Always

Easter Week is going well so far. Linda just read in the PCNH that the air show is this weekend at Tyndall, I wonder if any of it will be visible from our balcony here, we’ll see.

Walk this morning, and Wednesday is breakfast after, today I think we’re going to Golden Corral. Where is breakfast best? Three are a toss and good variety.

GC where the milk is freezing cold; maybe I'll have a fried chicken drumstick this morning. Naanh, too greasy.

Bayou Joe’s because we both grew up on Massalina Bayou. Fried green beans once in a while.

The coffee is consistently best at Big Mama’s on the Bayou, the chef cooks eggs OM best of the three;, and on a perfect day, their outside back porch looking over the marsh, mullet jumping. Quiet. Couple cups of nice strong clear hot black coffee. They use the Community Coffee that was always brewed at the Jesuit house in Louisiana where I did the silent retreat, summer of 2013.

For a year or two Robert lived in a house that’s almost visible behind the trees across the bayou from Big Mama’s back porch. He was four or five, remembers running in the marshgrass and pretending he couldn’t hear his mama calling him to supper. Robert! Robert, come to supper! Robert!! Small boy running through the marshgrass paying no attention to mama, would rather run than eat. When we are very small, we know that our mama will always be calling us to supper.

I started life in St. Andrews, September 1935. In my growing up years, the only place I lived before January 1938 when our house on Massalina Drive was finished, was at the NW corner of Frankford Avenue at 11th Street. First house north of the house right on the corner, both houses are still there. I don’t remember, but my mother said the municipal baseball diamond was right across the dirt road, that I’d wander out to the edge of the road to watch, and Patsy, our German Shepherd, would get in front of me and block me from going in the street.

In a very early memory I am standing at the back door of our new house, knee-high to my mother, watching my father and Old Dave carry Patsy way up in the back yard to bury her. Two and a half, maybe three because mama was holding Gina, I watched as they carried the dog away, and asked, What’s wrong with her? Mama said, She’s dead. I asked, When will she be alive again? Mama said, She never will.

On Massalina Bayou, our new house was in The Cove on the edge of thick woods that still had paths that Indians had walked and worn. Bob Whites and Whip-Poor-Wills at dusk. Every evening all summer long the air filled with fireflies, lightning bugs. Mama always calling us in to supper.