an apology

Maybe a quickie blogpost before I get back into my can't-put-down book that Joe brought, "Ghosts of Honolulu" by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. Fascinating to learn stuff including the years, months and days leading up to December 7, 1941 that make it obvious that "Let's Remember Pearl Harbor" did not have to happen as it did; though I don't think the battleships we had at the Time, before USS Missouri and the three others of that IOWA class, could have blasted the Japanese battle fleet out of the water.

Six, I was six years old and as innocent as any first-grader. What do I remember about that Time in my life? Well, the Labor Day 1941 sit-down at the dining room table with Mama when I reluctantly began the evolution into my twelve-year identity as Carroll. The first few minutes in Ms Violet Heyward's class at Cove School, when the teacher had me kick at a yardstick to determine that I would thenceforth be right-handed instead of somewhat ambidextrous, then looking around and a moment of panic that Mama had disappeared; but peace because the teacher then seated me at the desk behind my first-cousin and close friend Ann. Getting my first "graded paper" back with two large "exes" X X because I'd not noticed the instructions to color the boy blue and the girl red, and had colored the boy black and the girl yellow. Coming out of Cove School into the play-yard that was at the north end of the building where Beverly McDaniel Hall auditorium and dining room is now and panicking because I didn't see Mama waiting for me in our black 1935 Chevrolet (wsw tires and yellow spoke wheels), then heard Gina yell, "BUBBA!!" at me from a new 1942 Chevrolet waiting in the dirt road that Hamilton Avenue was in those years.

and on and on ...

In this morning's news, The Jerusalem Post reports the death of a 19 year old soldier, seems like most of the IDF deaths are nineteen year olds. I remember when I was nineteen, a sophomore at U Florida, and my summer 1955 almost twenty before starting my year as a college junior. Would I go back? Well, why not? 

There's a photograph of me seventy years ago, just after I turned 19, that Linda has on her dresser. We were starting to get more or less serious that year, mostly more. 

An interesting summer that year, heading west toward Panama City, Linda and I were run off the road on Hwy 98 the other side of Eastpoint by a driver in a top-down Olds convertible: he and his wife were heading toward us in the eastbound lane, sightseeing both gazing out over Apalachicola Bay, came into our lane, and to avoid a head-on crash I took to the shoulder of the road. He saw us just as he passed. His wife made him turn around, drive back, catch up and honk his horn until I stopped, and he came to my window and said that he was terribly sorry and that his wife had made him turn around and come apologize to me. 

That pic was after my first crew-cut that my Mother had begged me not to get. When I arrived home from Gainesville, Mama was sick in bed and, noticing my haircut, said, "It's cute." 

Anything else you want to know about that year is probably none of your business.

RSF&PTL

T88&c