Poirot

Thirty days hath Septober,

April, June, and No Wonder;

all the rest have peanut butter,

except Chifforobe

(it's a tall thing, with big drawers).

Early, pitch black dark, and all white outside, no channel navigation lights visible through the fog. I love fog season.

But what the Aitch, I love all seasons, except Hurricane Season, which consumes three weeks of Spring, all of Summer, and most of Fall up to within three weeks of Winter. In fact, now that I think of it, once the half year of Hurricane Season is over, Thanksgiving is history, we are into the Holiday Season, the lights will be up in Oaks by the Bay Park next door, and there will be only what? twenty-four shopping days 'til Christmas.

Fully vaccinated but still wearing the facemask in most closed spaces, still haven't been to a restaurant to Eat Out, a once favorite Time2Time pastime, except for that one Sunday afternoon some months ago, outside at Uncle Ernie's with Beloved Brother and Family. Walt and I traded hats. Not afraid to Eat Out, just cautious, but some restaurants around here have outside dining tables where the Bay breeze sweeps through - - so, maybe soon, but to Eat Out gets to be an expensive habit.

Also - - noting "just cautious, I recall something that happened to me in July 1966 the dark night/early morning that, returning to the U S from three years in Japan, where we'd grown totally used to very different culture, the four of us landed at San Francisco. We collected our large orange cat Tiger from the PanAm counter (we'd flown military charter Flying Tiger Air, the cat came back PanAm luxury), picked up our rental car for the drive to Phoenix and then to Sherman and on home to Panama City. In Japan, all U S personnel were advised by Navy authority not to drink the local milk, because something like The Cows were Fed Fishmeal and the Milk Tasted Fishy, so for three years we'd been drinking Reconstituted Milk from the Navy Commissary. Your taste sensations have to get used to Reconstituted Milk, and we couldn't wait to taste Real American Milk again, so our first stop was at a SuperMarket. For a shock, the enormity of it, the prospect of going inside such an imposing place after the tiny, intimate shops of Japan (e.g., you bought your rice at the bottom of the hill, in the small Japanese village of cobblestone streets and delicate one-story wooden buildings with sliding paper shoji, at a Rice Shop where proprietor and family lived in the back of the shop, where rice was the only thing they sold, and there were many small barrels of different types, qualities, and prices of rices to choose from, from brown to white, from husk to glistening, from the cheapest unwashed with small rocks to pick out before eating to the most expensive pure clean thoroughly washed white rice), and the sight of going into such an imposing American SuperMarket was so overwhelming, intimidating, that I drove on and eventually stopped for the milk at a small Seven-Eleven or some such. We drank the milk from the carton. Thick, rich, creamy. But remembering that confrontation with sudden cultural change, I'm minding, after these months of covid shelter and self-quarantine and relative isolation, to not be reluctant just because of the psychological challenge of something that's almost forgotten and socially so new. It may sound stupid, but I've been there, and there have to be conscious First Steps reentering a vastly different culture. If you scoff, all it tells me is that you haven't been to places in your life that I've been to in mine.

What else? Haircut today. Yesterday, browsing Youtube online for something besides German or Hungarian or Russian WW2 films. Watched a Dick Tracy film from 1938. Our hero drove a black 1937 Plymouth sedan

and scrolling through English WW2 films, I came across a long list of free and no commercials complete Poirot films. Not just the television series, full length films. Watched one of an hour and a half or so, Poirot's Christmas. Started wickedly in South Africa in 1896, with diamonds, greed, murder, a night of love (or so she thought), abandonment. Paused with a black screen for a moment, then reopened in December, Forty Years Later, what? 1936, in England, Poirot's radiator not working, phone rings and the adventure is cleared for take off. Included cars from the late-1920s to the mid-1930s.

Still foggy. What for breakfast? Yesterday oyster stew. Today? IDK. Black coffee and TBD.

RSF&PTL