7th floor condo, just down the street, down the beach a couple blocks. Mom sends Alf upstairs for a nap before waking him with coffee or hot cocoa. My mind moves forward, not thirty years, because Mom died in January 1947, but I’m making it 1944 and I was eight or nine years old, and she’s telling me again the story of that night, how bitter cold it was and that she thought to let him sleep on and miss the voyage and will never get past wishing that she had.
If only I were there with my time-turner, I could make everything right for her.
If only I were there with my time-turner, I could make everything right for her.
Mom and Pop had another son, my father, who that January 1918 night was six years old down the line after two older sisters; but I was, in the next generation, the oldest son as Alf was in his, and I have and had a feeling of being special to Mom, as she was to me. I loved her dearly, as a boy can only love his doting grandmother. A boy should not love anyone as much as he loves his own mother, but in every boy’s life there are things unsaid, love unspoken.
A wonder that must be precisely our godly image, the human mind can at will merge time and people's lives here and hereafter. I watch from here as there is some loud talking a quarter mile down the beach, out on the wharf as the Annie & Jennie makes ready and casts off. She heads out, south to deeper water then west. I have her green starboard running light in view here from my seventh floor vantage point as she crosses the Bay, making for Davis Point; then her port light as she turns to make for what we later called the Old Pass, disappearing behind the point and from my sight, and life and history.
Among my treasures in our sitting area, under the Annie & Jennie replica that Joe built for me, is a little book with a report from the past, of that night, by Captain Odom T. Melvin, who had been a member ot the crew. He reports, “It was a night of horror.” His memory and description a day later, when he and the other survivor had made their way back to St. Andrews and “we reported to Mr. Weller that the schooner had gone down, and that we were unsure of the fate of the other three men. I shall never forget Mr. Weller’s face when he the heard the news. The expressions of shock, disbelief and grief reflected there were heartrending.” There is no report of Pop going across the street to my house to tell Mom, but my aunt Evalyn told me their relationship changed forever in that moment, and never came back.
What happened to my family?
What happened to my family?
St. Andrews Bay News
February 20, 1923
Local Items
Mr. and Mrs. A. D. Weller, Miss Ruth, and her younger brother and sister, left by auto on Saturday for Ocilla, Ga., where they will make their future home. We realize a great loss when this estimable family left St. Andrews, and each of our citizens wish for them all success in their new home..
DR. FOSTER PREACHES LAST SERMON HERE
Rev. John William Foster, of Marianna, who for the past seven years has been rector of Christ Episcopal Church here, preached his farewell sermon at that church last Sunday morning at 11:00 o’clock. A large congregation was present to hear this wonderful sermon, which was delivered in his usual eloquent manner. ...
Dr. Foster has gone to New Jersey, where he will have charge of a church there, ...
Christ Episcopal Church of St. Andrews was erected early in 1915, and was dedicated in July of that year by Rev. Edwin G. Weed, Bishop of Florida. ...
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“Christ Church” apparently at one time was not uncommonly the name given to the first Episcopal church in a town, much as others use the name “First Church.” So, it began as Christ Church, St. Andrews. When, to my grandfather’s chagrin, St. Andrews was absorbed into Panama City instead of vice versa, the church name was changed to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Panama City. My grandfather was instrumental in the establishment of the Episcopal church here, his father having been an Episcopal priest, and two of his brothers, one an archdeacon and the other a bishop. I have a photograph of the church very early, taken on the grounds in front of the church, with apparently the entire congregation gathered, including the Rev. Dr. Foster. Pop is the tallest man there, standing with his two brothers also present, Charles Knight Weller, my Uncle Charlie whom I remember well, and Uncle Heber, the Rt. Rev. Reginald Heber Weller, who was bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Uncle Charlie baptized me. I never met Uncle Heber, who died in 1935 around the time I was born.
I'd always thought they moved away by about 1920, but it was 1923, five years later. My father was eleven years old, and I'd forgotten that he told me he and Ruth drove the Model T on the trip from St. Andrews to Ocilla. Evalyn was at college, in Tallahassee as I recall. Mom and Pop and Marguerite were in the Hudson touringcar, Pop driving. They said both cars had crates of Mom's chickens strapped to the runningboards and fenders.
I'd always thought they moved away by about 1920, but it was 1923, five years later. My father was eleven years old, and I'd forgotten that he told me he and Ruth drove the Model T on the trip from St. Andrews to Ocilla. Evalyn was at college, in Tallahassee as I recall. Mom and Pop and Marguerite were in the Hudson touringcar, Pop driving. They said both cars had crates of Mom's chickens strapped to the runningboards and fenders.
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In my merging of then and now, Annie & Jennie is still crossing the Bay tonight, as I watch. If I can get out there to warn them and persuade Captain Caton to turn her back, everyone will be saved. Except me. And my generations after me. Would I do that?
Mom and Pop would not have the five years of desolating grief that caused them to pack up and move from here to Ocilla, Georgia.
And my mother and father would never have met.
Would I do that for Mom and Pop?
St. Andrews Bay News
May 19, 1925
Local Items
A. D. Weller was over from Valparaiso on a business trip, the first of this week. Mr. Weller was general manager of the Bay Fisheries Company for many years, and it was largely through his efforts that the Episcopal church was built in St. Andrews. He has many friends in this bay who very gladly welcomed him on his short visit.
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The family had lasted a few years in Ocilla, until Pop had his falling out with Ford Motor Company (he was the Ford dealer there). They moved toward south or central Florida, where Pop tried real estate. Then, my father told me, up to Valparaiso (back in the fish business), then to Pensacola. They lived in a gray house in East Hill, house gone now, that my father used to show me each time we drove into Pensacola when I was a little boy. A gray house on Cervantes just two or three block from where my mother lived on E. Strong Street. And where they met.
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The family had lasted a few years in Ocilla, until Pop had his falling out with Ford Motor Company (he was the Ford dealer there). They moved toward south or central Florida, where Pop tried real estate. Then, my father told me, up to Valparaiso (back in the fish business), then to Pensacola. They lived in a gray house in East Hill, house gone now, that my father used to show me each time we drove into Pensacola when I was a little boy. A gray house on Cervantes just two or three block from where my mother lived on E. Strong Street. And where they met.
St. Andrews Bay News
September 11, 1928
Local Items
Mr. A. D. Weller and son, Carroll, left Saturday for Pensacola, where Carroll will enter high school. Mr. Weller will return to his duties as manager of the Bay Fisheries Company at this place.
My father would have been 17. That is where he met Miss Louise Gentry, of Pensacola, at Pensacola High School. There's a picture around here, that showed up after my father's death, of my mother standing by her boyfriend, a boy name Tom DeWeese. The note on the back says Louise 16 and Tom 17.
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In my vision, Annie & Jennie has rounded Davis Point and disappeared from my sight the other side of the peninsula.
TCW,Jr betweenTimes