overwhelming of sorts

Sort of. The daily early morning compulsion to blog, it's gone, sort of lost it - - truth is, I didn't always have something to say anyway, so no matter. The early years, it was something about my health, then schmoozed off to whatever, didn't it, childhood recollections, a blindingly bright light over me, people in white surrounding me, placing a cone over my face, circle of buzzing in my head, waking up to see my father standing there with a vanilla ice cream cone for me, nausea at one lick and Mama eating my ice cream: tonsillectomy, I was two years old, Dr Roberts' Clinic, the building is still there, NE corner N Cove Blvd and E 3rd Ct, behind the PC Woman's Club.

So far, that's my earliest conscious memory, what, late 1937 or early 1938. Where was Gina? Maybe not born yet.

Standing on the floor in the back seat of our 1935 Chevrolet as Mama drove. Where Massalina Drive begins or ends at the Y where Allen Avenue goes off to the right and Linda Avenue goes off to the left and on to Cove School. We were probably headed for town via Allen Avenue and over Tarpon Dock Bridge, a wooden draw bridge with the same kind of lift span as the newer bridge. At that Y, asking, "Mommie, how old are you?" and she saying "Twenty-nine." If Mama was twenty-nine, I was five. She lived another seventy years, two and a half months past her 99th birthday, when, deaf and nearly blind, she knew me by the shape of my head. I asked her about the Auburn car they borrowed from her parents to drive back home to Panama City that Time their Chevrolet was broken down in Pensacola. Was that what ignited their buying the new 1935 Chevrolet that I remember? I never thought of asking that, and now it's too late to ask. Here in Time, some things become too late forever, have you noticed that about life?.

Where the car dealers were here in Panama City my years after WW2, Crosley dealer, Hudson dealer, Kaiser-Frazer dealer, Nash dealer, Sala DeSoto-Plymouth. Where things were located in StAndrews from late 1945, the ice plant, the ice plant's new 1946 Ford V8 F100 pickup, our 1936 Pontiac with the trunk cut away and the car made into a pickup of sorts, Mom's Cafe, 75¢ for chicken dinner, the drugstore, the barbershop, the filling station where Thai Basil restaurant is now, the hardware store where my father sent me for the particular screws, nuts, washers, and bolts he needed. Mattie's Tavern: we weren't even allowed to look in that direction.

My occupational highs and lows, sense of overwhelming relief my first day at theological seminary, January 1959 coming topside on my beloved destroyer our first morning in Gitmo, home on leave Christmas 1960 and my Navy boss phoning to tell me I was on the promotion list for lieutenant, selected way, way, way below the promotion zone (he didn't realize that most of those senior to me on the long list of LT(jg)s in the thick blue register of Navy officers had done their three years and been discharged, and I never told him), first day and all the happy years at Trinity, Apalachicola, my overwhelming grief leaving Tass at her college in Virginia and living into what seemed like unsurvivable months, which reminded me that in September 1953 my father had written me that Mama cried all the way home after they dropped me off at my dorm in Gainesville: what goes round comes round, doesn't it. Overwhelming sense of love, possession, fierce sole ownership of a tiny girl flooding over me on the drive home from Gulf Coast Hospital in the wee hours of January 13th, 1993.

Between services after Sunday school class on October 17, 2010, rising from my chair, telling Linda, "I'm overwhelmingly tired" and being driven home, then to the ER at Bay Med to begin my next chapter of life.

What's all this Step in Time with Mary Poppins, enough of all that, years are flooded with overwhelmings!

This morning. Images and a couple of long articles, essays about Homo Erectus, our apparent ancestor who lived from about two million years ago up to maybe 50,000 years ago depending on which scientist is writing. H.Erectus fashioned stone hatchets for hunting and chopping meat, and one wonders how long before he turned with it on his fellow man in anger, hatred or fear? Have we been hating and killing each other that long? It's our nature, in our blood, our genes, we cannot help it, and it will be ever thus. Then extinct, first H.Erectus, now how long before H.Sapiens goes extinct? I have an idea the Universe can't wait. Thomas Hardy wrote stun-worthy poems about that future, including God's dim, faded and regretful memories of us.

Continuing my read of "You Can't Go Home Again" - - Book Five, Chapter 32, The Universe of Daisy Purvis. George Webber living in London for some months. Big people, Little people. Mrs Purvis grieving tearfully for nobility who have to sell their estates because of high taxes, and soul wrenching pity for mistreated dogs and horses with tight bits, but lighting furiously into the wretched urchin who delivers the beer for tracking mud in on his boots and for not washing his filthy face. Thomas Wolfe presages today's identical paradox in pro-lifers who resent families on welfare.

On Facebook this morning: pics of a local rector on the roof of the church building, checking HVAC units and clearing downspouts, brings to mind my crawling under the rectory building with my wrenches, locating the kitchen sink drain pipe, opening it to clean out the shrimp shells that were clogging it. "O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands, serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song." The Jubilate Deo is on page 15.

What on a Saturday morning of my birthday month? Rework and print notes for Sunday's homiletic endeavor. Did Jesus have long golden blond curls?

RSF&PTL