Saturday evening ramble
Friends whom I remember, know, love and respect include several who are, like my own ancient age, into their nineties. I've been a nonagenarian a week now and people have asked me "How is it?" "Does it feel any different?" Well, yes.
Yes. Physically it isn't any different from 75&c except for the CHF and increasing naps &c that go with it. Mentally, emotionally it feels like I've been sucked into an elite group who've beat the odds, like, heck yes, it feels different.
There were years, I've told this before, when I honestly expected to retire a Navy admiral, a career achievement that every new ensign aspires to, that has enormous odds against. I retired years too early for that, as a Navy commander, almost half a century ago (and retired as a parish priest more than a quarter century ago). Have I thought about it since? Yes, often. Would I have made it? No. Would I go back and make "corrections" to improve my prospects? No. And reflection on where life has taken me instead of to a Navy retirement home somewhere in Northern Virginia makes me constantly see my relevant decision points, Robert Frost's roads diverging in a yellow wood, where what I did, the road I took this day and that, as Frost said, "made all the difference."
What brought on this contemplation is this (Saturday) morning's poem for the day. Which explains why I can still go to the Bay Line Depot where West Beach Drive meets W. 6th Street, buy a ticket and ride the train up to Dothan (which someone recently characterized as a crime scene posing as a community, IDK), or on up to Atlanta and catch a connecting train to WashingtonDC where I loved living at one Time, or on to NYC or Boston and New England. Why do that, go on to Maine? It's on my bucket list to do again for reasons of family history, not to mention the lobsters and clams. I loved living in Newport, Rhode Island those two Navy school tours; I can go back to Mac's Clam Shack anyTime I want to.
That our local train station was long defunct, and tracks torn up - - years before the overnight fire's still smoldering smoke that I came upon during my walk one morning some years ago - - does not interfere with my mind's ability to make my train trip. This trip, the coaches are closed-window and air-conditioned instead of open windows with smoke and cinders being drawn inside like the last Time I caught the Bay Line to points north.
Or the train depot that was here in St Andrews all my years as a boy. There's a parking lot there now, behind the old drugstore that's now something else, a canoe shop or sumpmnother, on the northwest corner of Beck Avenue and 11th Court. My grandparents and family used that station, including in 1918 when they took Alfred's casket home to Pensacola for burial at St John's Cemetery with his sister Carrie and, decades later, Mom, Pop, and my father's sisters Evalyn, Ruth, and Marguerite.
When I recall the old St Andrews train depot building in my years as a boy, Kelley, or Kelly, who owned Kelly Super Market (open air, "We Doze But Never Close"), Mr Kelly had the use of the old depot and had the building and its old boarding platforms piled two stories, almost to the high ceiling, with hundreds of used mattresses for sale. One day I heard something like a moan, looked up, and saw, all the way two stories up on the top mattresses (I've remembered this here before), the head of a teenage boy looking down on the face of the teenage girl underneath him. The boy paused when he looked farther down and saw a much younger boy looking up at them and wondering what was going on.
But as usual, I ramble and wander. Here's that poem:
Lingården Äldreboende Lenhovda
by John Iremil Teodoro, translated from the Tagalog by Luisa A. Igloria
++++++++
(home for the elderly, Lenhovda)
My sister Mimi tells me,
many of the elderly she cares for
often get dressed and pack
as if they are about to go on a journey.
One of them wears his sandals backwards.
Another has put on her make-up, but unevenly.
When asked what they are planning to do,
they say they are going to Järnvägen Station
and are in a great hurry
so they won’t be left behind by the train.
But that train station at Lenhovda
has been closed for almost half a century.
Even the train tracks are gone.
Back then, this was where you could get a ride
to the cities of Växjö or Kalmar.
The train station they see in their minds
is now just one wide parking lot
for the workers in a factory
where expensive windows are made.
++++++++
And I'm with Teodoro's elderly: nothing stands between us and our memories and dreams. I can go anywhere, do anything.
RSF&PTL
T90
ah, T90: I've counted all my life to get here, and it has been well worth the wait, no more counting, nomesane?
pics pilfered from PCNH files online. the Bay Line Depot. the white car is a 1942 or 46 or 47 Packard Clipper.
the old Hathaway Bridge - - a drawbridge, it had a sideways swinging/rotating/turning draw for shipping, the draw sometimes got jammed and we either couldn't get to the beach or couldn't get home from the beach; now and then a tug running off-center of the channel would bump a barge into the bridge and knock the draw out of operation, who remembers?
If I had to go back, what age would I choose? seventeen