Just-ice I finish an article about Sotomayor’s latest searing dissent and scroll back to read a piece in which Sonia and Ruth disclose Supreme Court lunchroom secrets, the spinning beachball arrives to stop online and turn me to this blogpost. Rain overnight, evidenced by water drops on the porch rail, not blowing rain, at least not from the south, seeing the porch floor didn’t wet my socks.  Great clouds yesterday and a couple bird shots, what I'm impatient for are an osprey carrying a mullet arms length by my porch, and half dozen pelicans in formation east- or westward, wingtips almost touching the railing as they glide by. That osprey is still hunting - Now outside with breakfast: smoky Costa Rican coffee, charred brussels sprouts, crabmeat sandwich, as a thunderstorm sweeps in from the west and south across the Bay in front of me, close lightning flickering our condo lights and driving rain graying out the full 180° scape.  Busy day ahead as the r...

Perspective: 59/41 Here in 7H, our bedroom is just adequately spacious that bed and tables with lamps fill 59%; in the Bay end, two chairs, angled but parallel. Facing 30° NE, she sees television with top corner of my chairback intruding in bottom corner of screen, chest of drawers, wall with paintings, door into the dining room. Facing 210° SW, my chair with bookshelves beside me, Annie & Jennie above and a photo of a Navy commander accepting retirement certificate from a long-dead admiral, faces sliding glass door, porch, railing, Shell Island, Courtney Point jutting out into St. Andrews Bay such that I can’t see the Pass. Even stretching, I can’t see Davis Point (just as well). Red and green channel marker lights flash at night, in the daytime boats speed or sail by, ships glide past. Above Shell Island, Gulf of Mexico and the horizon, clouds constantly change the sky and Bay. Picture above at dawn this morning. On the average, our view is above average. Sometimes spect...

When Jeremy is here, he brews a pot of English tea, and after they leave I hope there’s tea remaining in the brown betty, because it makes the most delicious iced tea imaginable. Unsweet over ice: perfect. With supper last evening. Supper. Taking it out of the freezer, Linda thought it was beef. Turns out two patties of ground lamb I bought at TAFB commissary last week. She had hers plain, medium well. Folded into mine a chunk of English Stilton, on top a thick slice of marvelous Vidalia onion that we get once a year, springtime they show up. They are not hot, make a perfect onion sandwich, touch mayonnaise. Supper last night, seared on each side, rare lamb patty with Stilton, topped with Vidalia onion slice.  TAFB Monday evening, night ops. Starting at sunset, watching as they take off, rise high, bank left above me, west and south out over the Gulf of Mexico then around maybe far as Apalachicola, PSJ, Mexico Beach and back. Two lights coming closer, down, briefly d...

Noisily: when “acolyte” is a verb As it arrived ominously from the north and east, we watched a small sailboat anchored in the Bay just off our porch, four people diving unconcerned. A fearsome streak of lightning off to the east, thunder rumbling steadily but never close. Heavens darkened, Bay blackened, storm came over like doomsday with everything but the doom, the sailors divers eventually hoisted anchor and moved away, sail flapping noisily. Noisily. Acolyte, small boy with whom I could identify from seventy-five years ago, fiddled with his cross noisily through the sermon, tried noisily but unsuccessfully to catch the light in it and flash here or there, kept dropping it noisily against the wood pew. In time, to stop the adults and older boys from turning around and glaring at him, I collected his cross quietly, held it through the Prayers, Confession and Absolution, handed it back to him during The Peace. He was oblivious, bored, impatient, nothing to do but be s...

The Tempest Rose early this morning considering life’s renaissance of the last couple months: with blackened room and other factors, “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change,” thanks WmS, and most days lately I’m sleeping until about six; a sea change indeed, from early days in Apalachicola, summer 1984 onward, awakened by the predawn alarm of roosters crowing all across town, my waking and rising time has been for the birds, the fowl. With the climaxing of heart issues late summer 2010, excellent time of day to contemplate and write, or meditate. But renaissance is not a suffering, and life does not have to make sense or be explained. We like our new with the relocation hobby of watching ships come and go, especially larger ones. Yesterday, Federal Skye, 623 x 93, arriving to load wood pellets for Liverpool. This as she turned broadside in the morning sun, headed for Port Collect for today legitimizes our opening hymn, “The Church’s one foundation...

This evening fifty-eight years ago, we walked through the door of the emergency room at Athens General Hospital, we were living in Athens, Georgia, and I told the several nurses standing there, “We need somebody to tell us if we’re going to have a baby.” Behind me, Linda pushed an enormous stomach up to the counter, and the nurses burst into laughter. She was 21, I was 22, a Navy ensign, and we had been married exactly a year. It was our first experience with birth labor, and we thought what was happening was contractions, but we weren’t positive. Malinda was born that overnight. I had wanted a baby girl ever since taking care of first cousins the Malone girls when they were infants, and my heart filled to bursting with love for this child.  It was still the day and age when fathers were nobodies at hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to hold her until I took her out of the car when we arrived home a day later; after which Linda practically had to fight me to hold her even for...

