not so clear

No, it isn't very clear, is it, and you know what? Lots of things are not very clear these days, and not only in my life but in the lives of people I know and love and, more, in people far and wide whom I have never and will never lay eyes on, though just closing my own eyes, I know their angst. Life seems to have abandoned us, yesterday we drove to Tyndall, over and back, BX, commissary, barber shop, and the hurricane's devastation on that side of town is incredible, not quite Rotterdam, Cologne, Tokyo or Berlin in 1945, 

but we are looking at a long recovery. Maybe not so much in the pulling down and clearing away as in rebuilding, its planning, designing to new code, permitting, raising financing, construction. And it remains to be seen who all will stay, rebuild, and continue or start over, versus who is long gone, experience more desolating for some than for others. 

Along with other cities and towns along the Gulf coast, we now have our own place in history. I'm grateful to have lived into it, as many of my classmates and friends did not, I'm thinking of Bill and Philip and Parker and Tommy and Virginia and Dan and Tom and Warren and so many others; and at the same time I'm wondering, but not oppressively, what future catastrophe will strike my beloved place, that I thankfully will miss. MLP is gone, and that leaning cedar tree that, over a hundred years ago, my father sat in for his picture in his Sunday best. And I had thought of those cedars as eternal.

To me still, the most horrendous evidence of the hurricane's force is seen less in the hundreds, maybe thousands, of crumpled and collapsed manmade structures than in the forests of huge pines all snapped off at the same level and lying in the same direction. The unfocused anger stirs over and again every time I drive through the scene of eternity's crime, but I'm looking for that rage to abate as I become accustomed to new old familiar places that are not as magically beautiful as they were in my Time. I'm so glad to have known how beautiful my beloved hometown was, maybe it will seem so again.

I'm thinking of my college roommate Brad's friend John who dropped out of college to join the Army (this was in the mid 1950s) and soon after boot camp found himself PCSing overseas to a country I'll not name. Single, John was quickly on the prowl for female company. He wrote Brad that he had never seen such ugly women, but that after a couple months he could tell a pretty one from an ugly one. I'm thinking maybe Panama City and Bay County will in Time look beautiful to me again, perhaps even before a hundred years from now when the trees are starting to return.

About the first picture above. My cellphone camera records that I snapped it at 11:33 pm last evening. This morning not so early because I went to bed just after one o'clock this morning and so slept late, which was glorious for a change, when I got up I looked at the picture and thought what the hell with the blogpost - - I'll cut myself some slack for a change. The change, all the changes including declining to hold myself to a Time schedule and frame, are part and parcel of life as Hurricane Michael has rendered it. Gimme a break. 

T