R2D + P&R
the Father incomprehensible,
the Son incomprehensible,
the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
And yet they are not three incomprehensibles,
but one incomprehensible.
My favorite assertion from the Athanasian Creed (BCP page 864,5).
And now phasing into late octogenarianism, my +Time blogposts are increasingly noticeably goofy unto incomprehensible. Already I realized this, but having it pointed out by a respected person is reason to pause and reflect. So the most recent two are suspended, reverted to Draft.
This happens, revert to Draft, from time to Time over the past eleven years that I've done pretty much a daily blogpost. In fact, eleven years this month, October 2010, having then just turned 75 and suddenly careening into a new chapter:
starting with noticeable phasing to momentarily incapacitatingly severe chest pains that I knew what were because my grandmother Weller had it. All this has been told here more than once over the past decade. My most ridiculous recollection was, summer 2010 I was working every day trying to get the outside of the Cove School building back in presentable shape before naming it for Bill Lloyd, and, walking across Hamilton Avenue from the school to the garage/shed where my supplies were, the pain stopped me and I stood there for a few minutes pretending to look up and admire the clouds while the spell subsided. It was before I carried nitroglycerine pills in my pocket, and if you've ever had severe angina you know the pain is like someone running an icepick into your chest. That was all summer into August, September, and the mid-October week that started my 2-to-5-month prognosis countdown to Cleveland Clinic for heart surgery, and that also started my daily blogging
First health updates, then observations about Cleveland and from my Clinic room in mid-to-late January 2011, looking out over Lake Erie frozen from Cleveland Lakefront Airport all the way to Canada. Reminiscences later, generally about growing up in Panama City, where the Hudson dealer was on W. 6th Street, and the Crosley dealership.
The Nash dealership on E. 6th Street, corner of Hamilton Avenue, that building was demolished fairly recently. At its end, paint was peeled off the sign on the front of the building such that just the recognizable N for Nash was showing again after all the decades, sort of a last word.
The DeSoto-Plymouth dealership north on Harrison just south of 11th Street, east side, their old quonset hut building is still there next to what was St Dominic Catholic Church second location (when I was a boy, St Dominic Church was a wooden building on the NE corner of Harrison Avenue & 6th Street directly across from and facing First Baptist. One day a few years ago I went there (to the old Sala DeSoto-Plymouth quonset hut) and snapped a picture of it to write about.
And the Packard dealer on Grace Avenue just around the corner from where the A&P was at Grace & 5th when I was a boy, later Smith's Ladies' Shop during my teens and when I was in high school. A year ahead of me, Gene Smith was my college roommate my sophomore and junior years. My freshman year roommate was Philip Johnson, a best friend through high school, our sophomore year he lived at his aunt's house in Gainesville, then our junior year he went off to FSU and other interests, stories mixing up friends, stories I remember but won't blog. Philip and Gene are both dead now.
The (was it Rexall?) Drug Store on Harrison, the west side, I think in the block between 5th & 6th Streets, with the curb service where cars drove up on the sidewalk (slanted for that, like a driveway), honk the horn and an attendant comes out to take your order. I remembered going there with my mother, a couple of her siblings, probably Mildred, about 13, 14, 15, I called her "Minnie", maybe mama's other sister Edna, and my grandmother Mamie Gentry visiting from Pensacola, my grandmother driving her silver colored DeSoto Airflow sedan.
For years I was thinking the others in the car were my cousins Margaret Ann and Bill, but their close history with me didn't begin until their mother died in 1939, so it would have been my aunts, my mother's sisters. Must have been 1937 or 1938. We ordered ice cream cones, likely vanilla, and it was brought out to the car. I was very young but old enough to remember the curb service drugstore and the DeSoto.
That was years before World War 2 for us, but not before the Germans put their hatred of the Jews into action, and during the Great Depression. My grandfather Gentry bought Chrysler products, and their next car that I remember after the DeSoto Airflow was a black 1939 Chrysler Royal sedan.
Why do I remember these things? My life memories are marked by mental date-time-stamps involving cars. The car in the mental picture sets the timeframe. Later for example, my Navy career started with a 1948 Dodge and ended with six or seven cars parked out front, including my dark turquoise 1968 Lincoln sedan that I bought ten years old used from the Lincoln-Mercury dealer for $1400 and Linda's yellow 1973 Oldsmobile station wagon that I'd ordered built to my spec from Key Olds when we were stationed in Ohio.
One of these days maybe I'll blog my list of the seventy or so cars I've owned. My current car is my favorite ever, a silver 2006 Cadillac SRX that I used to admire in our HV garage below, then bought the instant it showed up on Cramer's website. It was ten years old when I bought it, had 55k miles, now is going on sixteen years old, gets driven like gasoline is rationed, and still has only 70k miles. Fits me perfectly and I'll drive it until it's the last V8 in town.
Last month we happily attended a football game, Mosley v Tallahassee Lincoln, in Tommy Oliver Stadium. Mostly a love visit, Charlotte plays trumpet in the Lincoln band, so we went to see her and Jeremy. The football stadium was in a different place in my years, next to the school, right on Harrison Avenue, where all our home games were and where the Bay High Band practiced when I was a drummer, and where we graduated that evening in 1953 before starting the rest of whatever life brought our way or we went and found. It was still and always Tommy Oliver Stadium, and if you want to read of an admirable life, google Tommy Oliver, he was a hero. A player, a coach, a soldier, and a war hero whose family must have proudly but with broken hearts displayed the Gold Star in the front window when they lost him.
Today my eye caught something, an article online or in a magazine, I didn't stop to read it, maybe I'll go back and find it. It was headlined about why certain places, like our hometowns where we were born and raised, become part of our Being. I know just how that is, because that's exactly what Panama City is to me and for me. Looking out on StAndrewsBay and downtown StAndrews from 7H, I have no wish ever to be anywhere else. As sworn years ago, I'll never again live north of US98, and I'll never again live out of sight and smell of salt water. And I'll never get tired of oysters and mullet.
What if another desolating hurricane sweeps through here? If I'm still here, I'll face that when the Time comes.
Eighty-six. Retired, the mind should wander, but it doesn't yet. I notice that it's increasingly goofy, but like Pavlov's dog and the bell, it still responds to "Hey, you, come to the table". At this stage and age, my mind still thinks: it contemplates, and mainly and lately it questions and challenges everything I've ever been taught and believed. Everything.
RSF&ABC&PTL, where
RSF is right shoe first, and
ABC is whatever you want to make of it, and
PTL is praise the Lord.
T+
top photo: 1935 DeSoto Airflow, notice the windshield panes are cranked out so air can ventilate in and through.
that model year still had the fabric roof insert too.
