Monday: yellow wood
The full moon is at its zenith at midnight local Time, just so last night. I stayed up and watched for a while outside on 7H porch. Taking shots of the Bay in the dark, I try to snap just as one or more of the navigation lights flashes. This is a minute or so later,
the bright red light is on the burned out hulk of a shrimp boat just beyond our window here.
This daylight photo makes it look quite distant from our building, but it's actually right here. I think Bert took that shot.
Breakfast: from Victoria's Last Bite in Lynn Haven, chicken salad on extra thin whole wheat bread. We like theirs better than Cahall's, which is ground much finer, but Cahall's seems better for little English-style tea sandwiches.
So, Monday morning. In this vocation, always my day off. The unwinding started on the way home from church, through Monday until Tuesday morning. Which nearly always reminds me. The spring of 1984 I had a "call" to St Luke's Episcopal Church in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania,
and we were quite serious about it, a lovely old stone church on a block of property just a block or two from downtown Mount Joy. The property also included a matching stone rectory, and a newer but reasonably matching parish house building. What reminds me is the draft letter contract their vestry gave me, in which they said the rector would have one day off each week, "probably Tuesday." I told them that nobody tells me about my Time, and only I would decide when my day off would be. Slightly taken aback, they instantly agreed.
We ended up not going there because the pulpit at Trinity, Apalachicola became available, and I was soon scheduled to fly down to Pensacola to teach one of my graduate courses at the Univ of West Florida; so arranged to visit Bishop Duvall and Father Sam at diocesan headquarters in Mobile, then drove over to Trinity that Sunday for morning worship and to meet with their vestry.
All of which is one of many reasons why Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is my lifetime favorite and retrospectively most prophetic poem. Here's that poem again. A treasure of my life is the memory of having heard Frost himself read it during either his fall 1953 or spring 1954 stopover in Gainesville when I was a freshman at Florida and starting to become conscious and aware of my own diverging roads.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.