μακάριοι, lucky, happy, blessed, fortunate

Every Day Is a Beautiful Day. Clouds, I prefer them crisp and clear, differentiated, and this morning’s are fuzzy, but Monday afternoon we glimpsed our old normal weather after weeks of gray. 

Rain overnight, rain arrived late evening as we sat outside on 7H porch, maybe more today, but I’m good, it's all good, it’s a beautiful day, let the reader understand. Not all readers, a few readers, couple of readers.

Monday: walk, longest park bench sit-down we’ve had in our years of walking, one of us feeling eighty-two. Home, pills, nap didn’t work, so read, what? My daily catholic spiritual emails. Then M.Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War, another book to read slowly so as to live as long as possible within the story long ago and far away. Two different occasions Monday, watched osprey sail by clutching mullet, μακάριοι, lucky, happy, blessed, fortunate birds, they eat as good as I do. Watched an hour speech online, Eli Wiesel, evidently to a Jewish audience, perhaps university students, though I really couldn’t tell, on morality and ethics in the evil that today has become. Why do I think it may have been a college class? By what stirred their self-conscious laughter at themselves. Eli Wiesel, what a loss, though he would've said that of the death of the most insignificant of us, the least of us. 

Early evening, watched Mrs. Miniver, which I saw at the Ritz Theatre downtown when I was seven or eight, 1942 or 1943. And yep, there it was: seventy-odd years I’ve remembered the startling scene when, walking in her garden, she comes across a downed German aviator, terrifying, he chases her into her kitchen, ravenously bites and chews bread, gulps milk while pointing his Luger at her. Greer Garson. Highly acclaimed and Academy Awards, it wouldn't do well today, but President Roosevelt pressed that it be quickly distributed and shown across America, anti-German propaganda early in WW2. We had tons of propaganda in those days, so effective and into the center of my being that to this day I cannot shed my bitter hatred of Germany and Germans, and my horror at my own German heritage. Late, supper, too late, we never do that, I had a toasted cheese sandwich, then to keep from going to bed on it, read Soldier another two hours until dozing in my chair.

Today perhaps. Hour at church office about Sunday’s worship services, Tyndall commissary, BX, and barbershop. There’s got to be an oyster for me in there somewhere.  

Rain now, hard rain. Glad we no longer own the roof at The Old Place couple blocks down the StAndrewsBay shoreline. Roof, early 20th century plumbing, yard, unease sleeping upstairs with dozens of openings downstairs, bear swimming across from Tyndall and roaming our neighborhood … 

Close flash of lightning and loud clap of thunder.

Not clear, but on the beach at water's edge seven stories down, a pelican huddling, perhaps stunned by the lightning or thunder. S/he's going to die. Not afraid, he has no idea what death is.

Neither do I.

All pelicans go to heaven.

DThos  

Monday morning from PB407, Star lines ship making for East Terminal to load woodpulp.