C5HM, COVID, XMAS, & T+
In my office early yesterday for a long overdue visit with a close friend of long years, "my boy", like a son! then on the way back along Beach Drive West to 7H. But first Beach Drive East over Tarpon Dock Bridge, I successfully fought off, then immediately regretted and have regretted ever since, overpowering my sensitive SRXV8's tug at the steering wheel as it tried to stop for oysters. My car loves me and knows best, next time I'll do what it says.
There've been, and it continues ongoing, losses due to covid. I like being here in 7H, never feel "stuck" here surveying my StAndrews childhood surroundings, looking over where my brother and I worked for years. Beloved Bay to the south, east and west, Beck Avenue Downtown to the north. The ice plant, hardware store, drugstore, postoffice and Mom's Cafe are gone, but Parks to walk in, stairs or elevator down to underground garage, and back up. SRXV8 at my disposal, though I only drive it to church office and back, not a thousand miles a year, it's fifteen years old and slowly creeping up on 70,000 miles.
Rainy or cold days, a few slow trudging laps around the garage if the weather's too yucky for outside. Office on the other side of town sheltering maybe twenty percent of my life's accumulation of books whittled down with every move and relocation and finally decimated with this final settling.
There's no boredom, but even if so, boredom's my second favorite, second only to my sins that, as I said Sunday, do not in the least sorely hinder me as apparently do the sins of whoever wrote last Sunday morning's collect for Advent 3 (sad for him, he needs to get a life).
But anyway, for every loss there's a gain. One thing that's been lost this year and isn't coming back is my daily drive to write a +Time blogpost. Which comes to mind because something I read this morning alleged that the closing of coffee shops and such because of covid has robbed people of the encounters and companionships and personal interactions that we need to excite our imagination. Human interface is important.
Even though I'm basically a loner who enjoys my own company and absolute silence around me, I'm thinking the allegation is true. In over ten years of doing this, I've written about Bible stuff, other religious stuff, how Panama City and Bay County were for me back in the late 1930s and through the 1940s and first half of the 1950s before I left for college and escaped into the Navy. Driving out in the woods to cut a Christmas tree the Sunday before Xmas every year. I've written about friends, and loved ones, and what I've fixed for my breakfast. Where the Hudson, Nash, Packard, Kaiser-Frazer, Crosley, and DeSoto-Plymouth dealerships were when I was a boy, about haunting them all for car brochures, most of which I still have.
've written about Navy life and what of it I loved and would do again if life started over vs what I'd cut and run and come home instead, about my years of business travels later, the dozens of cars I've owned, and finally "finding myself" in my seminary years. Some of life that was none of your business I've whizzed by and said ho anaginoskown noeito so only Norm gets it. I've written about the churches I've served and the cities and towns I've loved living in.
Of great joys and extreme sadnesses, fears and deepest griefs. About Happy, and Pensacola, Chryslers at high speed on streets of East Hill dark nights. Cove School. HNES. Bay High Band. Of trips across country and back, deep snow in Winnipeg, Kings Cross in Sydney. From time to time've doubtless written more about my children and grandchildren than they thought Papa should tell. About my political inclinations and my theological doubts. About life as a boy playing around Massalina Bayou and in the woods that were throughout the Cove in my Time. About the chinquapin trees and my BB guns and cap guns.
About frustration with watching normal, innocent and fun boy games and toys being swept away in frantic cultural cleansing of social correctness. Of my shame at having grown up as a normal Southerner of my Time and not realizing those unspeakable sins until I was a college freshman and looking around me. Of my contempt for racists driving pickup trucks with Confederate battle flags furling from the back corner of the truck bed. What I've preached as an Episcopal priest and pastor, goofy parishioners I've known from time to time, mindful that there's no Statute of Limitations on telling the things they confessed to me over the years, got to take all that to the grave.
Maybe blame covid, maybe fault the isolation it's imposed, maybe the stress of life, but at some point, or during some phase of the period from May 2018 to Summer and Autumn 2020, life caught up with and passed me and I wearied of sharing. Not of remembering, but of sharing. It isn't depression, it's life phasing and closing chapters and moving on. Though whoever wrote that article today is right, imagination is compromised, squelched. Or is it not loss of imagination, but declining interest. Except for the last panicky gasp of ongoing lunacy, election anxiety is alleviated for the most part. All my computers but one have basically died. What? Shall I eat and walk and sit here playing online Solitaire. Think and write or sit here and grow old. For ten years or so I enjoyed a glass of red wine daily about sunset; wine with dinner (noon) some days, otherwise that has phased into one martini a week, which enhances Sunday afternoon's high priestly nap; as with MLP from the Old Place, still waking up looking across StAndrewsBay, 7H good better best of all.
Looking south at Davis Point and beyond, and east down the shoreline where Annie & Jennie once docked, and thinking of Alfred, it's a grey day. Cat5HMichael swept away once and for all that dock sticking out from E. Beach Drive, but with the binocs I can still see where it was, from 7H. C5HM badly marred that long dock off 7H next to Oaks by the Bay Park. But then I don't think anyone had walked out on that dock in twenty years or more. Maybe longer.
RSF&PTL
T