October ...
Saturday morning October first, and my inclination is to ramble, so there. Mug of excellent coffee club hot and black to open the day, along with a cut of liver pate (no bread or crackers with it because the carbs in bread drop my BP to the fifty-something over thirty-something range, which basically turns the rest of the morning into a long nap - - you'll discover how it is when you're my age - - wishing you long years).
Harrison's - - I'm delighted that it's so popular, perfect location, good food, and I was looking forward to the shrimp bangers yesterday. We went late thinking to miss the lunch crowd, 12:45, but still a forty minute wait, so we slipped on down to Bayou Joe's for Britany's birthday treat. I grew up on Massalina Drive, boat on the bayou &c, so I'm okay being there any time that happens. My favorites there - - breakfast of eggs over medium and fried catfish - - lunch of fried grouper sandwich. The birthday family seemed absolutely delighted to get the squash casserole Linda had made for Brit; it sure made our car smell good!
Don't know whether I've said before, but some days instead of shave, shower, dress &c I just stay in my house clothes all day, and this may be one of those days. It's convenient because my house clothes are the same as my pajamas, which are not PJs at all but exercise pants and one of my worn out dress shirts - - which are amazingly soft and comfortable and don't sport the huge buttons they put on real pajamas.
Anyway, yes, suspicions confirmed, Father Tom is a slob. I started working my first job when I was nine years old and working in my father's fish house, and I was a workaholic all my working years, so I've earned relaxing into Loaferville, and I rather enjoy being useless and not having to answer to nobody for nothing.
Hurricane Ian, the results are horrifying, the total destruction of those manufactured home communities on the southwest Florida coast where for so many years Yankees have loved retiring to Florida. The evening before the hurricane came ashore I watched online for hours, a Tampa area station WFLA weather team, including an investigative reporter wandering through one of those communities looking for folks who had elected not to evacuate. It was mostly deserted, but they did find a few people, including one elderly (maybe seventies) man living alone with his dog. He engaged in a nice interview, in which he said that he was all packed and he and the dog ready to go, depending on how it looked. Well to me as a native Floridian, it was looking dire and worsening by the second, and the community was on the water, one foot above sea level. I've hoped ever since that he and the dog left, because that area would have been swept away.
Yesterday lunch (noon dinner) I had lots of salty fried food including fried oysters and fried grouper, and ate my french-fries for a change, and this morning my right foot is swelled up so huge and tight that it feels like the skin is about to burst. So, a furo-sixty day and stay home.
Supper last night a tomato sandwich on white bread - - I never eat white bread, but the thought was there, when Bishop Duvall died, my cousin who worked with him in the diocesan office for years remembered that at lunchtime Charles always went home and had a tomato sandwich on white bread - - it's a Southern thing, so, white bread, Hellmann's mayonnaise, and a thick slice of ripe red tomato - - okay. Not the best tomato of my lifetime, but Tanya's Garden seems to have a better tomato than you can get elsewhere anymore. The old days and ways were best.
None of this is any of your business, especially the CHF part, but sometimes I treat +Time as my diary instead of a public blog, so read it or lump it, nomesane?
October, not sweet home Alabama or Georgia on my mind, but October. The mind drifts around October. 31 October 1968 I took Malinda and Joe around Fort Adams, the officers quarters community where we lived in Newport, RI, for trick or treating. 31 October 1969 they felt too grown up to have me along, and wanted to do it alone, so I dressed in a long, dark coat and shadowed them around Windsor Park, our neighborhood in San Diego, then the next morning my ship deployed for WestPac and the Vietnam War. At some point that trick or treating evening Joe looked at me, half a block away, and said, "I see you, Daddy." The next evening, in my misery of missing them that first night at sea, of what was to be an eight month deployment, I made my decision to pack it in as soon as I reached twenty years Navy service. A promise to myself that I managed to live into.
October 1995 I was at a diocesan commission meeting in Pensacola, where Bishop Duvall opened the gathering with a prayer that Hurricane Opal be diverted into Mexico or Texas. The next day it swept ashore along our coastline here and made one helluva mess. Linda was at a church ladies fun time in Blue Lake; I buttoned up our two houses as best I could, then in two cars we evacuated, a creeping, crawling thirteen-hour drive to Tallahassee, where we sheltered in the parking garage of Tallahassee Medical Center. Me, Mama, Malinda, and Kristen. On the car phone the next morning I telephoned our next door neighbor Bill Lee to ask if our houses were still standing, and he said Yes, but two of the neighbors' docks are in your front yard, and it's a foot deep in bay-bottom seagrass. My father had been dead more than two years by then, it was my first instance realizing total family responsibility really coming upon me.
Sunday, October 17, 2010, feeling overwhelming exhaustion, I had to leave church and Linda took me to the Bay Med ER, where my heart issues were diagnosed, inoperable, would die on the operating table, with a prognosis of two to five months to live, and my new life began. With a ten-year promise, I'm into my twelfth year of survival after surgery anyway (replace aortic valve, repair mitral valve, two or three CABGs) at Cleveland Clinic, Ohio on January 24, 2011, my sister Gina's 73rd birthday.
October 9, 2018 we took Malinda to Sacred Heart Hospital, Pensacola for further brain surgery to tie off a second aneurysm, after which she had a stroke that significantly changed her life; and during which hospital stay, sitting in her ICU room, I watched Category 5 Hurricane Michael come ashore on my laptop screen.
Last year, October 2021, my adventurous sister Gina died from injuries in the crash of her motor home. My mind knows better, but my heart honestly believes Gina is still away on her travels and the next Time she is home in Panama City we'll either have her over for supper or meet at Hunt's for oysters. Hearts are funny that way, keep on loving, just won't let go: my heart is still protecting me that way about Ray Wishart, Richard Youd, and Ryan Yessman too.
October yet. I'm scheduled as supply priest for Sundays 9 and 23 October. Wednesday October 12, God willing and the Evil Eye doesn't visit hurricane season upon us, which is iffy, Linda and I are to drive through Apalachicola and Panacea and on to Wakulla Springs, where we are to "vacation" (I never need a vacation from 7H) at the Lodge several days, see Tass, maybe have a seafood dinner at Angelo's and another at Posey's, who knows, maybe get to visit Trader Joe's, and attend a Lincoln High football game at which Charlotte will be directing the marching band as drum major.
Fingers crossed, and prayers of smoky incense wafting up, that we be ushered safely and happily into November.
RSF&PTL
T