So What Else Is New?

 

Five short blasts of the ship's horn as the pilot of Progreso warns the small boat in his path to move aside. There are fools and there are damn fools, and it's a stupid damn fool that sits in a small boat, fishing in the shipping channel as a large vessel makes its way toward. 

After the five toots, the pilot brought Progreso to a stop to wait for the small boat to move, which eventually happened.

Watching the action reminded me that, maybe thirty years ago, Nicholas and I were out in a boat that I'd rented from Tyndall Rec Services for the day, and we had, stupidly on my part as the adult aboard, run out of gas and were sitting in the channel as a tug pushing barges loomed larger and larger as I tried to crank the motor and get enough power to move us out of the way. It succeeded, and I ran the boat in to water shallow enough to anchor and phone the folks at TAFB to bring us a can of gasoline. They were gracious enough to do that, and I was a lot more careful from then on.

In those days when Nicholas was a boy (he's 39 now), we loved to get a boat at Tyndall Rec Services and spend the day riding, and swimming in the then clear deep inlet at the east side of the Pass across from St Andrews State Park. The inlet was beautifully aquamarine and clear then, but the last Time I was there it was murky, dark, and dangerous for sharks.

As with memories, it all comes back, when Nicholas was growing up, and me with him, he was Granddaddy's boy and, in my heart, mine alone. He and his mom moved away to Michigan when Nick was, I think, nine years old, thirty years ago, and my mind still hasn't let go of the little boy I loved so dearly! 

But, as someone said, No matter what you think, a child is never yours; a child is a person who grows through your life on their way to becoming an adult. 

We send them along with memories and experiences of us, both positive and negative, that contribute to who and what they become and are in their own Being. I still have both happy memories and scars from the adults who were around me when I was a child, and so does everyone else. 

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Early, I was up early this morning, dark-thirty, three something, because my mind keeps running over what to say to the folks at Holy Nativity when, startled and unexpected, I consented to the request from the bishop's office that I be Supply Priest for HNEC on Sunday, June 16th. I've been struggling somewhat unsettled as I think about and work on that. It's the opposite of my plan and commitment to myself, and way too early for me to go back; but the diocese has numerous parishes in Transition, and not enough Supply Priests to help them all; so I was asked, and I agreed to this one Time. I hope the folks won't look surprised and ask, "What are YOU doing here?" because I have an acute sensitivity and deep, deep aversion to being where I'm not wanted, that over the years of my life and Time has influenced me in many ways. 

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Going off psychological and introspective, this is turning out to be a private and personal journal or diary entry instead of a public blogpost. Maybe I'll code it for limited access, or maybe I'll leave it as a Draft instead of pressing Publish this morning. Or maybe I'll press Publish and then go back later and press Revert to Draft. Because I'm not looking for comments.

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So, what else is new? as Harry Golden liked to ask in his New York City's Lower East Side Yiddish upbringing as a Jewish boy. Harry Golden is/was one of my heroes, and at one Time I had all his books, from "Only in America" to "So, What Else Is New?" to "For Two Cents Plain," and all the rest of them. Harry Golden: the life, experiences, and wisdom of one of the wisest men who ever lived. Leaving Apalachicola though, I had to get rid of about three-quarters of my enormous personal library, including all my Harry Golden books, so all that's long gone. 

Once in a while I recall one of Harry's stories here. Born in Eastern Europe, migrating to Canada and then NYC to grow up, Harry Golden eventually relocated to and settled in the South, in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he experienced our blithely oblivious but unspeakably evil prejudices and racism. There in Charlotte, as an author, columnist, newspaper editor and publisher of "The Carolina Israelite" newspaper, Harry developed tongue in cheek solutions to make us aware of our absurdities and hoping to ease us out of our wickedness. One such was his "Golden White Baby Plan." Lemme splainify. 

In Harry's day, and mine, all my growing up years, the South was racially segregated by law and by deep personal prejudice. Schools, Theaters, Buses, Restaurants, Rest Rooms, Churches, racial mixing was illegal and racial separation was enforced. I was once, the summer of 1954 on a bus ride from Panama City to Birmingham, Alabama {{on the way to my first of many appointments with cardiologists and other heart specialists over the years; I was eighteen and a rising sophomore at Univ.Florida}}, threatened by a bus driver that he would throw me off his bus if I did not get up from my seat next to a black woman holding her baby, and move to a seat at the front of the bus. 

Seeing me in his rearview mirror, he had slammed the bus to a stop in the middle of nowhere, dark of night, and stalked back to order me, "Get up and move to a front seat." I said, "I'm fine." He said, "Get up and move or I'll throw you off the bus right now." We were somewhere on US-231 north of Marianna and south of Dothan. Every eye on the bus was on me. With an apology to the baby's mother, I got up and went to the seat just behind the bus driver. We were in the South, and the bus driver had the law on his side, and he might either have put me off the bus in the dark middle of nowhere, or had me arrested when we arrived in Dothan.

It was an occasion of finding myself where I was not wanted. More, it was also my experience of being a Black American in the South.

America was not Great.

Anyway, Harry Golden's "White Baby Plan" - -

Throughout the South in those years after the Civil War, we had total racial segregation where Black is Black and White is White and never the twain shall meet. The Ritz Theatre downtown had a ticket booth for white only, and a ticket booth window off to the side for "colored." White only could sit downstairs and in the left side of the balcony, which was walled off from the right side that was for "colored." It was this way throughout the South and no Black person could sit in our White section, forbidden by law, and it never occurred to us that we were white supremacist a-holes. Of which there are still more than enough still today and on and on.

Anyway, Harry's plan. In the South, the only way a Black person could sit in the White section was a Negro Maid bringing a White baby to the air-conditioned picture show. Harry's plan worked from there: any Black person who wanted to sit downstairs in the White Only Section could be issued a white baby doll at the ticket booth, and as long as they where holding the white baby doll, they could sit in the clean section with the White Folks.

Harry Golden was tongue in cheek, but he was smart, wise, impudent, challenging. I remember him. He lived and wrote in my lifetime, and died in 1981. Along with Robert E Lee before me; and Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, MLK, Harry Truman, and Ike Eisenhower in their lifetimes and mine, Harry Golden was one of my heroes. 

Tuesday morning. We have a plan for walking this morning, so I think I'll cut it off here.

RSF&PTL

T88&c