Except for the black coffee and nibble of dark chocolate, little makes sense at 0314 when I finally surrender and get up for the day. As I gaze out into the distance, that row of green lights far away across StAndrewsBay, for example, is actually, as if actuality were a factor, the reflection of tiny green lights on kitchen appliances and the green light on the hvac thermostat behind me here inside the condo. Half my perception then is imagination, or more. Or fantasy: do old fantasies that are part of my being , comprise part of my reality. Or history. And who cares. 78.8F 81%. British voted 52 to 48 to leave the, when I was at UMichigan it was a huge speculative possibility called, Common Market. Though their vote affects others, it’s their sense of national identify v. being ruled by foreigners. EU seems like a great idea for them, free trade, free movement, interdependence eliminating war, common language, reassembling the tower of Babel. If asked to give up being American...

Thursday: looking forward to visit and lunch with Frank, don’t know yet where we’ll go. Favorite so far is Stinky’s out on 30A beyond SeaSide, best fried oysters. Best fried mullet, Gene’s Oyster Bar but can’t depend on the mullet arriving. Best beer?  Looks like a blue day but is not.  StAndrewsBay clear until a few minutes ago, tug towing two barges through the Pass and arriving just across from me.  In the Gulf, barges are towed from astern with wide distance between tug and barge, and between barge and barge. Once in the Bay, the tug stops (as I’m watching this moment) disconnects, snugs the barges together, then connects astern the second barge and pushes instead of pulling. This for tight control in the inland waterway where there are sharp turns, &c and where barges could drift and do damage or go aground if towed. Seems logical that the tug captain must first ascertain, before he stops in the channel, that the Bay channel will be clear...

Thursday: looking forward to visit and lunch with Frank, don’t know yet where we’ll go. Favorite so far is Stinky’s out on 390 beyond SeaSide, best fried oysters. Best fried mullet, Gene’s Oyster Bar but can’t depend on the mullet arriving. Best beer?  Looks like a blue day but is not.  StAndrewsBay clear until a few minutes ago, tug towing two barges through the Pass and arriving just across from me.  In the Gulf, barges are towed from astern with wide distance between tug and barge, and between barge and barge. Once in the Bay, the tug stops (as I’m watching this moment) disconnects, snugs the barges together, then connects astern the second barge and pushes instead of pulling. This for tight control in the inland waterway where there are sharp turns, &c and where barges could drift and do damage or go around if towed. Seems logical that the tug captain must first ascertain, before he stops in the channel, that the Bay channel will be clear ...

20160621 we watched two ships arrive through the Pass, east in the far channel to the hairpin, west in the near channel heading for the turn north toward the Port. Early on, Lauritzen’s CS Crystal, 587 x 92, from Veracruz to load wood pellets then to Liverpool - - Later, wine time as I was waiting for pelicans,  Sichem Hong Kong (Bertel Line) 422 x 66, with a cargo of molasses, last port Coatzacoalcos, Mexico.  May be her first time in here, as instead of waiting at the north turn as usual, her main tug slipped out into the near channel to pick her up early.  As I was snapping her, an osprey sailed by just out of Linda’s reach, clutching a large fresh caught mullet. Regret missing that pic. But last evening I realized how difficult it is to photograph wildlife, total patience required, and they move by so quickly. Besides the usual osprey, a large "sea-hawk" bird, black or very dark and with a red head, zipped by several times Summer re...

Sitting out here on my porch irrelevantly humming “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain” with Kate Smith somewhere back in the crevices of the cranium haunting mind and memories, trying to visualize what it would have been like in the ages when Selene, newborn, filled a fourth of the firmament, as astronomers say. Speeding away from earth at the rate of 1.48 inches per year, that would have been a long time ago. Already in my lifetime, though, she has moved almost ten feet farther away, and sure enough I can see she’s a little smaller than she was the day my parents brought me home from hospital. By a couple billion more years, she will have withdrawn so distant that earth’s entire ecosystem will have changed. "To her proud waves, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther'" will no longer be efficacious,   and Thomas Hardy’s prophecy will have come down, the Lord eternally grieving and eternally repenting, "Written indelibly On my eternal mind - - all the wron...

Full moon arriving last evening 72F 68% and a gentle breeze, pelicans sailing by heading east, Monday begins perfect. At least for me, us, in 7H. First day in seventy years the summer solstice has been greeted by the full moon. Reportedly, summer actually begins at four o’clock this afternoon.  Bit of dark chocolate, black coffee and a cool beginning for summer.  Full moon departing this morning It’s almost tomorrow, and here comes the sun - - - DThos+ DreamWeavers, 1953

What are you doing here? Summer weather, summer freedom. Instead of being and doing here this morning, you could be do ing anywhere under the sun instead of sitting in church. And your mind probably is, is anywhere . I know, mine is. I’m on Shell Island, where you were last Sunday morning. “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  Elijah bragging piously about his piety, to which Yahweh, Adonai the Lord, says,  ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire the sound of no sound at all.  What do you hear from God in response to your prayers? From the God of Elijah, what do you hear? Anything? What do you expe...