Summer 2018: rain and rainbows

Thursday evening weather, I just got it, I get it, it's the weather. It's depressing, I want out. If the summer's going to be like this I want out, I want to go back to Newport. Rhode Island, July 1957 where, just arriving from Panama City, standing on the parade ground in a sailor suit, long collar flapping behind me in endless wind, was like an outdoor ice box in bright sunshine. Newport. A strange new sort of newness far away and I was here, wherever I am it's always here not there, now a new land, everything new and different. Even though this was school, four months OCS, July through October, as September started there was a strong sense of not being where I was supposed to be, I didn't register for classes, they're starting school without me, dawning awareness that everything was past and I was in a new place and life, an adult, no longer a student, an adult. It was eerie. I remember. A Time of awareness that what was familiar would not be again, that everything I had been doing for twenty-one years was for this: starting new all over again in a sailor suit. This isn't what I'd expected.

I don't remember my first day out of the womb, September 14, 1935. I recall my first day at Cove School, September 2, 1941, Pearl Harbor three months ahead and how different it would all be tomorrow. I remember my first day at Bay High, September 6, 1949 and for the first time knowing what it was like to go from senior to freshman. I remember my first day at UnivFlorida, September 14, 1953 my birthday, senior to freshman again. But Newport: this was different, on my own and uneasy except that looking around me I saw that I could do as well as the next man. Man?

This is depressing, alphabet depressing. It's the weather. It's the blasted weather. I want to go home and start over, barefoot until school starts in the fall. Mama. Mama?

My vacuum: July 1957 to September 14, 1980 when I resumed my life by starting theological seminary on my birthday. What happened to those years?

Summer 2018. Depressing. And it's raining out there beyond Shell Island, can you see it? 

Depressing? no it isn't. Another rainbow, but with the sun shining on it from the west

This rainbow curved in right onto the beach below 7H, into the trees in the park next door.

Is there a promise here that I'm missing?

T