Rudyard & Warren
My early reading this Saturday morning was a couple of articles from Good Housekeeping, June 2020, which I didn't even know Linda subscribed to it. To my knowledge, I've not looked at GH in years. The first I remember it was coming to the house when I was growing up, along with Saturday Evening Post, and maybe Life, and maybe Time magazine.
And the last I remember GH was it coming our years in the rectory at Apalachicola. Good years, the best of life, as though I'd finally found myself, or as though life or myself had finally found me and I was at last where since age ten I'd known I was meant to be. Still a uniform though. Still other than a "lay" title too. Rev in writing and in speaking Fr instead of Mister, which I never got used to. Or Commander, which I did like. Anymore, only USAA still calls me Commander though.
But where was I? Oh yes, GH. One article was about adjusting to Change, things one might do to keep healthy in the face of. I'm doing most of them. Breakfast this morning, again, one slice of Good Seed bread toasted, creased for easy folding (crease on one side, turn over and fold the other way), smear of butter on one side, half jar of anchovies laid out on the other side, fold the buttered side over onto the anchovy side. Second mug of black coffee with.
The other article, more to my point, was about grief, how common it is. Not only in a death loss, but job change, marriage loss, estrangement of friend or loved ones. Move, a relocation that involved leaving what one had known and whom one had loved. Even retirement. I remember. Again and lifelong, the only job change I grieved was leaving the destroyer, even though the Navy loved me by sending us from Norfolk to Florida. Likely the GH article was timed to help us work and live with the covid19 disaster that is changing so much in so many people's lives. For us, me, life in 7H is not all that different except that in the Before we went out to eat several times a month, and Monday Friday walks with Robert and good visiting social time breakfast here and there. Less miles on the cars. Fewer. Shhh, don't call me that in public yet, eh?
But grief. In Time life will level out to what some folks refuse to call a New Normal, but that's what it is, will be. We are creatures of habit. The longer we're shut in, withdrawn, the more Normal it becomes. Will I take a sanitizing wipe and wear a facemask every time I stop by Tarpon Dock Seafood forever? Will I wear a facemask from now on any time I'm placing Communion wafers in the hand of some masked incognito human, as I mumble "Body of Christ" and take care not to touch?
An exceptional joy in life was the Sunday morning hour with my adult Sunday School class: must I regard this resort to some kind of goofy attempt at a written and posted online Sunday School lesson as New Normal and relax into it? What about the smiles and laughter? Okay, that's exactly what the GH article on grieving is meant to help me with, to recognize what's happening. All these changes are deaths, actually. What about oysters on the half-shell with all the noise and chatter and loud music going on around me. I mean, gardenia, WTH? Tell me what: Tombo, you remember what happened to you when you signed the contract to sell the Old Place, but you got through it and life is even better now. You remember telling people goodbye and knowing it was forever, but got through it and life is good. With HMichael, you weren't one of the falsely cheerful fools, you loosed your anger and grief into the open, and you felt and feel less phony because of it, mights well take the lid off now. I'm thinking of new technology: the pressure cooker my mother got back in, what, the late 1940s? It had a heavy little valve on top that rocked and hissed steam instead of the pot exploding. That's my metaphor for the grief I'm feeling this Saturday morning as I remember going in to church early so as to turn on the lights and the air conditioning in the library building, and put out the bibles for Sunday School. There won't be anyone in church either.
School days, school days - - Cove School
choosing, learning a poem, then standing to recite it in class. I'm thinking of Warren Middlemas
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Friday: Bahama Spirit, 615x106 arriving with aggregate, drawing 34' of water, appears to be inching warily along in a 42' channel, and finally, in front of 7H, picking up a tug to push her safely the rest of the way. A hazy day, so hazy the Shell "Island" was not visible all day, and unclear photographs. es tut mir leid.