eleven o'clock and all is well

It'll be a toss-up today, how to relax, to which the sense of entitlement begins beneath the soles of my feet and stretches into the depths of my soul, higher than the tallest angel standing outside the tomb in the Gospel according to Peter. 

Black coffee earliest, ambivalently we saw Joe off home to North Carolina, good and better best visit in recent memory but he's long years on his own, headed for sixty, and entitled to his own Time & Space. Walk with Robert and too much for breakfast, my cell phone clocked 1.7 miles so let it suffice.    Now back home in 7H and the toss-ups.

The day is clear, cool a seasonally pleasant 62° though bit breezy up here. May take my new telescope out on the porch and scan the horizon for ships at sea to the south and whatever's on and beyond Thomas Drive to the west of me. May sit here in my cell withdrawn from all that is. May blog. May brood over what might have been or be grateful for what is instead. May read my book, currently into Carlos Eire's boyhood in Cuba at their Batista to Castro change of reality. 

I do remember Fidel in the hills. I remember once, I was a sophomore or junior working in the Food Service Division at UnivFlorida, upstairs at "The Hub" helping prepare for a banquet. As mischief, going to the wall intercom that connected us to the kitchen on the floor below, I pulled down the switch and shouted "Viva Batista!!" and instantly heard a door slam and fury racing up the back stairs to burst into our prep room red-faced demanding "Who said that?" ready to murder. We were several boys in the banquet prep room when our Cuban male colleague burst in, and one of us replied "said what?" To which we got a barrage of Cuban Spanish epithets about Batista's evil. Maybe he was; was Batista more evil than the "cleansing" that was done as soon as Fidel came to power in January 1959, some will remember the kangaroo courts, the crowds shouting "the wall, the wall, to the wall" and the victims dragged out and shot forthwith. But my shouting into the intercom would have been what? 1954 or 1955 maybe 1956? IDK, Castro still in the mountains. I recall nothing, but seems to me that I later went and talked with that Cuban student, was told that his family had suffered terribly under Batista, and his hatred for the man was beyond feeling. So I apologized to him for my words that had lit his fuse. IDK but pray they did better under Fidel and Che.

My sophomore year at college I made friends with a Cuban student who was, incredibly in that time and place, a KA pledge when I was a brother (yes, I recall that era of life in this part of creation). Don't remember his name, he drove a black 1949 Buick Super sedan with Dynaflow, which was introduced exclusive on the 1948 Roadmaster, then was Buick's AT for years, and was intending law school after undergrad. For his magnificent singing voice, I dubbed him the singing barrister, which he liked. 

May mess around with my cars, several dozen in 7H, lined up here and there. May clean more computers: we don't appreciate that the gardenia things eavesdrop on our chatting and immediately flash up ads for whatever we mentioned to each other, fair warning.

May hang a couple of pictures. May go to my office at HNEC and continue its recovery from HMichael, but I don't think so, there's so much yet to do in there that it's tiring yea unto depressing even to contemplate more than a few minutes per visit.

May sit here and continue wondering how the hell I got to be 84 years old.

RSF&PTL

T