pax &c
What a Saturday evening, all day Sunday to early Monday morning we had. Driving rain at times, unrelenting gale winds, and magnificent storm clouds, which I'm ashamed not to have snapped pictures. We have such clouds here at 7H, I never tire of seeing them, admiring, enjoying them. Well, gimme a little slack, I may change my tune during hurricane season, which comes round as regular as Christmas and lasts longer.
Haven't finished my book yet, "The Poisonwood Bible", but I'm down into the ending. It's fiction, historical fiction, a novel that's like a family's memoir where every member gets to contribute as the story develops. It's making me want to get out some books and read them again, Roger Ebert's "Life Itself: A Memoir" that really stirred powerful memories of my own life. "Where Rivers Change Direction" by Mark Spragg, his memoir about growing up on a dude ranch his family owned and operated in Wyoming; Spragg gave me the harshest idea of winters in Wyoming, where a close friend has actually been to visit friends, and hunt wild game, and eat steak.
Memoirs, memories, songs too, Frank Sinatra singing "It Was A Very Good Year". "Turn Around" by Dianna Ross singing "Where are you going, my little one, little one", if you had little daughters you know the overwhelming mix of love and fun and worry and anguish as they grow through your life and away into lives of their own. When they were little it did not occur to me that this constant joy would not be present in my life forever.
Mark Helprin, "A Soldier of the Great War" and Towles, "A Gentleman in Moscow" and Eugene Vodolazkin, “Laurus”- - I keep remembering and mentioning all these songs and books.
I keep remembering my sister too, whom I had for more than eighty-three years of my life and never expected this gap. It's a strange and most unwelcome emptiness, more mental than physical because from the Time I went away to college at age eighteen, and as grownups, we lived far apart and didn't see each other all that often; especially once into old age when Gina sold her house and bought a motor home and became one of the Travelers that she used to tell me about from her life in South Carolina. See, I keep thinking we've not exchanged emails in a while, it's Time to find out where in the world Gina has lighted for the moment and invite her over for oysters the next Time she's in Panama City. With covid making restaurants unsafe, I'd order fried oysters and shrimp and grouper, and cole slaw and fried okra takeout from Hunt's and bring it up here for us to enjoy in 7H and reminisce. Gina had all these relatives that were mine too but that she had found, and contacted, and gone to meet and visit, whom I'd never heard of. One of the things, she'd start talking excitedly about distant relatives she'd found, and their children and spouses and grandchildren and their spouses by first name and I'd have no idea what and who she was talking about or anything. There are these memories, and there's this emptiness, this gap that I can't fill. I need to live closer to my brother. I need my sister back.
Anyway, as rain fell and wind blew outside, a nice Sunday evening supper of cold tomato slices, half an avocado, mayonnaise, and a sprinkle of NoSalt, which is potassium. Too much NoSalt works against one of the medicines I take, IDK, maybe the one that starts with a "C" or the one that starts with an "L" but when I take furosemide to drain off liquid from the CHF foot-swelling and weight gain it depletes potassium in the body, so NoSalt closes a happy circle of extreme old age.
But the avocado, which I love. We never had avocado at home when I was growing up, I never saw or heard of them, but was introduced to them when Linda started inviting me over to lunch, dinner at her house from fall 1952 when we started dating. Alligator pears they were called (Kingsolver also calls them alligator pears), diced in salad with a salad dressing of oil & vinegar & blue cheese. My avocado memory, shared here before, is of my thirty-days TDY to a Newport RI naval installation in January 1958, right after being commissioned a Navy ensign. Told here before, a brand new officer, and the Navy gave me a room in the BOQ but I didn't realize the Navy was not going to feed me, as they had when I was an officer candidate, OCSA, which was enlisted rank E2 and I didn't know they feed enlisted but not officers. So I had no money but maybe ten or twenty dollars for the whole month, so drank free coffee for breakfast, walked to a nearby grocery store and bought an avocado for 69¢ to last me two days lunch, and a tiny jar of Real Foods (Yankee for Hellmann's) mayonnaise that lasted me all month for a tiny teaspoon of mayo on my avocado each noon, and there was free salt. This is getting to be pitiful, isn't it, and the pathos deepens: I had no car with me, didn't know how any cross-station bus transportation might work, never heard of galoshes, owned no overcoat, and walked a couple miles each way to and from my BOQ on one side of the Navy base and my TDY station around the far side by the destroyer piers, walking on the side of the road (no sidewalks), leaning into the freezing wind, hurrying through icy puddles of melting snow.
No, seriously. Soaking wet shoes and cold wet socks and feet. I don't remember how I managed to keep my black navy-issue shoes shiny, or how I managed the weekly haircut, or what I did about fresh clean white shirts, but I did, and did a computer study project for the CO, a Navy captain, at my TDY station; and got my first, very nice officers fitness report out of it to kick-start what was to become my twenty-year Navy career because I loved the destroyer duty so much and mistakenly assumed the Navy would always be like that! That month, January 1958, Linda was at home in Panama City, we'd been married going on seven months, and she was three months pregnant with Malinda.
That was a Happiest Time of Life for me. Age 21 and 22, after years of growing up through family, school and college I was enjoying and constantly surprised at the life changes the Navy brought. Moreover, Fr David Damon, first rector of Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, PC, and his family, Olive, their daughters Susan and Julie and son David, had been family friends at St Andrews Episcopal Church the years David was an engineer at the Navy Base, before he went to seminary and ordination. In fact, as a teenager I babysat the children for David and Olive any number of times. Fr David officiated our marriage, advised me on various life issues, and owned a house in Kingston, RI, where he had lived growing up while his father was a professor at the University of Rhode Island. The last time I looked on Google Maps the house was still there, brown clapboard with a wood shingle roof. The downstairs was rented, but a separate apartment upstairs, with outside stairs entrance and old kitchen stove with two burners that worked, the other two burners fallen through into the space beneath. Fr David gave us use of the upstairs apartment to help start our marriage, my brother Walt and a friend drove Linda up to Kingston RI to live in Fr Damon's place while I was in OCS at Newport across Narragansett Bay, and we had weekends together.
Our car was the green 1948 Dodge sedan, my mother's thirty-six birthday present that mama and I had selected brand new in May 1948 while it was still in the boxcar at the railway depot, now given to me for my senior year at Florida when mama got a new Buick from Nelson's. In Rhode Island the Dodge gave us problems of cutting off and being hell to get restarted, and because it was Fluid Drive you couldn't push and let the clutch out to start it, but driving around that part of Rhode Island one Saturday late summer or early fall when I was on liberty from OCS, we came across a little shade tree mechanic garage, and the kind fellow there took care of the car's problem, an ignition issue as I recall.
For me, that fall 1957 was a Happiest Time of Life, of which I have had quite a few, including life with our children and grandchildren, and my exciting life adveontures after retiring from the Navy, and my studies at theological seminary, and our years at Trinity, Apalachicola and Grace Church and St Thomas by the Sea. And all of life since then except for the losses and sadnesses that go with every life but that seem unique and deeply personal when they hit you. You live into them, don't you. Not "through them to the other side" because there's no coming out the other side into the sunshine, but you live into them, into life as, changed, it now finds you.
The happiness goes on and on here at 7H as long as there are two of us. Wishing us long years.
Interesting, a beauty, the car is English origin, a 1935 Jensen Ford shooting brake (English term for what Americans called a station wagon) that was recently offered at auction.
Pax
T