seventh heaven

4:19 AM, 81° 81%, sunrise at 6:00 AM, I slide open the door to 7H porch and the muggy heat hits me as unwelcome as the frigid blast of bitter cold did in January.

One mug of strong hot coffee, sweetened for a change with raw sugar, lightened with whipping cream.

The HVAC has my OSD too cold and breezy to sit at my round table desk looking north on downtown StAndrews and up Beck Avenue to the traffic light by St Andrew Baptist Church, so

sitting here at my Bay side window as the red navigation lights flash in my peripheral vision to the left of me.

Someone posted a picture of Panama City Beach, Florida, early in their memory, some years after I was grown and gone off into the U S Navy. There are several more of us, I'm sure, but The Beach I remember is in the minds of Carl, Robert, and me. More people and explosive construction brought The Beach up to what I saw at Miami Beach in 1954 when my fraternity brother Brad drove us down, in his 1939 Mercury convertible to visit his home in Coral Gables, must have been Spring Break.

Brad proudly showed me Miami Beach, and I was blown away appalled that I couldn't see the ocean for the high-rise buildings.

A memory of the weekend is of telling Brad, "thank God, Panama City's beach will never be like this."

But here we are nearly seventy years on. What I believe though, is that no matter when a person lives, the old days were best. It just isn't so, though. Me, I've lived into medical miracles that've saved my life three or four times; and friends' jet plane that took me from Panama City to Cleveland Clinic in an hour and forty-five minutes; and an electronics, computer, and internet age in which I can watch a hurricane develop and move and strengthen, and know when to leave town - - in my day we had no idea where they were going to strike or how fierce they might be. Yes, it's crowded and overgrown, but what the hell! this is the first day of the rest of my life, and I'm living in seventh heaven with my high school sweetheart.

Life is Good.