Monday again
Monday: what's happening? When I came out earlier, just after five o'clock, the air was filled with an unpleasant smell of smoke, but there's a breeze from the east with gusts to 13 mph that seems to have carried it away. Now clear, 73° F 85% humidity. St Andrews Bay is flat, not mirror flat, but with a slight ripple, the day just smells like Monday now, and I could sit out here on 7H porch forever.
Pic: the birthday balloons don't seem to have lost one puff of their energy reminding me that it's getting late.
My life: I've liked to divide it up, perceive it, reflect on it, in roughly twenty-year chapters. Twenty years growing up, twenty years as a Navy officer, twenty years as a parish priest, twenty years that, 60 to 90, turned into thirty years as a retired person; now What? Something new? What? What new, What now?
What? Well, my life has been car oriented, I once counted up the cars I'd owned that listed over seventy including two Ford pickup trucks our Apalachicola years, and a wonderful new, red Chevy Tahoe that I bought as, unknown to me, 9/11 was unfolding, planes crashing and buildings falling. It all began in 1956 with a ten year old Buick that a friend and I paid $75 for.
Now I don't have a car anymore, Linda does most of the driving, and my inkling to end up, as I began, with a Buick makes no sense, what nonagenarian needs to threaten self, spouse, and public by setting out on the road? What I've found out in my lifeTime of car lust is that reason, logic and common sense are not factors. For instance, my favorite car dealer recently had on the online used car lot a twenty year old Buick from the years when a Buick looked like a Buick, and I kept going back and hovering lovingly over it, but it's gone, lucky for me, I guess.
A boat swung into our area with a man standing with a cast net: probably fishing for mullet to be served in one of the local restaurants that serve fried mullet. This little area right down in front of 7H is, or before Hurricane Michael was, a mullet hatchery, thick and heavy with mullet this Time of year. The storm wiped it out and it hasn't recovered, though we still see a bit of mullet activity down there now and then. Besides people, who likes mullet? The pelicans, which can be thick down there at Times, and the ospreys. Haven't seen an osprey for at least several days now, maybe they've migrated.
The ospreys at the Boulder County Fairgrounds osprey nest in Colorado, that I watch, have come, raised their chicks, and migrated, completing another fascinating cycle of life. We don't need to wax sentimental about these things, it's the Way of Creation, life comes and goes.
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Mullet: last week I bought three mullet up the street at Buddy Gandy's, we deep-fry nothing, so bake them in the oven, they were fresh and excellent. At the fish market I also bought oysters, two of their new improved super-pints that, like a pound of coffee, are twelve ounces instead of sixteen. They were fresh and beautiful but disappointing raw, so I ended up cooking them all, pan cooked in their own liquor and making an oyster roll with a hotdog bun.
Cooking hamburgers this evening, to enjoy cheeseburgers with one of two long-years best friends, who is coming over after work. What's a best friend? My experience, a best friend is someone you trust and who trusts you with no secrets between you, life is all out on the table. One, a generation younger than I am; the other a Navy contemporary of more than half a century. They know who they are.
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Honesty, honestly: greatly disappointed in my Mark's gospel class yesterday, I was prepared in great detail with more information than I could get to but I didn't have it well enough organized for presentation. Linda reminded me that last week, my "birthday week" was overwhelmingly stressfully busy without any letup and I was never relaxed enough to prepare satisfactorily, which eases my self condemnation a bit. Live and learn, eh?, and press on. This week is light.
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Last January I had two bouts of dermatology surgery on my face, one an almost emergency frighteningly immediately close to my right eye, one beside my mouth down toward chin. Both surgeries totally successful, but the work near my eye left something that causes tears, instead of draining, to form sandy grit that gets into the eye and keeps me blinking, and now dripping in eye drops. I'm extremely leery of anything close to my eyes, been thankful that the eye doctor keeps saying the cataracts are not forming; thankful that over the past fifty years my vision has hardly changed, including the same eyeglasses prescriptions for the past ten years (one for reading and one for pulpit and altar); and I don't like the little plastic vials that you break off the top of it, leaving a scratchy plastic tip to touch near the corner of the eye to pour in the eye drops. But once done, the eye drops help immensely.
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What? Breakfast: magic mug of hot & black, with chicken liver pate on three saltine squares. I eat the liver pate over a couple of weeks, slowly and sparingly, because, like Life Itself, it's all too soon gone.
RSF&PTL
T90