Wilderness Summer
A few weeks ago, a very dear person at church brought Linda a gardenia blossom, and the thoughtful kindness of it ignited the memory of a gardenia bush we had at The Old Place. Seven or eight feet high, huge to walk around, late spring into summerTime it would cover itself with blooms, filling life with its fragrance.
The next morning we went to Lowe's garden shop, found and bought four different varieties of gardenias in pots. One especially quickly filled out with blooms and fragrance, then another, and three of them sort of phased through the next several weeks. Right now, one plant has two new flowers, keeping the porch faintly sweet.
Another of the plants was named "August Gardenia," which we hope will mean more blooms late this summer.
Of which, today is summer equinox 2024, first "official" day of summer. Eighty years ago this morning I would have been loving life while watching the calendar wistfully as summer vacation slipped by. How could life have been so wonderful with no air conditioning? If you wanted air conditioning you had to go to the Ritz Theatre, or to J C Penney's department store on Harrison Avenue. We didn't know what we were missing, yet life was good! Is life good now? Yes, and gets more dear, because life is short, and we haven't much Time.
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Thursday, early dark, four-thirty-two in the morning. Magic mug of hot & black, and a saltine cracker here if I want it. Which reminds me, CHF is relentless and it has to be a FuroForty x 2 morning because I forgot to take it this week and the fluid finds its way down to settle in my feet, ankles, legs, especially right side first. I've had to order a larger shoe size, longer and wider, from SAS, San Antonio Shoe Company in Texas.
Every thought seems to stir a memory, doesn't it! Some forty-five years ago, following my Navy retirement, I'd established my own defense industry consulting business, and I used to love it when I got to go to San Antonio and eat in restaurants on the river walk. One visit there I toured the Alamo. One of my officer assistants on my second ship was named Bill Travis, and he told me about his ancestor who had died fighting in the Alamo. "Let's remember Pearl Harbor, as we did the Alamo." I forget the name of it, but I had a relationship with a company in a nearby town that did business with Lockheed Marietta, which sold C-130 airplanes to Australia, where I had clients in government and industry.
Although it kept me away from home traveling some seventy-five to eighty percent of the Time, my business was huge fun, the new Cadillacs, teaching in seminars around the country with a consortium of the U S Navy and the Australian Embassy, receptions at the Embassy, trips to San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angelos, Long Island New York, Connecticut, Maine, lots of Time in WashingtonDC. One of those seminars we held in a motel right on Puget Sound, and another we held in a motel shouting distance from Walt Disney World in Orlando.
In Time, through a Navy friend, I picked up from an Assistant Secretary of Defense teaching his two defense industry courses that he had established in the MBA program at the University of West Florida, that he was tired of teaching - - which let me come home to Panama City and visit my parents six times a year from1978 or 1979 through 1984. One of those teaching sessions, I got off the plane from Australia, hired a $29 a day Lincoln Towncar from Budget Rent-A-Car, and drove direct to my classroom at Eglin AFB. Those were years when I was more impressed with myself than was warranted, but Life was Good.
The only faux-pas I remember from those days was, visiting an aircraft plant with an Australian client, remarking that the A-10 Warthog was almost too ugly to fly;
only to be informed huffily by one of the company executives present that he had been on the A-10 design team, was very proud of the plane, resented and was offended by my remark.
Doubtless, other mistakes were made during those years as well.
Retiring from the Navy at forty-two going on forty-three, on my forty-fifth birthday, I started school at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg and for three years was working my business full Time, teaching two graduate courses in Florida, and going to seminary full Time - - the most dizzily busy period of my life. Would I do it all again? Not now in extreme old age, but through my forties, you bet!
A memory of those years that I've shared here before: a January day when I left Gettysburg in bitter cold and snow several feet deep, drove to WashingtonDC for an eovrnight, and early the next morning took a plane to Los Angeles to meet an Australian client for several days in the California sunshine.
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Way off track, where was I going?
Oh yes, the Wilderness, deep into the desert. All my life I have worked, starting in my father's fish business when I was nine years old. Now at eighty-eight I've finally retired into full stop. Getting up every morning into the first day of the rest of my life with no professional, business, or vocational responsibilities whatsoever, I'm letting the feeling of being lost almost unto despair sink in. Before breakfast this morning I'll go for a walk by myself, maybe take a thermos of coffee and a pbj foldover. Wear one of my new wide-brim hats. Maybe take my new binocular in case there's a bird, fish, or ship to see. A friend was right: the desert will find me if I let it.
and so forth and so on
RSF&PTL
T88&c