Monday: &c

What a lovely Sunday! The forecast was for bad weather, but it held off, and when we finally left church well after noon, the sun was shining. Backpack Sunday and all the Rally Day ministry display tables up, fried chicken, barbecue pork, the 30A oyster man happily opened oysters as often as I returned with my empty plate for another dozen. In all these years, yesterday was the best of all Backpack Sundays. Happy Bubba.

Me, I'm a raw oyster person. It harkens back to post-WW2 days from 1945 to 1953 working in the retail market of our father's fish house, reaching into the ice case, opening the metal gallon bucket of oysters and helping myself to an oyster, one by one.

And, yes, I fished each oyster out by hand.

In the iced down showcase we usually had two buckets, one of larger size Select oysters and one of Standard oysters.

Part of my joy in 7H is that, looking out on downtown St Andrews from my study office den, I can see exactly where our fish house was, where at a very young age, under my father's guidance, I learned to be a responsible person. And or but where I developed my lifelong taste for raw oysters, which, like a passion for mullet, can be a ravenous craving at Times.

I loved working around the fish house with my brother, once he was old enough to go with us.

And, things our father taught me, somehow it seems to have been passed along to and expected of me, the responsibility to teach Walt. I don't know whether he ever felt that way, I never thought about it. I reckon it was more a sense than a reality.

Of all those years that mean so much to me now, what did I hate? Shaking my knee-high rubber boots until the enormous spiders dropped out of them and sped across the floor, hopefully not toward me.

We had to wear the knee-high rubber boots when working in "the back" where the concrete floor was constantly being washed down with water from a long hose. And, after we got the ice machine, about 1948, we also wore them when shoveling ice in the ice room - - from about 1948 until I went away to college, my responsibility not only during the workweek, but especially every Sunday on the way home from church.

The year range I remember because we always went by the fish house in our new 1948 Dodge, until 1950, when our father bought the 1949 Plymouth station wagon demonstrator from W & W Motors.

Shoveling ice: it had to be done or the pile of ice, which the ice machine dropped off in large sheets that broke up into flakes, the pile of ice would back up the five feet or so to the ice chute and cut the Ice machine off. The shoveling work itself: I looked forward to it on hot summer days, because the ice room was well insulated and stayed delightfully chill.

For me, on hot August days, our ice machine room could be the most pleasant place in Bay County. Air conditioned: the Ritz Theatre (my recollection, the Panama Theatre was not air conditioned, but mama would not let me go there anyway, telling me there were evil men there), and the J C Penny store on Harrison Avenue, where I went to buy my khaki pants, 32" waist by 32" seam, which I remember because I liked to joke about being square.

See, you're really getting a dose of me this happy Monday morning, August 7, 2023: oysters, spiders, ice, and cars.

Weather Panama City, Florida 9 AM, 92° feels like 114°

RSF&PTL