February 1

Every day is something to someone, and just so, this is a date with markers on it for me. I retired from the U S Navy forty-one years ago this morning, took a moment's rest, went car shopping, started life anew, and here we are. Thirty-four years ago this evening we were in Mobile and son Joe telephoned from Killeen, Texas, where he and Dianne were in the Army, to say "You have a grandson! Nicholas Kevin Weller." In Alabama for diocesan convention hosted by Trinity, Mobile, I remember being welcomed so warmly by Albert Kennington, we were in a hotel room up high, looking south onto the long, winding causeway bridge across Mobile Bay and the battleship USS Alabama; my all time favorite hotel room view. Malinda was a nurse, still in Pennsylvania. Tass was back home in Apalachicola, at the rectory with my parents, who were there with her while we were in Mobile.

At diocesan convention that day, we visited with Fr Tom and Anne Byrne, catching up after three decades. Fr Tom was our rector at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Panama City my high school years, a friend and mentor who had encouraged my vocation to ministry when I was seventeen nearly eighteen and heading off to university; Fr Tom had introduced me to the vestry as seminary bound after college, gotten their blessing, called the bishop in Jacksonville for his blessing. At nineteen and a college sophomore, I rebelled and decided, or it was decided by stars or something, that I did not want to be an Episcopal priest after all, changed my major from pre-theology to business administration and here I am, or rather, here we are anyway.

Much water under many bridges. Was that me on the bridge watching and waving? Or was that me in the lifejacket, sweeping by under each bridge and looking up at whoever that was standing on the bridge waving?

When I retired from the Navy at forty-two, and again when I retired from parish ministry at sixty-three, I didn't expect at eighty-three to wake up this morning somewhere west of Phillips Inlet Bridge.

T

One lump, or two? One "L" or two?

Sometimes I find myself in poetry - -

On Anger   Rage Hezekiah

My white therapist calls it my edge, I hear Angry Black Woman. She says, Strength of Willful Negative Focus. She says, Acerbic Intellectual Temperament. I copy her words onto an index card. She wants an origin story, a stranger with his hand inside me, or worse. I’m without linear narrative and cannot sate her. We perform rituals on her living room floor. I burn letters brimming with resentments, watch the paper ember in the fireplace, admit I don’t want to let this go. What if anger, my armor, is embedded in the marrow of who I am. Who can I learn to be without it? Wherever you go, there you are. She asks what I will lose if I surrender, I imagine a gutted fish, silvery skin gleaming, emptied of itself—

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