Dear Diary Fr 10/14/2022

We saw a manatee! The Florida Park Service man who drove our jungle cruise boat maneuvered up close for pictures and a good look. I remembered them as gray, but this one looked white to me.

We had the most fun yesterday! Tass came at eleven, we visited in the lobby, had noon-day dinner in the Lodge dining room, then walked down the path to the boat dock, sat on a park bench under trees, enjoyed the dark blue sky, the trees, and people walking by, until Time for our boat ride.

Years ago, a meteorologist friend told me that a white blue sky signaled high humidity and a dark blue sky low humidity, and sure enough. Low humidity, mild Florida fall temperature, an idyllic day. Wakulla Springs is loaded with visitors on summer days, but October is perfect, fine weather, and almost nobody here. Peace and tranquility.

Tass snapped most of these pics, all of them on the boat ride.

The tour boat captain explained how nature controls the alligator population. The birds eat the baby alligators. The big alligators eat the young alligators. The big, bigger, biggest alligators live in one section of the park along the Wakulla River, and the other young, growing alligators sense that it's best to stay in the far distant end of the park.

We did see a couple of situations where an alligator was stalking a bird, but, as our tour guide said, the bird was "on to him".

Large/medium size mullet were hovering around the area where the boat dock is. To my knowledge, I've never eaten fresh water mullet from absolutely clear water, but I'm pretty sure they'd taste different from the salt water mullet from the Bay and bayous around North Florida.

In fact, I worked with a priest friend who is a marine scientist, hunter and fisherman who has fascinating stories to tell, whose mother, he told me, could tell by the taste, which of many Pensacola area bayous the mullet for supper came from.

Me, I have no such tasting skill. I do know that, raw half-shell, I love Apalachicola oysters, Sydney Rock oysters, and oysters in Colchester, England first and best, and all other oysters as close runner up to first place. Sunday noon dinner I'm hoping to have fried mullet and raw oysters at Angelo's by the Ochlockonee Bay bridge. When I was a teenager in the early 1950s it was George's, owned by the present owner's father or grandfather. A local area family of Greek ancestry.

Florida is full of strange names from pre-English days: Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Ochlockonee, Wakulla, Choctawhatchee, that nobody knows what they originally meant but for every inexplicable and unpronounceable name there's all sorts of myths, imagining, and certainty. Before my phone & camera died, I snapped a photo from a display in the waiting room at the boat dock. Explains likely origins, meaning, and development of our word Wakulla.

No complaints with the wonderful Lodge here. We have a perfect room, the blessing of no television but competent wi-fi even if we do have to log on anew about five o'clock every afternoon. Everything is very convenient, close, lovely, the employees and service people kind, helpful, pleasant. It's perfect, and the last Time we stayed here, thirty-eight years ago, the elevator worked perfectly. Anymore, it's cranky and doesn't work properly - - which, for us at this condition of extreme old age means we pretty sure won't come back, because the stairs are a real challenge for us. Otherwise, delightful, perfection!

In the room: we brought a Keurig coffeemaker and coffee pods, a neat little refrigerated ice chest to hold milk, bread, a bit of cheese, couple other things. Reading matter, I saved unread and brought The New Yorker, read what I wanted to from it, several articles and the fiction piece, their usual in-your-face confrontation at the end. On the way out of PC we stopped at the Downtown Post Office and so brought Consumer Reports that was waiting, which car to buy - - they're recommending hybrids. I brought my copy of The Hebrew Gospel according to Matthew, meaning to read it again, but instead I'm reading "Billy Lynn's Long HalfTime Walk" that could and may be quite real. It generally takes me a long time to read a fiction book, because I pretty much read slow, deliberate, enjoy instead of the speed-reading I learned years ago as a student at the Naval War College. So, slow: Billy, Mango, Dime and Major Mac.

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Lights out at eight last night, up for coffee at four. Seven-thirty now, and just dawning, light orange sky behind the trees outside our window looking east.

9/14 to 10/14: I've been eighty-seven one month today. Still functioning.

RSF&PTL