way leads on to way
We came to Apalachicola this Time for the ordination in Trinity Church, of a new priest. A lovely ceremony in a place of the heart. I introduced myself to him as his predecessor from nearly forty years ago!
Each Time we visit Apalachicola, my fresh, new joy in the hour we arrive is slightly but nevertheless dimmed by my awareness that the hour will come all too soon when we have to leave again.
I don't know what a psychiatrist might term my personality fault, "pessimist" maybe, but I might call it "realist" because for me it happens every Time. My sadness in leaving is part of the price of coming back here for a Time.
But it's always worth it to me, and, even though it's always good to be back home in St Andrews, I can't wait to return to Apalachicola.
What's so great about Apalachicola? Honestly, I do not know, but it's something I've known since I was a child first here in the 1940s. In fact, and I've remembered this here before, there was a Time early in my life when my parents considered our relocating to Apalachicola. Trying to date that event was sort of like the exercise of trying to date a Bible writing: you look for clues. I asked my sister what she remembered about it. Gina remembered that all five of us came, and that we looked at big old houses. I asked her if she remembered what car we were in, and she said, "Yes, the blue car." The blue car before the green Dodge was the blue 1942 Chevrolet that my parents bought about the Time of Pearl Harbour. We traded it for the green Dodge for Mama's 36th birthday in May 1948. That narrows dating possibilities to 1942-1948.
To narrow possibilities further, we would not have been looking during World War 2, 1942-1945, because our father was away in the Merchant Marine. So the Time when our parents considered moving to Apalachicola was between fall 1945 and spring 1948. Say then, 1946 or 1947.
What do I wish? I don't wish anything different for my life. Sometimes, though, I do wonder what my life would have been like if I'd lived in Apalachicola from about 10 years old, and grown up here. For one thing, there are two, with great-granddaughter Lillie three, generations after me that would never have been born. But other people would have been born: who would they have been and what would they have been like?
It's my same reasoning that pinpoints my own personal destiny as the evening in January 1918 when the Annie & Jennie left Bay Fisheries pier in St Andrews to sail around Davis Point and into the Old Pass, where, in a heavy squall, a wave lifted her high and dropped her on a reef, breaking her keel. My father's 18-year-old brother Alfred drowned in the freezing surf that night. In inconsolable grief, my grandparents sold The Old Place and relocated, staying away from St Andrews enough years for my father and mother to meet as students at Pensacola High School, giving me a chance to have life.
Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" says that every road not taken makes all the difference in where we find ourselves in life. Or, indeed whether some have life at all, and some do not. I like to think about it.
What, for example, if Hitler had been killed when he was a German soldier during World War One, and WW2 and the German Holocaust, which cost untold millions of human lives, had never happened?
This also gets personal for me: in the mid-1940s, Linda's parents and Linda moved from Alabama to Panama City because of a business opportunity that was created here during WW2. What if?