much Time

201701070703 CST and 33°F wind 18 mph as Seaboard American leaves bound for Houston. Wind picking up and driving the steam, mist, on the surface of StAndrewsBay, making the cold seem bitter, nasty, raw.

But from son Joe in W-S, NC, snow overnight and still coming down

Burying today a friend of eighty years, lifelong, starting together at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in the 1930s, later two acolytes in red cassock and white cotta, the kneeling requirement was a killer: for some reason I never keeled over faint but think Tom did at least once. Through Cove School and Bay High, church youth group leaders together in high school. In 1952 he went off to W&L, in 1953 I to UFla, both of us KA brothers. Thinking cars, Tom had their family’s 1949 Chevrolet at college in Virginia and I recall riding in it once while visiting Linda at R-MWC; odd thing to remember, why do I? 

With the front seat pushed all the way back, he was driving, I was in the seat behind him, my right foot against his seat back, shoe moving back and forth obviously annoying, as he said, “Carroll, don’t do that.”  Tom’s father died during heart surgery in 1962 while the Navy had us at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. One evening while we were living in Apalachicola his son Tom was killed by a car while walking along the road at PCB, and I assisted Fr. Battin with the funeral the next afternoon. A father never gets over such a loss — we discussed it years later when he was drafting our Foundation contract to lease our Cove School property to the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast for use of Holy Nativity Episcopal School, which Tom and I have loved lifelong.

I won’t be saying these things at his funeral service this afternoon, but they will be in heart and mind.

My friends, life is short, and we haven't much Time …

DThos+ in Stoppage Time