just thinking

Boulder, Colorado. Been watching the osprey cam off and on from one egg to two eggs to three eggs to hatch and fledge. This year's three chicks are hunting and bringing fish home to the nest. No bird expert, to me they look like adults and it's fun to watch them mature. In due course they will leave on their migration south. From what I read (check out the link below), they don't stick together in migration and over the winter, but go their independent ways, and the first year the new young remain behind while the others head north again, but when they return, the same two parents mate again for another season at the same nest. 

https://www.bouldercounty.org/open-space/management/osprey-camera/

The sermon yesterday, I was really taken with it. The owl story brought one of my own life stories to mind, of which I, like the boy in the story, have always been ashamed. When I was ten or twelve, my main Christmas gift was a Daisy BB gun, which I expected and intended to be my first of many guns for hunting and for all our regular good old boy Southern stuff. One day I was "hunting" in the back yard and saw a bluejay flutter over and light in one of the chinkapin trees that were where our carport was built in 1948. I took aim and fired. Good shot! The bird fell to the ground and I ran to pick it up. Dead in my hand was a baby bird, a bluejay fledgling. I was so sad and ashamed that I never shot at another animal. 

Like the boy in yesterday's story, that moment has stayed with me, come back to me from time to time, affected me in various ways throughout my life. What might my life have been had I taken a different road in the yellow wood that day, missed my shot, never had that unfortunate awakening? For one thing, up until then I'd thought to be a bird hunter like Daddy Walt, my grandfather Gentry, because I loved the dove and quail my grandmother used to cook for us. But a dead little bird in my hand. This, my story, I don't think I've ever told anyone. It's one of my secrets. I'm still ashamed. Please don't tell.

There was so much in the sermon. I was glad we had a lot of visitors there to listen. As the preacher's idea of making one's life stories developed, some of my own stories flashed through my mind, most of them far too personal to share outside my own head , and they will die with me unless at some point I become so addlepated as to begin writing them down, typing them out as they come to mind. I'd have to get my priest confessor to set aside a large block of Time, over days and weeks, to hear me for Reconciliation of a Penitent. And, it being years too late to make amends for most of them, I'd be stuck with. Sometimes at church, indeed again yesterday, some of my stories pass through my mind during the liturgical general confession, and I make the sign of the cross during the absolution as the priest says "Son," hopefully forgiven.  

As I listened to the sermon I wondered if, at 82 fixin' to turn 83, I'm finished making stories. Life now is watching from 7H more so than doing anymore. No more cruises, no more flights, no more long drives, no more travel trailering - - I like life this way.

Our visit to the TAFB commissary, I bought a few lamb shanks, individually packaged. The one in the stew pot for today's dinner weighs over two pounds. There are carrots, celery. There'll be rice, Japanese rice, our favorite since 1963 when we moved to Yokohama, where still other roads diverged in Frost's yellow wood.

Monday then.

T