Time to Time

What's up, what's online, what's bothering today, Thursday?! Well, online that we may drive over to Apalachicola for the day, lunch, around town, Linda to her shopping venues, and back, and the day itself is promising for sunny and pleasant. Apalachicola is one of those Places of the Heart that anybody who's lived there never gets over loving and missing. 

In fact, when despairingly casting about for What To Do and Where to Move after Hurricane Michael, Apalachicola was always on my mind as First on my List. Loved since I was a boy in the late 1940s visiting there on seafood business with my father, later as a teen, finally in middle-age and elder, and still the odd trip from Time to Time. 

Although I love arriving home to 7H and StAndrewsBay, leaving Apalachicola is always wrenching, driving US 98 West at the end of the day, what was and what might have been.

Troubling, bothering? "knowing the difference", what I can't change, the political destiny of America, that every empire in history has fallen, some conquered by enemies, some brought down by evil within, I didn't really want to live into this phase of America. 

Oh, and that about restaurants &c having to close because of lack of workers: what sheer b.s. - - this is a capitalistic system of supply and demand, and if you need workers don't be whining stupid, you attract them by paying them more than they're getting at their current source of income, including welfare checks. The covid pandemic has forced all sorts of reimagining and re-imaging. A prime example is waking up to the fact that we don't need so much office space, because many folks would rather work from home, and are trustworthy, and business does just as well when they do as in the old model when everyone had to travel to the office, put in a day's work, and travel home five days a week. Like Hurricane Michael that, in spite of being such a personal downer for me, encouraged all sorts of cleanup and beautifying in PC, covid-19 is having its good effects as well. 

For myself, I see improvement in the church, worship, liturgy, hygiene awareness, all sorts of things. My fear is that as soon as permissible we will go back to using that old lightbulb that grandmother gave and reclaim the inheritance that the flat-earthers wrote and mandated.

What are my hopes if today in Apalachicola works out? Well, last week I was irrationally infuriated when a local restaurant broke their unequivocal telephone promise of oysters on the half-shell and I failed myself by ordering something else instead of having the gumption to get up and leave: today I'm staying in Apalachicola until a tray with a dozen icy ones is set in front of me. Fully aware that they'll be oysters from Texas, or Louisiana, or Alabama, or down the Florida coast, as Apalachicola Bay was over harvested into devastation; but I'll be in a Place of My Heart. Can't wait.

Breakfast? shrimp-burger. Fourteen steamed bay shrimp on a hamburger bun, mayonnaise, smear of Tabasco, shake of salt, turn of the pepper mill. Cup of hot and black.

ABC&PTL

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