Davis Point

We have wonderful and memorable as well as terrible stories not only in our Scripture but in our own lives and the lives of our families and communities, that become our personal history.

Randomly recollected and fresh, a category 5 hurricane with desolating damage, for us a ten month Hurrication exile, coming home to revised geography where landmarks are gone, lingering physical, mental and psychological aftereffects including an ineffable confusion as everyone around me pretends everything is restored. Covid19 bent on changing lifestyles, populations, and the landscape of civilization. Political strife setting a nation against itself in ways that will hasten its fall as every nation in history has fallen; leaving me thankful for life as it was for me personally in my generation but sad for loved ones and their destinies.

WW2 that gave me specific mindsets for my lifetime, but that's aftermath brought the Linda Peters family to town from Alabama. Robert Frost was right, though he only mentions one time and place where two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and that he chose one, when our divergent roads are innumerable and constant, and most of our divergent roads are laid on us by history, others, and fate, without our even being aware.

Yesterday I recalled a family journey that all my life, from the first time my grandmother told it to me as a little boy, has been part of my soul because I pinpoint it as the raison d'être for my existence. That the devastating death of my father's brother in 1918 led my grandparents to depart StAndrews into a wilderness of grief just as Abraham left Haran and Moses left Egypt, for a decade or so before circling back to StAndrews. That's the stuff of metaphors in theological reflection. For a couple of years their journey to escape life had them back home in Pensacola, where my father met my mother, stole her from her boyfriend Tom, married, returned to StAndrewsBay, and the first result was me. All, for me, in my mind, thanks to the family tragedy of Alfred's death, though innumerable roads diverged for innumerable and unnamed people before, between and after January 1918 and September 1935. Yet that is what I see from here on 7H porch looking out at Davis Point, round which the Annie & Jennie sailed into the squall of my destiny that winter midnight high tide.

Whether my sister and brother look to that crisis period quite as central, seed, and core of life as I do, I don't know. If not, they would be just as right. Because every choice we make, every choice made for us by others, and every event laid on us by fate has the effect of settling our future until the next happenstance whether we realize it or not. Destinies are changed and set and changed again and re-set at every fork in life's road. As I see it this morning, my life these past 48 years would have been immeasurably impoverished had I stayed aboard ship one particular night in San Diego the summer of 1971, instead of going home.

My father believed in Fate in a way that I do not. Any number of times, he told me that "the Old Master" had set a date for his end and it was beyond him, there was nothing he could do to change that at some instant he would be gone. A heart attack, or a truck would hit him, or a lightning bolt. But his fate was set.

For all I've read about us not having Freewill at all, I'm not that way, The fall of 2010 I had choices, and my family said it was up to me, they wouldn't choose for me, I had to make up my own mind. Abide quietly my final two-to-five months and journal away to the end, or look for a heart institute. I don't believe all that and my latest ten years were set before Eve enticed Adam into biting the apple and everything falling into place. I don't believe Andreas Wäller had to leave what is now Germany for Broad Bay that is now Waldoboro, Maine, or George Weller had to leave the bookbinding shop in Boston to read for holy orders so that I could fill my place in the jigsaw puzzle. I'm not a fatalist, I believe I have a hand and choices and a share in whatever the future brings for the generations after the lives of those I so love this morning.

Why am I taking this walk this morning? IDK, maybe because of the storm we had at four o'clock yesterday afternoon, sudden and quite fierce it was. Snapping a shot of its clouds across the Bay. Having in front of me, as I do at this moment, this constant view of Davis Point

that the Annie & Jennie sailed around that last night of Alfred's life. Alfred going upstairs to my, our, his bedroom in the Old Place to take a nap before Mom came upstairs with a cup of hot cocoa to wake him for the A&J voyage down the Gulf coast to Carrabelle. The picture of my history as I see it is constantly in front of me, beyond 7H porch, the view out the window by my Bay side chair in the living room. But I know full well that's not all there is to it.