trust me

Morning, I love this morning, Friday. Not TGIF like, hell, I’m retired and no longer have an office with my secretary filling up my “IN” basket all day long, haven’t had that for forty years, sixty years I’ve been a naval officer now, forty of it retired and TGIF is no longer my motto, it’s more like TGIMonday anymore.

As a parish priest I always took Monday off, it was a great day to make a gap between last week’s sermon and next week’s. Nowadays with no office hours, it’s every day actually, 82, I ain’t nobody’s gardenia assistant, I just help out as needed, good for a codger. When my father died, July 1993, I started driving from Apalachicola to Panama City every Sunday afternoon, returning to Apalach on Wednesday morning, to look after my mother and especially to raise Kristen, who was mine from before she was born, I claimed her the instant I found out she was a girl and, living in the rectory parsonage manse next door to the church and so never having had one day off all those years, started taking Monday and Tuesday off. Don't like it? Try calling me on it.

Anyway, not TGIF, schoolboy and office worker stuff, in my second life it was TGIM. Here in my third life it doesn’t matter except that this is a really good day so far. It started at one-something with my sacrifice to Father Nature, couldn’t go back to sleep and got up at two o’clock. Coffee. Nice outside but quite close at 77°F and 88%. Some bright flashes of lightning too far out over the Gulf to hear thunder, but a perfect Florida summer morning, bright red orange Mars in the western sky, now gone as the sky lightens into daytime. What did I do early? Read.

Always I’m keeping an eye out for something to read, like a bucket-list item, a book I’ve not read and time is fast running out, don’t present myself at the pearly gate not having read the books. Browsing online a day or so ago I came across something about J D Salinger and remembered I’d not yet read Catcher in the Rye. Sipping coffee in today’s wee hours, I downloaded it, free, I’m a cheap you-know-what and I almost only read free books anymore, so Catcher free. When Linda came out with my square of dark chocolate and a second cuppa black, I put Catcher down to visit a bit. Where was I? Somewhere in chapter 4, Holden in the can watching Stradlater shave and dress to go out with his date, which Holden gets upset is Jane. Where are they going on their date? New York probably if there’s time, she only signed out for nine-thirty. What I missed as a teenager: life at a boy’s prep school close enough to New York City to take a train into NYC with a date for the evening. But Holden has failed four of his five classes, kicked out, heading home for Christmas holidays and won’t be back. In fact, his luggage is already packed. He’s obviously bright if not brilliant, only interested in English, writing, and reading books, this is about his third or fourth unsuccessful school. I’ll see what happens if I can stop laughing long enough to read another paragraph and go on to another page. Stradlater wanting his roommate to write a composition for him and dumb it down a little so the teacher won't know it's Holden's work.

What would I give to be sixteen? When you get five weeks from eighty-three you’ll know. Life's an unending struggle though, you can trust me on this one, I wouldn’t do it all over again, way, way too many, many places where two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and doing it all again I’d get a few of them wrong and end up in the gutter instead of here at 7H. Trust me, I know. Better to just live with the memories. Besides I wouldn’t want to start over and take a chance on never getting to drive that Olds Cutlass.