Labor Day et al

 

Not a commitment to myself or obligation to anyone else, but more a habit helpful to me alone that almost every day for the past, next month it'll be fourteen years, I've taken Time to bother with this +Time blogpost. It's helpful to clear my mind of whatever's eating at me and go on with my day.

The no-sugar-added cranberry juice that's added to my mug of tap water is quite sour, not tasty. Breakfast: last of the Boar's Head sliced roast beef and a slice of Cracker Barrel extra sharp white cheddar cheese on Pepperidge Farm extra thin sliced bread, usually whole wheat but white this morning, with mayonnaise. I'll not name the mayo brand for fear of re-kindling the Southern Mayonnaise Wars always simmering just below the surface. 

Japan's official signing the document of unconditional surrender in the ceremony aboard our battleship USS MISSOURI. 1945: remembering, it was covered in the newsreels at the Ritz Theatre downtown, I was starting fifth grade at Cove School and coming up on my tenth birthday. If you are among those condemning our dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fire-bombings of Tokyo and the German cities, you are excused, because it simply means that you were not there with us; and if you weren't there, you are outside looking in and could not possibly understand how it was. So, + bless your little heart, darlin' - - don't worry about it, shug, God loves you just as you are, the way you are, innocent and oblivious.

+++++++

Labor Day, Times have changed and the old ways were not necessarily best, but in my memories Labor Day was much dreaded because it always meant for dead serious that the most holy Time of the year, Summer Vacation, ends today and school starts tomorrow morning. 

Little do I know on Labor Day 1945, when joyfully WW2 is finally over and the victory ours, that when I enter my fifth grade classroom tomorrow morning, Miss Martin will be behind the desk, and, after a wonderful year with Ms Watson in fourth grade, the sheer hell that I had known every day of third grade with the same Miss Martin would begin again. With so many students, the class was too big, and split into two fifth grades, and Robert and others went off to enjoy fifth grade with Mr Sandilos, going deep sea fishing, and all that; but not me.

Her brother Will Martin, and the Martin sisters who were still single, lived in the old Martin House that still stands on the hill overlooking Martin Bayou just off US-98 across from the paper mill, in Bay Harbor. They were members of St Andrew's Episcopal Church, and longtime friends of my grandparents. I don't remember ever seeing Mr Will at church, but Miss Ruth and a sister Miss Martin were usually at church on Sunday morning. Mark me, though, being one of the cute little Sunday acolytes in red cassock and white surplice never cut me no slack with Miss Martin in class, nomesane? I was one of her regular targets to be diminished by being called on whenever she was sure I would not know the answer. 

Shall I also reminisce that it was the year I was ten years old that I realized that seminary and ordination were my future? Only after my sophomore year at U.Florida did I change my mind, change my college major from pre-theology to business adminatration; and upon graduation June 1957 married Linda Peters and went off for three years, ultimately twenty years, as a US Navy officer. 

But the Lord moves in mysterious ways. God's never in a hurry, eh? Ask Abraham.

++++++++

Malinda and Joe grew up as Navy Brats and never knew any other way of life than moving from place to place at the Navy's whim for me. Tass was five, nearly six years old when I retired 1 Feb 1978 and likely has no memories of our Navy life.

My major sense of life transition was my 45th birthday, 14 September 1980, the overwhelming relief of starting theological seminary full-Time at Gettysburg Lutheran; though for the next three school-years I continued my previous life of running my defense-oriented business full Time, and continued teaching graduate courses in major weapons system acquisition at the Univ of West Florida part-Time for the next three years. A busy life of old things and new. But my first day of feeling reborn into new life and all else left behind was in July 1984 when we arrived as new residents of Apalachicola, living there at Trinity Church for the next fourteen years. Already a place of childhood and teenage memories, Apalachicola became the Place of my Heart second only to life here on St Andrews Bay. I could almost wish to be twenty-one years old again so as to live another life right here in 7H.

++++++++

Labor Day, Monday, 2 September 2024, a FuroEighty Day, therefore not going anywhere; monthly personal business; working on what to do with Revelation in Dr Dan's adult Sunday school class next Sunday morning, there'll be two more sessions of Revelation, and each session has to be different. 

Autumn 2024, Fall doesn't officially start for three more weeks, but Labor Day heralds Fall's annual countdown to Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. The days and nights will cool down, and we enter the nightmare Time of Hurricane Season, so not to let our guards down is wisdom.

Today I'm happy and reasonably healthy in extreme old age. Hoping you get here as well.

RSF&PTL

T88&c