when I thinks

Saint Agur (pronounced [sɛ̃taɡyʁ]) is a blue cheese brand owned by Savencia Fromage & Dairy Group and made with pasteurised cow's milk from the village of Beauzac in the Monts du Velay, part of the mountainous Auvergne region of central France. It is made from pasteurised cow's milk, enriched with cream, and contains 60% butterfat, qualifying it as a double-cream cheese. Aged for 60 days in cellars, the cheese becomes stronger and spicier as it ages.

The moist, rich, white cheese has characteristic olive green mould veins throughout and a smooth, creamy texture with a subtle mild spicy taste resembling a softer and finer Roquefort in presentation and taste. It is not as salty as more traditional blue cheese, and its tangy and creamy nature is balanced so as not to overpower with a sharp bite, although this is dependent on the age of the cheese. Owing to its double-cream nature, this cheese is easily spread and also melts well. (Wikipedia)

Our duty station summer 1968 to summer 1969 was Newport, Rhode Island, where we lived in salt air within the clanging sound of a navigation buoy in Narragansett Bay, and where I was a student at the Naval War College. It was a Time of contented deliciousness in life and rising career that left many happy memories floating around in my mind.

An aside is my awareness that all these memories and all this happiness of mind will fade into nonexistence at my death, when my brain dies. That's not a depressing thought, just simply an awareness that makes me wonder sometimes, what evaporated from his notion of reality when George Washington died, and also Winston Churchill - - two sort of benchmarks for my mental wanderings. 

Anyway, one Newport memory is that growing up, at Cove School, I always envied both the school library and the students in my class whose families owned The Encyclopedia Britannica; and when an encyclopedia salesman made an appointment and came to see me one evening at our home in Newport, I could hardly wait to sign the purchase contract. It was for something over a thousand dollars, a present value of about $8,890 and at the Time a third of the value of a new Dodge car. I loved and treasured that encyclopedia, which continued to send me a new annual update volume for, as I recall, the next ten years. Those encyclopedias are obsolete today and I finally gave them away when we sold The Old Place and moved to 7H the end of 2014. One of my memories of that Encyclopedia Britannica is of grandson Nicholas sitting with a volume open, absorbed in reading. And later he might tell me excitedly about something he had read. Our Apalachicola days, a life's highlight. 

While we were living in Newport, my parents came to visit us and we drove up to Boston, where we toured the Battle of Bunker Hill memorial so I could see for my own proud self the name of my ancestor George Weller who my Uncle Charlie had written in his family history, died in that battle and whose "name is inscribed there" in the memorial. Searching and going back to search again, I couldn't find George Weller's name. I wrote to Encyclopedia Britannica to exercise my then privilege of having something researched and reported to me, asking them for a written list of every man known to have died at the Battle of Bunker Hill, both American side and British side, and they did, and George's name was not there. 

Years later I found out that Uncle Charlie's family history was at least partly fabricated, a lie; and further, to my desolating dismay, that my Weller ancestor did not come to America from England as he'd written, but from Germany. 

Why was I so desolated? Because my view of Germans was formed during World War Two and its immediate aftermath when facts and photos about The Holocaust came to light.   

A Newport memory that I was going to share here this morning has slipped my mind, so I'll remember being awakened in the wee hours by the sound of the snowplow scraping past, and trying to find my car among the lumps of snow along the curb as I left for class the next morning. 

I also remember wonderful adventures with the travel trailer we owned at the Time, and Mack's Clam Shack, and the fish market where I went out back on the Bay side, climbed up on the walkway around the huge, deep vat, and selected the lobsters I wanted. 

I pretty much stuck with the chicken lobsters, about a pound each, which were a dollar apiece. 

As another benchmark, that shore duty marked the end of my joyful satisfaction in my Navy career. I was a lieutenant commander, we PCS'd from Newport to San Diego and sea duty, and two years later I left the ship as a Navy commander, but the camaraderie and family happiness while we lived in Newport was the summit, and starting with that sea duty that I hated, it was downhill on the other side, then plateaued as I waited to clock my twenty years. So, of my Navy Time, basically, twelve years going up, eight years coming down.

All of which, of course, involved roads diverging in Frost's yellow wood, choices and decisions or indecisions that brought me to where I am this Saturday morning, 1 March 2025. Who'd've have thought, eh?

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Where was I? The wonderful cheese section at Fresh Market, where I bought the smallest packet of Saint Agur cheese, to try it out. It's exquisitely delicious, though I know I'll never buy it again, because sampling cheeses is a progressive life adventure for me.

I had a respectable smear of the Saint Agur cheese on each of three saltines with my hot & black this morning while reading Section 11 of Wiman's "Zero At The Bone." He dissected a poem, then acknowledged that what he found in the poem probably had no likeness whatsoever to what the poet had in mind in writing it, something I used to experience as a parish priest, when folks would go out the door thanking me for the sermon and telling me what it meant to them, that had nothing to do with what I had in mind in writing and preaching it. 

Wiman is strange, very strange, reading him makes me uneasy that even though I lack his brilliance, I share his strangeness, not a good thing. 

Two other notions in his Section 11 caught my attention and rang bells in my mind that started me on this out of control ramble. One is the paragraph that begins, "I woke this morning so leaden I could hardly rouse myself from bed," BTDT and increasingly as I age, there's an insanity in it, to it, that I don't like and that I've wondered whether it's all my age or because of my sleep pattern, that can be quite distressing. Go to bed at a respectable hour, wake three or four hours later having to get up, realize I cannot go back to sleep so stay up and contemplate but not meditate, maybe read something, maybe write something, then go back to bed around five or seven o'clock and sleep comfortably for several more hours. Then a morning, then lunch, then a long afternoon nap. 

Another Wiman line that caught my eye this morning reads, "Because in fact you are going to catch cold, bone cold, and hell and heaven are inextricable in this life, and time is ticking every instant toward a catastrophe orchestrated just for you." I'm aware of that increasingly with age and aging as issues show up more and more here and there in the body, and as I wonder whether they are also showing up in the mind but beyond my awareness.

When I contemplate trying to get into something that satisfies me as meditation, I let my mind focus on 

NASA's JWST deep field image looking into far reaches of the Universe that also has become a foundation for whatever passes for my belief, religion, spirituality. Whoever or Whatever in the beginning said "yeh-hi" and released the possibility of what that image reveals. Adam, nor Abraham, nor Moses, nor even haMoschiach himself had any idea, all being of geocentric worldview. We are not any smarter, but we've discovered more, or more has been revealed to us.  

So, I think and I wonder and I remember my frustration when people I've cared about have dismissed, in response to my expressions of concern about the end of life, "Oh, we don't want to think about that!" I know a woman who years ago was a dear parishioner, whose son recently died and I participated in his funeral service: afterward I wrote her that I would love to get to know her son better if she ever was able and of a mind to share; and, after a little bit of "healing Time" has passed, she has written back, obviously grateful, that she has many memories to share. She's the age of our oldest child, the boy who died was her only child, whom she raised as a single mom from his birth, and he was her world. Frequently other people, even clergy, are uncomfortable with the idea of being with a person in deepest grief; and I'm trying to be other than that and available. Knowing how others have suddenly become unavailable to me in my own Times of angst.

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At any rate, thinking, focusing, picturing, contemplating that is not yet meditating with its supposed healing qualities.

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From someone and also floating around in my brain, 

When I works I works hard

When I sits I sits loose

and When I thinks I falls asleep.

RSF&PTL

T89&c

top image pinched online