Not Just Another Tuesday

What a great world to live in where big and ongoing news is the awards announcement envelope mixup at the Oscars. These things happen, I suppose, it’s just that the odds finally caught up with them. Will the same PriceWaterhouse team be managing the envelopes next year. The film to appeal to me might be Hacksaw Ridge except that I’ve read the entirety of it online. I wish I liked movies more, but there was never a time. Well, yes, Harry Potter, Tolkien, Narnia, and that I was doing it with my middle school students at HNES. I probably wasn’t a good teacher, I loved the kids too much, all of them together and each of them personally, to be a disciplined and demanding teacher. It was that way as a naval officer too, it’s just me.

Hot honey lemon water this morning, and now the black and dark. Last week’s barbershop adventure to Tyndall included a tour by the chocolates counters at both the exchange and the commissary to renew the little stash of heart healthy dark chocolate. At one square a day, we brought home enough for a couple months, but this morning I had two, which seldom happens, and not squares but truffles. 

What, grits for breakfast. That day in August that we dropped Kristen off for her freshman year at Oxford-Emory, we stopped on the way home at Callaway Gardens to sort of recuperate. There’s this thing with me that won’t let go of my girls, and leaving them at college has been among life’s most searing episodes. I’ll not go back forty years to Malinda, or to watching Joe drive off knowing it was forever, or to Nick moving away; but leaving Tass in Virginia was so traumatizing for me that we drove on up “home” to Pennsylvania and that groundhog morning that escapes its crevice in my cranium and comes to mind all too frequently to recover. It was August 1990 and I’m not there yet, but eventually, even soon. So, I was on grits, eh. August 2011 it was, we left Kris at OxfordEmory and drove down to Callaway Gardens. See, I’m from the Florida Gulf Coast, a StAndrewsBay native, and everything falls short of being home, even a DisneyCruise, even a train ride to Arizona, but I needed an interruption, just as in 1990. So a couple nights at Callaway Gardens. Nice, good, distracting. It’s no secret, I can look in the mirror and tell that my favorite thing about any adventure is breakfast, dinner, and supper, and just so there. The grits, the collards, the muscadine preserves. We came home with a couple jars of muscadine preserves, one for a friend, and a sack of their old-fashioned speckled white grits. 

Though growing up we had grits about every morning, seldom cooked this past near three-score years. But Callaway Gardens grits are addicting. When the sack was empty, we ordered two more sacks, 2-lb cloth bags. Proper southern grits are thick NOT SOUPY, and Linda adds cheddar cheese and this current pot, which I’m having another bowl for breakfast today, was cooked using half water and half chicken broth. I’m thinking that’s how Colonel Sanders made grits, they’re that scrumptious. 

The down side is that they nevertheless stir to mind and memories,watching my girls grow up and leave. Plus Joe and Nick. It’s been almost the hardest part of life. But am I down this morning? No, I’m going to have two fried eggs with my grits this morning. After my walk.

Bubba/Carroll/Tom/Dad/Papa

Supper: shriving the cupboard of fat and sweets: pancakes, butter, maple syrup