musings v ravings
Some may duh, some may understand my sense these days of having lived through the end of Weimar as the people - - who because we are so diverse are not a People in the true sense of Reich even though being served the kool-aid and insatiably swilling it (though some, perhaps enough to carry the victory again, self-identify as Volk) - - frenziedly transition into the new Realm. And factions of would be Opposition comically disintegrate into impotent irrelevance. ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω and leave it at that.
Talking to myself, remember, some of us do that, especially as we age into irrelevance. The musings or ravings, but not rantings because there's no emotion left in it, of an old man who obviously is leaving port.
Speaking of which, my intent for this morning was to copy and paste an essay by another retired octogenarial Episcopal priest writing pathetically, somewhere between desperate and resigned, from a retirement community that he up and front admitted was a nursing home. Born in 1933, he's 87, which is three gardenia years from alphabet ninety, and I'm not going to look in the mirror this morning as I shave that old man who keeps surprising me in my bathroom: I think he may be the grandfather of that guy who sells pillows in the television commercial. Is it pillows or mattresses? I think it's pillows.
But what came on instead was an article about a 1949 Diamond T pickup truck that's for sale. Okay, so this takes me back into the late 1940s period after WW2 and before the magical 1950s broke upon me. My other magical Time was my own forty-somethings, but that's another blogpost for Neverland.
In that Time, my father was in the wholesale seafood business, with a fish processing plant (that sounds grand but was not) that was where Uncle Ernie's parking lot is this morning. I'm looking over there from this my BeckSide chair in my office/study/den at this very moment. Which, because it's like being in Heaven looking down on the place of my childhood, is one reason I so love 7H.
In our fish house, besides the ubiquitous huge spiders, was a long bench for dressing and packing fish, a "steak machine" for slicing huge groupers and red snappers into inch-thick steaks (a filet or fillet is down the side of the backbone, a fish steak is across the backbone), and a crew of workers, that down through the years included Crab Long and Dick, old Richard McCaskill, who had worked with my grandfather since the early 1900s and was among those who helped him and my family in their desolating grief upon the death of my father's brother Alfred in January 1918. And Dick & Annie McCaskill, who lived a few blocks north on Frankford Avenue, our same dirt road in the 1930s, but respectably beyond what the invisible line segregated off as "N. Hill", showed up on a Christmas Day when my (and I was the first and only child in that Time) parents had nothing, at our door with a roast chicken and dressing, and the works.
Anyway, I'm here in the same place, including looking down the Bay shoreline toward The Old Place and across beyond Davis Point, where it all comes back.
So: my father's business included trucks with large insulated walk-in van-like bodies that loaded up every week and took truckloads of iced-down fresh local seafood on their routes north into Alabama and Georgia, selling to cafes, grocery stories and fish markets. My father's trucks were Chevrolets, a GMC, then, because Bubber Nelson couldn't get us Chevrolet trucks during the extreme shortage of new vehicles after WW2 and my father switched to Karl Wiselogel at W&W Motors, Dodge trucks. All of which I drove as I practiced and learned to drive starting from age 12. So, I've been driving 72 years now. But I digress.
Anyway, one of my father's business associates, whose trucks were just like ours including he may have had some Dodge trucks, I don't remember, was Alvin Cook. Alvin's trucks were very often at our fish house, backed up to our loading ramp, loading crates of fish for his own business, which was similar to ours. Alvin and Gracie were friends as well, with whom we took a couple of spring azalea tours, one to Mobile and one to Tallahassee. On one trip, Alvin had a 1948 Dodge sedan just like ours except theirs was burgundy red and ours was deep green; on the next trip Alvin was driving a brand new black, I think 1950, Packard sedan. Which sort of ties into wherever I think this blogpost may be going, I'm not sure. BTW and again, the blogpost is for me not you, so exit whenever you DWP, I don't care.
Another anyway. One day Alvin drives up in a brand new Diamond T truck. I nearly swoon as, to Alvin's chagrin I crawl all over the new truck, gorgeous red, Diamond T red, with black fenders. That would have been late 1940s I guess. Growing up, I learned to watch my father's reactions, moods and tempers so I could ease the gardenia hell out of the alphabet way as needed from time to time for my own safety and wellbeing. On this occasion, introduction of a Diamond T into our middle class business complex, I recall my father commenting to Alvin, and I knew he was chiding Alvin for trying to put on the dog. I mean, a Diamond T, are you serious, the Cadillac of Trucks?
In those days, our property, which as I say is now Uncle Ernie's reserved parking lot, was on 12th Street, a dirt road with deep ruts. Our property itself was rolling white sand dunes, where we stacked our dozens or hundreds of wooden packing boxes ready for use. Each box held a hundred pounds of iced down fish when dragged across the loading platform into the backed-up truck. At the edge of our lot, where the white beach sand faded into dirt road, were two large pine trees that gave wonderful shade and cool on hottest summer days. Walt will remember, there may have been three pine trees, I'm not sure. Under those pine trees on hot days we parked our trucks. And our cars, at least the 1936 Pontiac and the 1942 Chevrolet; but never the new 1948 Dodge, because the pine trees dripped resin. What I best remember though, is Alvin Cook parking his brand new Cadillac of Trucks Diamond T out of the sun in the shade of the pine trees, and going to my father's office for business and to visit for an hour or so, while I went over his Diamond T from top to bottom, front to back, inside and out. See, vehicles were never locked in those days and years. And the windows were left down.
It was a classy truck. I'm delighted to think of it this morning while the rest of the nation grimaces at the Democrats' absurdities. And my breakfast is ready: two kinds of lox (thin sliced smoked salmon) with thin sliced French bread, toasted, and creamy goat cheese from TJ's in Tallahassee.
Top: Enviva Daiwan Kalon 590x98 making for Studtrup with a load of wood pellets, passing 7H at 6:30 this morning. White hull markings read "Wisdom Line"
T
car pics are all supposedly Diamond T vehicles. I didn't know they ever made car, but they made cars a few years in the early 1900s, then switched to trucks, except perhaps for a few truck chassis custom made into cars such as the couple station wagons