red red red Tom likes red

Pearl Harbor Day, 3:39 a.m. and just stepped out to see what December is up to: bright in the west, damp wind, 68°F and 7H porch rail is wet, signifying dew, fog or rain during the night. The rail is just wet, not big drops like rain leaves, so more likely just the night dampness. For a native Floridian it's a perfect late fall Time of the long Holiday Season.

Good news from Cleveland Clinic, and my ongoing prayer is that it continues right through a happy return trip home. From Time to Time, and especially as we advance further in age, life can seem a bit shaky, and we're here to hold each other up - - "raise them up if they fall, ..." and "God has no hands but our hands to do his work today" go the old prayers.

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Picture of Old Father Time - - or - - Tom, Papa, Uncle Bubba, Commander, Dad, Carroll, among the incoming texts on my cell phone this morning. Yep, that's me, in a blue Advent stole that several years ago I gave to Mike - -

The mind wanders, doesn't it, and with lightning speed, jumping from synapse to synapse, from cubby to cubby, from memory to memory and place to place and Time to Time. Seeing myself in this picture reminds me - - here goes the wandering mind - - that all my growing up years my shiny black hair was parted from the slightly right-side cowlick in the back, up to the center, as decided one visit by the barber and my mother - - it would have been Mr Sorrentino back in the 1940s at Sorrentino's Barber Shop on Harrison Avenue, I think about where the Marie Hotel is, was it next door to Cooper's News Stand? - - told Mama that how one's hair is parted should be determined by the location of the cowlick and how it causes the hair to lie - - so my part started at the cowlick and came straight to the center of my forehead - - which I always disliked and thought looked not only 1920s but rather fruity - - the mind continues to wander, see. My freshman year at Florida, I noticed white hairs starting to appear here and there (which Mama had told me would happen, as she herself had gone from the same black hair as mine to white hair, by the Time she turned thirty and she started dying it black), and I'd sit at my desk with tweezers and a hand mirror, plucking them out. In due course the white hairs outran me and I gave up. Anyway, about the part - - that freshman year, or maybe the next year or even my junior year, I changed and started parting my hair on the left side, which, stlll to this day, as the above picture shows. When I got home to Panama City for the summer, I mentioned to my father that I've started parting my hair on the left instead of to the center; and he retorted, chiding me correctingly, "You shouldn't be changing those things." See, the mind keeps wandering, and I remember how that made me feel, but it was not surprising as just one more episode in the lifelong history of our tense, extremely tentative, strained relationship.

As the mind continues to stray from a long lost antecedent into the darkness, I'll stop there, that's enough and more for this morning, maybe but not likely, a private memoir someday. The development of parent-child relationships is interesting and sometimes scary to contemplate. I recall again, as this wandering persists in spite of me, that July day in 2011, standing with Gina at the front entrance of the rehab center where our mother was dying, talking an hour and more about growing up and how different our childhood memories were - - Gina telling me that she and I had grown up in two different families, with two very different mothers. And she took it back to the early and mid-1940s when our father was away during World War Two, that it was always her and Walt against me, Mama's favorite - - which Mama even admitted. That in our father's absence during the War, I at eight years old had taken over as their boss, and she and Walt had always resented that. Again several Times she told me during that enlightening, once in a lifetime conversation, that she and I had had two different mothers. I had no idea. Indeed, none of us lives inside another's mind. It doesn't occur to us that our perspective is just that, Point of View, not Truth.

Enough, enough. This is a blogpost, not a journal or diary entry.

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More tea, Vicar?

Do you think we'll have rain?

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Fog outside now as Wednesday opens. From my chair here by the Bay, my favorite color. Red. Christmas cactus. Poinsettia. Rose Poinsettia.

RSF&PTL