Day of the Heart

 

Outside our Beck door this morning we stood at the open window and watched the sun come up. Catching it just as it begins to peek over the horizon and watching until it's in full bloom only takes a minute or so, counting the seconds actually, watching it move slowly into our Saturday morning sky. 

It's the same at sunset, watching it sink into the sea beyond the high-rises on Thomas Drive. I understand Genesis 1:1f and the ancient Hebrew way of counting the day ended as the sun set and a new day beginning, but somehow it always seemed backward to me, that we should count the day as beginning with the sunrise, not with the sunset. 

But, thinking and remembering, my mind is on the day my mother died: it was, consciously for me unique, jarring, stunning, jolting, a day of ending and beginning for me, keenly aware in my mind and heart that it was my last day forever of life in the world with Mama and simultaneously my first day of being no longer a son. 

That Sunday evening in July 2011, I stood on the shore somewhat north of Hathaway Bridge watching across North Bay as the sun set, and snapped a photo of the end of a chapter of my life and the beginning of the next. I was 75, μακάριος, a man is blessed if his mother is alive and still part of his life when he is 75 years old. 

Why am I "here" today. Couple of reasons, I never know where my mind will be at any given moment, but today, May 7, is Mama's birthday and tomorrow is Mother's Day. Which always stirs in my memories that when I was a boy it didn't seem fair, sort of like the unfairness of having your birthday on December 25th, and as a son I always made a point of giving her a separate birthday present and Mother's Day present, even if it was just a couple of linen handkerchiefs that I bought at McCrory's with money put aside from working at the fish house. 

It's all easy to re-member, to put back together, including that where I stand this minute, from 7H I'm looking several blocks over downtown St Andrews at where our fish house was, both my father's fish house and my grandfather's fish house! And where my brother and I worked as we grew up together, Walt almost four years younger. 

And that's not all! Yesterday, John Carroll texted me a snapshot of a newspaper clipping that my first cousin Margaret Gentry sent him. John is my sister Gina's son. Margaret Ann is the daughter of Mama's older brother Wilbur Gentry. On both sides, maternal and paternal, that generation of my life was from Pensacola. My parents met as neighbors in East Hill, and went to Pensacola High School together for a year or two in the late 1920s. 

There's a lot to the story, or several short stories actually, including that my father and Wilbur Gentry were best friends who, with my mother, as high school teenagers, together joint-owned a Model T Ford named "Jim". Stories about "Jim" are still alive in my mind, maybe I'll come back there again some blogging morning. 

Another story is that Mama was going with a boy named Tom, there's a small photograph of the two of them here, on the back marked "Louise 16 and Tom 17", which would have been 1928, that I guarantee my father never knew Mama had kept over the years. My father and Tom were teammates on the Pensacola Tigers High School football team one year, and then the next year the Wellers, my father and his parents and younger sister, had moved back to St Andrews (family stories branch out, this branches out to my father's family moving away after the death of my father's brother Alfred in the shipwreck of the fishing smack Annie & Jennie), and my father played on the Bay High School Tornadoes football team against Tom playing for the Pensacola Tigers, I've got newspaper clippings to prove it! Anyway, "anything's fair in love and war", and it ended up my father stealing Tom's girlfriend away, and my mother and father marrying in Pensacola and moving to Panama City.

Which brings me to this morning. Yesterday, John texted me the newspaper clipping, which was "heart timely" for me because of the conjunction of Mama's birthday and Mother's Day, announcing my parents' wedding. It was at the Gentry home in East Hill, 1317 E. Strong Street, Pensacola, Florida, on June 11, 1934, my father's 23rd birthday. My father used to say that mama was his best ever birthday present. 

So, Saturday, May 7, 2022. Mama was born 110 years ago today, in Bluff Springs, Florida, a few miles north of Pensacola, nearly to the Alabama line. That's still another story, more stories, many more stories.

RSF&PTL

Bubba

Thomas Carroll Weller, Jr 

Another text this morning, Susanna via John Carroll, something Mama wrote about herself, that she was born in McDavid. Same area, I wish Gina were here to help me pinpoint it.