Monday and counting
Starting this on Sunday afternoon, after the mandatory nap. Love, I love Sunday afternoons, nearly always have, especially this season of year when the world is gray and overcast, looking like a freezing winter day though it isn't, 64F and 79%, a week before Christmas, two days before the winter solstice shortest daylight hours day of the year on the NW Florida Gulf Coast.
Clouds from here often remind me of jewelry made by our exquisitely gifted friend in Apalachicola. This clouds at sunset picture is looking westward at 3:53 pm, but the visibility is 10 miles, and looking south I can see beyond the sailboats and over Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico. On a happy Sunday afternoon like this, when I'm thinking to live forever and so far so good, it comes to me that our priest's blessing is right on, "My friends, life is short". It might be nice if we could live as far as we can see, which on a clear day or night at 7H is forever. Even traveling at the speed of light, no one lives as far as the eye can see though!
Having a cup of coffee to recover post-nap. Hot and black.
What now? A gathering this evening, six-monthly doctor appointments at eight o'clock in the morning: at this age you look forward to having your ears vacuumed out, no really. The procedure instantly restores the hearing aids to working perfectly. What's ahead for you to look forward to!
Too early on Tuesday morning we are to be off to Pensacola after a year or two of postponing the drive to have a safety recall taken care of on Kristen's car. In retrospect of nine years with it, I'll state my experience that, unless one enjoys the occasional drive to the next city, which I no longer do, but did as recently as five or six years ago, best drive a car for which there is a local servicing dealer.
An email just flashed at the upper righthand corner of my computer screen: Fauci warns. We're "fully vaccinated" at the moment, but it's starting to look like a trip to the Sam's Pharmacy for new booster every six months or so, eh? And the mask: we've grown careless, almost nobody wearing.a facemask.
What's on my mind. Our resistance to yielding to each next phase of life. I remember the morning Mama took me to a strange place, a schoolroom, and when I looked around she was gone. Leave the familiar closeness of Cove School where one is a "senior", and begin Bay High wearing a red and white rat hat as a lowly freshman. Graduate high school and another rat hat, orange and blue, a freshman again. College graduate on the way to Rhode Island to have head shaved, put on a sailor suit and be shouted at by some crusty old Navy chief trying to make an officer out of me. Retire and suddenly become ineligible to wear the uniform with gold stripes on the sleeve and scrambled eggs on the hat. Start school all over again as an ignorant beginner among world-known scholars and theologians.
Spring of year 2008 when I was 72, I found myself at "Credo", an eight-day retreat-type event for invited clergy. This particular one was designed for aging clergy agonizing about coming up on mandatory retirement age, where the staff told twenty or thirty old men It's Time: Face It and Do It: Relax, Give it up, Let it go, Sit in the pew with your wife, and Enjoy the rest of your life. It was good advice, being put in my place while I was still in charge of an Episcopal parish. Even if I still haven't completely done it. Anon, anon, I'm easing into it. At least I head for Linda's pew as every service closes.
T