Seven-fifteen and the fog is back. White early, then lifting, clearing, but now it's back and I can't see the houses on the other side of the park across the street. Coming and going this morning. Thursday evening there were just four of us here and I grilled steaks on Ray's new grill outside, dragonflies flitting around, coming and going. Reportedly around for 200 million years, they can fly backwards and sideways, up, down, straight at you and veer instantly. I miss watching them early evenings at 7H, in small swarms darting aorund just off our porch, their suppertime, catching and eating mosquitoes and gnats. Which is interesting because up that high we've not been bothered by the mosquitoes and gnats that sometimes made evenings outside intolerable at the Old Place. Which brings to mind our Maine trip summer 2008, August just before school started, we flew from here to Boston and rented a car, were there just short of two weeks. Linda, Kristen and me, I. L...

Not at all what's on my early morning mind, I keep seeing this picture in the disorganization of my desktop, where I set it weeks ago. It's there pinched from someone else's posting because it stirs Mario Lanza slnging in The Student Prince, "life has nothing sweeter than its springtime", and here we are with all the memories. Well, not all of them. But Jimmy's Drive-In during the 1940s after WW2 and into Korean War days, to mark life by which war was going on. And my own Time by which car I was driving or riding in, but which makes the mind calendar easy.  Jimmy's on 6th Street east and down the hill from Harrison. And we had Tally-Ho out on Harrison at 15th Street north of Bay High ("On our city's northern border ..."), about as far as you could go in Panama City without running into the woods or heading out US231. And the Chicken Box on west US98 in StAndrews, or specifically what we called Little Dothan, who remembers Little Doth...

Just personal musing, it's not a political blog and there's no point, nothing to be served, only deepens emotions about something totally beyond my abilities, commenting to self about the confounding but fraught with sadness, anger, disgust and pain matters of immigrant children, abortion legislation. The situation worsens in numbers, fact, policy, intent and handling; who can deal with it competently, effectively, and with humane compassion?  And a trade war? With both undergraduate and graduate courses in international economics, I came away with the conviction that, unless there's a promising infant industry temporarily to be protected, tariffs hurt us more than them, and everybody all around. And long years of observing that international economic interdependence is a practical deterrent to international conflict including war. War is the worst thing we do to ourselves and each other. What I see is a megalomaniacal lust and exercise of hostility, power ...

Want to Stay Healthy as You Age? Let Go of Anger It may be more damaging than sadness Jamie Ducharme Though emotions are often fleeting, they can have a lasting impact on your health. Stress, for example, may heighten the risk of both chronic and acute health conditions, while happiness can improve wellbeing . Now, a small new study published in the journal Psychology and Aging suggests that anger, far more than sadness, is linked to negative health effects in older people, potentially by contributing to inflammation and chronic disease. The new research was borne from a theory developed by two of the study’s co-authors, psychologists Carsten Wrosch and Ute Kunzmann. The theory posits that all emotions — even negative ones — play an important, evolving role throughout a person’s life. “All negative emotions may have a positive function if experienced in the right context,” says Wrosch, a psychology professor at Concordia University in Canada. Anger may motivate people t...

Severely and seriously needing a major distraction from tension, upon waking this dark predawn and sitting here with computer in lap and black coffee in white cup on the dark chest beside (in the room's darkness the chest corner where between sips the coffee cup rests is invisible, so a white envelope or white napkin is kept on that corner for visibility to help me avoid sitting the cup down on empty space), I googled "n" which brings up news netflix nba nba playoffs nike nordstrom et al, tapped news, then selected NPR (which I've never selected before, usually selecting BBC, then maybe going back and selecting Fox then CNN for the dark comedy of difference).  Read about the small plane collision in Alaska, wondering how ten people who were rescued could have lived through a plane collision, must have been very low, on takeoff or landing,  Then to NPR coverage of the Supreme Court going on the defensive about their apparent contradictory handling of death pe...

Wind in the Pines is classic, poetic, takes me to Narnia and the Hundred Acre Wood, but it's true and real here, over the fence and beyond, the wind in the pines has a hush to it, a soft, continuous hushing shhhhhh. And the summer sun, when summer comes, will enhance it, bringing out the fragrance that sets piney woods apart from everything else. Summer 1955, I worked for the paper company, in high-top metal-toed shoes, tromping through northwest Florida pine forests "marking timber" to be cut. I was 19 almost twenty, summer outdoors before my junior year at Florida.  Except for enjoying working with my brother, there are no specific memories to most of my summers growing up, because Cove School and Bay High years I worked at the fish house every day, Monday through Saturday until 1952 and 1953 when I spent all summer at our diocesan Camp Weed, Carrabelle, Fla in various capacities as both camper and staff. My father was not happy with me about that, saying I should be ...

At 83 it's interesting being the primary summoned household playmate for a little girl who just turned four years old. Her name is Lilly, our months on the run and at the condo in South Walton she hardly ever calmed down but was almost constantly frantic. Evenings she would find me and ask, "Papa, want to play Hide and Seek?" and I would look at her with big eyes and start, "ONE! TWO!" and, looking startled, she would leap into a run toward her hiding place, often under the same chair. At first, "Papa, be a monster" and I would come looking for her, growling and arms dragging the floor. But when she said "Papa, don't be a monster, it scares me" I stopped that altogether, because I like that she likes her great-grandfather, a malleable playmate who generally does what he's told. Since we've settled into the new house here at Breakfast Point, her personality seems to be mellowing beautifully. I've wondered if the sudden u...