Wednesday in October

What's happening? Out on the porch enjoying three tiny slices of meatloaf for breakfast, with catsup and wheat crackers. One slice from Linda's “mom's usual” and two from “usual” that I mixed with liverwurst after remembering liverloaf at some earlier point in life. We once loved liver and onions, probably haven't had it in forty years.

In the PCNH this morning, obit of Bill Bailey. My age, in my class at Cove School and Bay High. In our growing up days, Bill lived in a house on Cove Boulevard right behind Scotty Fraser's house across the Bayou from us on Massalina Drive, so Bill was a Massalina Bayou boy. Bill and Scotty Fraser were roommates across the hall from Philip Johnson and me our freshman year at UFlorida. He and Scotty were Presbyterians, and when it turned out that I didn't mesh with the Episcopalians at Canterbury House, we started going every Sunday to First Presbyterian in Gainesville, where the much loved popular pastor, Preacher Gordon held forth beautifully in the pulpit. There was a time then when because of Preacher Gordon I wrote home to Linda that I was thinking of being a Presbyterian minister instead of an Episcopal priest. By the end of my sophomore year, all that went out the window and I'd decided against seminary altogether and changed my major from pre-theology to business administration.

Good read this morning, front page of a PCNH issue from June 1941. That summer I was five years old, soon to be six and start first grade at Cove School the day after Labor Day in September. War was on in Europe, the German military machine spreading out across the continent. A member of the Jap cabinet was on his way to Berlin to meet with Hitler and Mussolini about joining their alliance, and Pearl Harbor was six months in the future.

Bill Bailey and Philip Johnson didn't start first grade with us, they were at Lynn Haven, came into our class in second grade. Bill sat next to me at our Bay High Class of 1953 sixtieth reunion a couple years ago.

Thos+