the road taken

Every life owes its Being to the vagaries of choice that are the foundation of  Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" and all the "if-only" and "what-if" or "thank God" musing and reflection of the years to come. Pop, my grandfather A D Weller looking back and for the rest of his life regretting that he did not mind Mom's anxious fears - - Mom, his wife Carrie, my beloved grandmother - - and not sent Alfred on the Annie & Jennie that night. Mom begged Pop and Alfred not to let Alfred go, and they laughed and scoffed at her fears. 

If only ... 

The Road Not Taken

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I would never have been born. Mom and Pop and family moved from Pensacola to St Andrews about 1909, and Pop went into the seafood business here, owning and managing Bay Fisheries

located out on a pier that today is the site of Landmark Condominiums on West Beach Drive, then called Bay View Avenue. The weekly gossip or chat in the left-most front page column of The St Andrews Bay Times reports that it has been graded, "now for a good, wide, coat of clay on it" to make it nice and smooth. Bay View Avenue, later W Beach Drive, wasn't concrete paved until some years later.

But Alfred - -

that happened January 1918. Born in 1911, my father, who remembered the horror, was six years old at the Time.

Six years later my grandparents evidently had not even begun to recover from Alfred's death, and they sold The Old Place, packed up and moved the summer of 1924, beginning a few years of restlessness that took them to Ocilla, Georga, where Pop was the Ford dealer for a while; then to Lake City, where he tried real estate; then to Valparaiso, where he went back into the fish business; the back "home" to Pensacola and working with E E Saunders & Company also in the fish business. 

By the Time the family returned to settle in Pensacola, my father was a teenager and student at Pensacola High School, where he met Louise Gentry and stole her from her regular boyfriend, a boy named Tom. 

Many family tales about their teen years in Pensacola came to me through my childhood, a favorite being one I told here years ago, about Louise, and Carroll (my father, named Thomas Carroll Weller after his father's sister's husband John Thomas Carroll, was called Carroll all his life, which which I was six got laid on me), and Mama's brother Wilbur Gentry owned a Model T Ford that they named (dammit all to hell, I forget the car's name). The car had no taillamp, so they hung a railway lantern on the rear to make do. There were many stories about them and the car, which also had no top, a Model T Ford touring car with the top long gone; they paid $15 for the car.

Another, earlier, story is when Louise did the usual rollerskater trick those days, of grabbing the bumper of a car and, kneeling down, being pulled along E. Gadsden Street toward the bridge across Bayou Taxar (the bridge was on Gadsden before the new bridge on Cervantes). Gadsden was paved concrete, Mama (Louise Gentry) fell and was dragged along the concrete until she could let go of the car's bumper. My father, Carroll Weller picked her up and rode her home to 1317 E. Strong Street, and apparently love was born. I heard that story many Times when I was a boy.

Anyway, back to Frost's poem, and the Gentry and Weller families. A year or two later, Mom and Pop finally returned to St Andrews. My father finished his education with the Bay High class of 1928, and my parents were married on my father's birthday, June 11, 1934. I was born September 14, 1935. All because of Frost's poem about choices in life, and the deepest conceivable family tragedy that comes to my mind every Time I look my 7H window down the beach at Landmark Condominiums and across the Bay at Davis Point, round which Annie & Jennie sailed on that bitter cold January night in 1918. 

Mom died January 23rd, 1947, a day of my own deepest sadness. Many Times as a small boy I had crawled up in her lap and asked, "Tell me a story about Alfred." One of the stories was about taking a cup of hot chocolate up to his bedroom and waking him up that night, for the boat trip to Carrabelle.

If the other road had been taken that night, I'd never have Been. 

Always with gratitude to Mike McKenzie for newspapers and pictures that have enabled me to put my family's story together.

T89&c