+Time is by no means a whine blog, but now and then a whine seems apt. Mine has to do with something learned recently; that folks who experience the kind of pressure from long term "making do" and "getting by" that we of Panama City and Bay County have been going through ever since HMichael, should expect to get stressed out, to suffer mental and emotional exhaustion and depression; in time possibly depression that is severe and clinical. I don't think I'm there.  Trying to focus on myself as my own object, keeping an eye on myself from outside myself, I think my constant awareness of my sudden deep and deepening psychic crisis, from what had happened and was ongoing, all totally beyond my control - - the combination of the hurricane, its damage and longterm aftermath including shock and then long term Exile with everything changed and different, nothing as before; together with my daughter's precarious medical crisis of brain trauma, ambulance, fi...

As one looks at the picture the camel is on the right side (the face's left side) just below and on the leg of the brown horse below the eye of the face. It's a tiny white Bactrian camel.

We are headed into the final Sunday of the church year, anciently properly called The Sunday next before Advent. The old lectionary had the Collect of the Day and two, not three, readings. On this Sunday we heard the same reading from Jeremiah that we'll hear this coming Sunday, the gospel was Saint John's story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.  The Collect set the stage for a household tradition, or more properly "custom". The day was Stir Up Sunday or Fruit Cake Sunday because the words of the Collect meant the women of the household (remember, this was a day and time when there was men's work and there was women's work, and never the twain shall mix) went home and stirred up the batter for their Christmas fruit cakes - - which I actually remember in my home, my mother baking fruitcakes, me stirring the batter and mixing in the colorful candied fruit. The Sunday next before Advent. The Collect. STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of...

Seriously, I have no idea why, but reading and hearing and seeing and knowing about the Holocaust keeps me filled with a sense of guilt for even having been alive and well during that time of unspeakable cruelty in the history of human evil.  Our American propaganda during WW2 left me with an ineradicable lifelong contempt, mistrust of Germany. We had no television in those days but as said before, I remember the horrifying newsreels in the theaters as Allied forces came upon and liberated the death camps, pictures of rail boxcars crammed with dead human bodies.  Why my almost lifelong sense of guilt I do not know or understand except that the horror was so overwhelming as to spread guilt universally across the earth, no degree of assuagement possible until the death of the last human on earth who was alive on 7 May 1945 when Germany surrendered.  A nation only since 1871, Germany, then, again, now, and always the center of antisemitism stirring throughout Europe and t...

This is what I was going to do yesterday when other things about the day got in my line of sight. A friend sent this, which I enjoyed working. Maybe someone else will too: "Doctors say that if you can find the camel, you don't have Alzheimers." Maybe it's a woman's thing: Linda found the camel in less time than I did. Speaking of, she's making pimiento cheese, which I love. My mother used to make it too, from as far back as my memories go. She used to tell me about the pimiento cheese sandwiches she could buy for lunch when she was in business college; at Kahn's Delicatessen in Pensacola during the Great Depression, a cole slaw sandwich or a baked bean sandwich cost a dime. For a penny or so more you could get a pimento cheese sandwich. A chicken salad sandwich cost 15¢ which was getting extravagant in those days when a new Ford roadster cost $385.  Mama let the cheese warm and soften, then started mashing it and mixing in pimientos.  We ...

Per the weather on Channel 13, going to be a beautiful day, starting a bit hazy across the Bay in all directions from 7H.  The ship left the West Terminal yesterday morning and was heading into the Pass as I walked onto the boardwalk on my way home from Staff meeting and a stop by the school to pickup my copy of the 60th anniversary history. I think she was enroute to Studstrup, Denmark with wood pellets for the power plant there. This morning to drop Kristen's car, the Volvo XC60 we bought for her in 2013 after her car crash on an Atlanta interstate during rush hour Feb 2013 while she was at Emory. Her car was totaled, she and her roommate were shaken but unhurt, and it nearly put Papa in the grave, so online and telephone from here, bought her the safest car in the universe. She's driven it way over 80k miles, and it's being thoroughly inspected at James Auto Service. She's driving Linda's car this morning, and we are heading for Tyndall,...

Up at my usual time this morning, 4:01 AM and not especially glad of it, as recently (how recent? in recent, maybe months) I've been trying to enjoy a later morning, five is late to me, six is quite late and generally not achieved unless I rose and read or wrote for an hour or two in the wee hours before back to bed. But this morning three-forty for the sacrifice then back to bed for about twenty minutes.  Why so early a riser? My last Navy days I may have done, not sure, don't remember. But for sure the Apalachicola days, not only because I was unendingly surprised and delighted at myself that I'd actually pulled it off to be back home on the Florida Gulf Coast from way up north, but especially because before dawn that summer of 1984 the roosters started crowing all over town, especially from the northern sector that was called, not surprisingly for an old Southern town, "The Hill". Built in 1900, the old rectory (a rectory is the house the parish church owns...