remembering, just thinking

Life moves along, doesn't it, and keeps changing, a fact of life that never changes. If I were doing it all again I'd live next door to a bakery that flew bread in from Paris every morning. Not only good regular French bread, but also brioche. They'd have a couple of tables on the sidewalk out front, and I'd go there every morning for coffee, bread and cheese. But it's chilly this morning, 51° wind NE 9mph and feels like 48° so this morning I'd go inside and sit at the table by the front window.

Nobody messes with me, not even the waitress, who knows what I want and just brings it, and refills my cup. She spoke once and I snarled and she got it. That was years ago. Anymore, I leave a buck tip and she puts my bill on the tab.

Life slips away, doesn't it. Slips away from us like a lifeline that we can't hold onto and keep sliding. 

If I were doing all this over, would I make all the same decisions? Probably. Although I might fly Navy jets off carriers, my eyes were good, and still are, I could qualify. Oh, except, come to think of it, they picked up my heart murmur while I was at OCS and sent me to the Navy hospital to be evaluated for November into December 1957 before deciding it was NCD, Not Cause for Disqualification, commissioned me ensign and sent me into my destiny. Or after college I'd stay on in Gainesville for law school. Or go on to seminary at Sewanee, which was my original expectation of myself. Except that a military draft was in effect and I remember that as a factor in the options I gave myself. 

Florida graduates in business administration were hoping to find jobs paying as much as $300 a month. Engineering graduates were looking for starting salaries as high as $350. Once commissioned, my pay as a Navy ensign was $222.30 plus $47.88 subsistence (food) allowance (BAS); plus a quarters, housing allowance, (BAQ) that I think but am not sure, was $150 a month; or maybe it was $110, I don't recall.* But "all told" I was earning more than I might have expected getting a job with a business firm right out of college, and actually more than BSE classmates who graduated with me. 

*Errata: Navy friend has reminded me, the BAQ was $85.50. So total Base + BAS + BAQ = $355.68. BAS and BAQ were federal income tax exempt.

How did I feel about all this - - well, my first sea duty, the destroyer, caused me to fall in love with the Navy, 

so I transferred from USNR to USN and stayed twenty years. In the MBA program at the University of Michigan, I remember feeling sad for my classmates who were interviewing and scrambling for jobs with Chrysler, Ford and GM: comparing their giving their lives for that to my own giving my life's time to my country, they seemed pathetic at the time. I was wrong, and on my second ship, the evening of November 1, 1969, underway for WestPac and the Vietnam War, and facing nine months deployment separation from family, I stood on the fantail under the flight deck looking east and decided I'm getting out of this C.S. outfit as soon as I'm eligible to retire. And that held, life slipping away. 

Would I do it all again? Well - - who knows. For sure, not all of it, that's fer sure, that's fer dang sure.

For one thing, given a choice, I'd be a Jew because God speaks, reads and writes fluent Hebrew as his first language, and Jesus was a Jew, and I'd grow up speaking it and reading the OT as part of my heritage instead of struggling mightily with it in my mid-80s.  And I'd have to be Greek so I could read the NT in my native language. The priest part? Any number of Episcopal priests have come over from Judaism, so okay. Of course, being a Jew in Greece during the 1930s and early 1940s poses a problem, but I'd not be the only one facing it, so why not me - -

as it is, the Holocaust is ongoing anyway. It is slowly resuming throughout Europe. And in America among ignorant lowest low class humanity every time a white man shoots a Jew it's because he hates Jews, because everybody is above him and he's got to hate somebody. 

Breakfast: second cup of black coffee, a brioche bun from France bought yesterday at the TAFB commissary, and a tiny remnant slice of blueberry pie. Even though the barbershop was empty I did not get a haircut, because - - well, just because. Now sitting here eating fresh blueberries while blogging.

Supper last night. Weather was too sharp for octogenarians, so we didn't go to church and out Christmas caroling. I cooked steaks on my new cast iron square grill pan from the Exchange. First beef I've had since my birthday in September. 

Thursday: still clinging to the lifeline!

RSF&PTL

T