ten o'clock scholar

A dillar a dollar a ten o’clock scholar, why do you come so soon? You used to come at ten o’clock, but now you come at noon.

There’s a history for that bit of rhyming sarcasm, I don't remember what it is. Not a fan or advocate of sarcasm, for one reason because my growing up years, my father’s relationship with me was one of sarcasm in so much of what he said to me. At a family camp session at Camp Weed in 1951, even a family psychologist who was there to observe and for consultation chastised my father that “every word you speak to him is sarcastic.” Still, I was fifteen and remember that as a good week of unusual family closeness, fun and relaxation that never came again. My father may have tried to change his tone with me and our relationship, including a long letter of regret to me my freshman year at Florida, though it was tense from my earliest memories to his last moments. My father felt he did better with a grandson than with his sons, told me “God gave me another chance.”

The rhyme was chastising my late post, and that’s surely not where I meant to ramble. I had a blogpost about design, focusing on LaSalle but’m not satisfied, so maybe another time. My iPhone won’t send or receive emails, including the pic I snapped early of the Nina and Pinta motoring by on their way west to another docking. At the moment there’s what we used to call an Air Force Crash Boat (white hull, orange superstructure) noisily heading back to dock at Tyndall. Far channel, too far away. 

But with Linda’s iPhone I snapped the above shrimp boat slowly passing by. Don’t recall seeing one heading out in the daytime, they’re nocturnal, with nets and lights. 

What I think it comes down to, is that for many reasons, nearly every normal father son relationship is somewhat tense during growing up years. Lion or human, male animals seem wary of other males in their territory. No one understands this with me but my brother. Whatever, it makes the boy eager and anxious to grow up and get away. I certainly was so.

Thos+