Moving slowly in the darkness

for love of Maddy

Shrimp boat moving rather noisily east in the near channel, a Florida night perfect for May: clear sky, moon waning from full and nearly at zenith, 67F and 96% humidity, slightest hint of air movement, just enough to make pleasant sitting out here on the balcony porch. I could get used to this.

What I do have to get used to is caution. All the furniture legs are in place out here, and having jammed the long toe on the left foot into a chair leg early Wednesday morning, I’m learning to move slowly in the darkness.

Sermon there. Sermon and/or life lesson, minding the legs as well as the gap. Moving slowly in the darkness. A slight accident that causes an inconvenience, a sore toe irritating movement and slowing gait in the Wednesday morning walk, makes me think of the one admiral I enjoyed, Chet Heffner in all those years. He was death on lost time accidents, when an office worker left a desk drawer open and banged a leg against it or tripped over it there was hell to pay and reporting to do all the way down and back up the chain of command. Long late, the admiral still keeps me vigilant, even from the grave. 

The shrimp boat has cut his motor and must be drifting, my hearing isn’t that bad, suddenly it’s wonderfully still as night out here.

Yesterday for some reason my Facebook page went out on me. Apparently I can still post, which I’ve been doing faithfully once a day like a dog marking a fire hydrant, ever since the June 2013 morning when my caringbridge page quit taking my posts, log on, leg up, log off; but FB won’t list friends, show notifications, receive or send messages.

My reaction recalls Rhett to Scarlett, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The social sites are a drag on life if we let them be, addictive as nicotine or a long lost love, bad enough for wasting time instead of getting a life; but worse, a place for telling people what we want them to think, how cool we are instead of the truth of what a struggle life is and how much we are hurting compared to everyone else who is doing so beautifully and having so much fun. Read Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173910 and get a life. The world is not the Superbowl, and life is not a cool television commercial. 

Tormented by the horror of it, I’m adding a link a friend sent me last evening http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12833146/instagram-account-university-pennsylvania-runner-showed-only-part-story an unspeakably tragic condemnation of how shallow and phony are the measures we use to compare ourselves to others.

You are real, not a dream, and someone treasures you and your life beyond all that you can ask, think, hope, or imagine. So was Madison.

TW

20150508 predawn pic, shrimpboat on St Andrew Bay