wandering, wandering

hot & black, 3:33 AM 61° 95% way too dark early Thursday, but WOW is the coffee good this morning! 

And who'd believe a doddering nonagenarian can learn something? Everyone knows that some foods are unhealthy, and hotdogs are at the top of the list, but a little research - - reading and personal taste-test - - reveals which brands are better anyway. From a lifeTime of only Oscar Meyer I sorted it down to three: SRF wagyu beef franks, Hebrew National kosher all beef, and Sabrett. 

Sabrett because if you buy a hotdog from a NYC street vendor it's sure to be Sabrett. Last week I bought a package and with my coffee this morning I ate just a plain Sabrett wiener cooked 60 seconds in the microwave: much more flavorful than Oscar Meyer (Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener, That is what I'd truly like to be-ee-ee. 'Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener, Everyone would be in love with me), but a bit salty. 

My experiment put Snake River Farms wagyu frankfurters tops, but with Hebrew National actually too close to call and they were on twofers at Publix last week. But (did I already tell this?) SRF also had a markdown, from $12 a pound (WHAT?, AYKM?) to $10 a pound, plus a limited offer of 25% off if you buy six or more of sale items, making them $7.50 a pound, borderline competitive to at least give them a try, and

the SRF brand is too expensive and distinctively flavorful to call them hotdogs or wieners, they're frankfurters or "franks" and that's where I am with this little paragraph in life.

+++++++++

It's after four o'clock now, and my coffee club hot & black is still perfect hot drinking temperature in my magic mug. 

Stopping now to check out How's-it-Going? with a close friend who currently is living in a Manhattan apartment close enough to a Katz's Deli to stop by and pick up a pound of pastrami, loaf of rye bread, and jar of mustard to take home for supper. And if it were me, I'd pick up a couple of bottles of Heineken on the way home.

And that does it, at this stage and age in life everything stirs a memory. On my first ship, the destroyer, my best wardroom buddy was Don Senese. Don was from Boston, a Harvard degree in Russian, an Episcopalian whose parish served mimosa cocktails and bloody Marys at coffee hour, and who was a sailing enthusiast. Don's favorite beer was Heineken. Every Saturday morning our January 1959 month in Gitmo for RefTra after the shipyard overhaul, Don and I left the ship, went to R&R and checked out a sailboat, lugged a washtub filled with iced down bottles of Heineken aboard, and sailed all day on Guantanamo Bay. I was a new sailor, and Don was not a patient "skipper" but when we both were promoted from ensign to jg, we qualified aboard for "senior officer's quarters" (there were lots of ensigns aboard), and moved from junior officers' quarters on the main deck amidship to share a stateroom on the first deck way forward at and below the waterline. Don had the lower bunk and I had the upper, and I went to sleep every night with my ear against the skin of the ship, listening to the Atlantic Ocean rush by less than an inch away. But, ah, the weekends that month in Guantanamo. Sunny Cuba when it was snowing bitter cold back home in Norfolk, where Linda was with Malinda.

Don, who was absolutely appalled when I transferred from USNR to Regular Navy, finished his three years, went back to Harvard for an MA and then his PhD in Russian language and history, and lived his life as the Russian professor at a Canadian university in, as I recall, British Columbia. Don and I were the same age (1935), he died a few years ago but my memories are still alive.

Don was one of the four or five USS CORRY officers who, a later Saturday morning back in our Norfolk, Virginia homeport, went with me to the local Peugeot dealership, asked to test-drive their demo, a blue Peugeot 403

drove it out to Virginia Beach, kept it all day, and returned it at the dealership's closing Time, by which hour the salesman, who'd thought we'd be just driving it around the block, was furious and ready to murder us.

In those days (years), being a junior officer on a Norfolk destroyer was a good Time for a car lover like me, because all the new ensigns coming out of Annapolis arrived with a brand new car, and I got to drive them all.

Looking back from age ninety, what do I wish? Nothing, I wouldn't change one second of it. If I were starting life over I wouldn't stay in the Navy twenty year, I'd do my three years and come home to Panama City then go to theological seminary at Sewanee as I'd originally intended. But with the life I've had I wouldn't change a thing. Not eon damn thing. I'd take exactly all the exact same roads diverging in my yellow wood.

RSF&PTL and thank you, Robert Frost

T90

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.