anamnesis

To be sure, already I've said this more than once, but with three hurricanes in the Atlantic and a yellow X in the Gulf of Mexico it drifts across the mind again.


That the first weekend of November 1993, driving across Tallahassee in a light drizzle, on my way to pick up Nicholas at school when the bell rang, hurrying because I was running late, I ass-you-me-d that the pickup truck in front of me would go on across the yellow light and so would I follow, when suddenly he stopped and, slamming on brakes, on the wet pavement I skidded into the truck and saw the hood of my car fold up in my face and my car's transmission come up into the seat beside me. It made me skittish, nervous about driving for the next several years, and a lesson from which I'm still both recovering and benefitting over a quarter-century later. Just so, three hurricanes curving north and east far out in the ocean is scant relief, the fact they are there, and worse that October is yet to be suffered again, is never far from my uneasy state of mind. 

That for untold years I in complete ease of mind ignored the Atlantic until something made its way into the Gulf of Mexico is not in the least pacifying. Sleeping relatively peacefully the night of 9 October 2018 and waking the morning of 10 October to what, turning on the television, I exclaimed as "OMG it's a G_d d_ _n category 5 hurricane" was life shifting such that nil will ever be the same; exactly in the exact same way that Christian theologians like to say "we cannot go back to before Easter". 

We cannot go back to before 9/11.

A professor at the University of Michigan, as the calendar crossed December 7, 1962, remembered exactly where he was and what he was doing when the news came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and that his thought was "How different it will all be tomorrow!" and indeed it was. Is. 

We can remember, but we cannot get it back. 

POD: read the lectionary lessons for next Sunday while we wait for the folks to bring and install our new shutters early afternoon. Wednesday church and supper this evening.

Breakfast: mug of hot black, sandwich of crabmeat toasted under cheese on Good Seeds bread.

RSF&PTL

T