Just remembering again

Something online this morning, seems like maybe it was a vacation commercial about St. Lucia, ignited (no, that's truly the best word for how it felt) my memories of the song "Santa Lucia" and hearing it sung off and on through my growing up years.

Enrico Caruso.

Maybe played over the radio. WDLP or whatever. WWL in New Orleans, your fifty-thousand watt clear channel station, with studios in the Roosevelt Hotel.

Those were the two radio stations that came through loud and clear when I was a boy, WDLP and WWL.

Anyway, I googled Santa Lucia, read about it on Wikipedia, charming, romantic story. Neapolitan to Italian to English. Enchanting lyrics, a boatman inviting folks to ride his boat in the harbor in the cool of the evening. Yes, there was a Time during summers when we wanted a place to enjoy a cool breeze. Windows open wide. Fans, table top fans, floor fans. In Time, huge attic fans that, with windows open maybe six inches instead of open wide, pulling a draft in. My favorite bed and bedroom as a boy and teenager was upstairs right, the north side window open enough to put my pillow in the windowsill and let the attic fan pull a cool breeze across my head.

Seems to me my father had that attic fan timed to cut off at some point, or he got up and turned it off, IDK.

Wandering, Bubba.

So I listened to Caruso singing Santa Lucia, about 1918. And then went to the Grand Hotel Vesuvius, with Mount Vesuvius in view across the harbor, and listened as Caruso sang. He'd made that hotel his home the last years of his life, and died there in 1921. You can go online and reserve a table for dinner in the garden restaurant that's up high overlooking the harbor and imagine yourself there as Caruso ate his dinner at a nearby table and then stood to sing.

++++++

I remember as a teenager in love, summer evenings walking and holding a girl's sweaty hand. You hoped for a cool breeze.

Nowadays you can just stay inside in the air conditioning. Doesn't sound as romantic, but life is whatever you make of it, isn't it. We only know What Is in our Time, we don't know what life will be like for our great great grandsons. Pop, my grandfather, reminiscing to me about the winter Sunday afternoon in Wisconsin, as he was visiting his brother, a priest there, took the horse and the family sleigh and called on a girl he was in love with - - at some point in the sleigh ride, drew the horse to a stop, and kissed his girl. Pop was sixteen or seventeen, told me it was the first Time he kissed a girl. It would have been 1888, eh? Pop lived in Jacksonville, where his father was the rector at St John's Episcopal Church. An older brother, Heber, was the priest at a church in northern Wisconsin.

I suppose Pop would have traveled by rail, eh? It might have taken a couple of days and overnights on the train. How was life for a teenage boy in the late 1880s, in love with a cute girl in the age before deodorant and breath mints? IDK.

Less than a dozen years later, Pop was married to Mom, my grandmother, living in Pensacola, with their first son, Alfred. A few years after that, they were living here in St Andrews, building The Old Place.

Pop died nearly sixty years ago, in June 1964, at age 92, while we were stationed in Japan with the U S Navy. What I wouldn't give to go back those years, I have a lot of questions to ask him. And I'd make sure to tell him how much I love him, and how fondly I remember him now that I'm the age he was when I knew him best.

See where the mind goes?

A Monday in June 2023.

RSF&PTL

Pic: sky to the east of me at 5:51 this morning. Magnificent.