BTDT and this ain't it

Tuesday 201702140447 CST Seaboard Pacific V45 525x91 arriving with general cargo from Kingston. In the dark while sitting in my chair-by-sea taking a tentative sip of hot black, I noticed early Bay action, tug slowly gliding out to stand by. So looked out toward the Pass to see ship lights just moving in to StAndrewsBay, grabbed camera, donned light jacket, out to 7H porch rail to wait. 

Pic from left. Green channel navigation light beyond which Χάρων the ferryman of Hades heads ever for me. Seaboard Pacific V45. Red nav light. Another green. Red lighted tower beyond Courtney Point, one of these days I’ll bother to locate it on NOAA chart 11391. Lights of an industrial facility along Magnolia Beach. Lights of cute tug Little Toot, and behind her, condo lights along Thomas Drive.

Today. It’s past 6:30 in Winston-Salem, so Joe may already have left — or not, it’s still dark, but he’s a little east of us so may be light there now. Early morning driving away always reminds me. In our Navy days, when we were stationed miles north, Newport, Norfolk, WashDC, Columbus, Harrisburg — not Ann Arbor we never drove home on leave from AA we rode the train once at Christmas — we always stopped for one overnight driving home to PC. Toward dusk, we kept an eye out for Motel Six trying to avoid the $20 tariff at Holiday Inn but sometimes anyway, Linda would have us up at four o’clock, first one child, then two, then three, immediately on the road headed south before dawn. We no longer drive much in the dark, never early morning and seldom after sunset even locally. Something in the paper recently, or in a magazine Linda was reading, maybe Consumer Reports Health, said "eighty is the new forty": trust me, that’s b.s., a crock of it,  to be scriptural it's σκύβαλον, just trust me; I remember forty, BTDT and this ain’t it. Except in the mind, and even that’s slipping away.

Best early memories of predawn up and on the road. First 1957 in our green 1948 Dodge. In our new 1958 Ford. In our orange Opel. Mid sixties in our Dodge station wagon. Ford Thunderbird in the 1970s and that enormous yellow Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon I ordered from Key Olds in Columbus, Ohio just before Tass was born. Late 1950s through the 1970s. My friends, life is short, and we haven’t much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, and make haste to be kind …

With two weeks sabbatical to go, ’ve started two new books. For fiction, A Gentleman in Moscow which loving. And to agonize my mentals, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil which learned about from a FB friend, wasn’t aware of it or the raging controversy of its day and for decades after. In the 2017 lies-are-truth-if-told-repeatedly, or- with-executive-authority, or-with-passing-fervent-conviction-before-moving-on-to-the-next-lies, or-to-fools-NewSpeak, the book will be a case, at the very least, of alternative facts - differing points of view, where, early on, political correctness is all that counts and stirred vicious hatred of Arendt. I read the Intro last evening. Not to be moved, I enter Arendt’s book with my own preconceived convictions set in concrete from having begun life on the edge of the German Holocaust, ocean distant, but newsreel close as the Ritz Theatre on Harrison Avenue downtown. It’s a topic of ongoing, unending, lifelong terrible fascination of horror to me. I saw and know what happened and continues today as Germany and the Germans slipped away scot and conscience free while innocent Palestinians pay for the atrocities of once supposedly civilized Northern Europe. But we are not civilized. My Lai. Shock and Awe. Never certain, I am nevertheless certain what should have been done when Germany surrendered unconditionally, but that was not done, and now is too late forever. But not to play my hand before the book is read and the game played. 

From 7H, Tuesday sunrise across mia terra

DThos+ in the Not New Forty