This came from an email to me from my USS Hawkins shipmate, Norm O’Neal. As i began to read, i kept thinking about how Ray Boggs would have loved this. Ray, my father-in-law and one of my best friends ever, was a dyed in the wool through and through engineer. But there aren’t many who have had a better sense of humor, and i don’t know many people who could laugh at himself as well as Ray. i hope you either remember him while reading this or admire him if you never, unfortunately, knew him.

I apologize for the spacing, but i didn’t want to screw with the formatting and take another half-hour to post this.

Ray would understand.

i hope you don’t mind, Writer’s Almanac, for my re-posting this on my website, but although i find Joyce incredible, Beckett mesmerizes me when i read his stuff, and in this excerpt from your daily email today, i found Beckett’s thoughts (in green lettering below) personal, as though he had written those words for me.

It’s the birthday of Samuel Beckett (books by this author), born in Foxrock, Ireland, a Dublin suburb (1906). He studied French literature in college and then went to Paris, where he met James Joyce, who by that time was almost blind and working on Finnegans Wake. Beckett became his assistant. He read books to Joyce, took dictation, and walked with him around Paris. He idolized Joyce so much that he began to smoke like Joyce and walk like Joyce. He tried to write in Joyce’s meandering style, but Beckett said, “I realized that my own way was in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”

Beckett eventually found his own voice and wrote many novels and plays, including his most famous, Waiting for Godot (1952). In 1969, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He wrote, “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Beckett wrote, “My mistakes are my life.”

And, “We are all born mad. Some remain so.”

And, “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”

He also said, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

There’s this incredible little corner of the city and the world in the Southwest corner.

India Street winds from downtown San Diego where it is the hub of what was the Italian fishing community and is now old Italian and haute cuisine eateries alongside new high rise condos. India Street parallels Interstate 5 north pass the airport until it dead ends into Washington Street.

i can feel the city history’s on this journey, even wondering what it was like when Richard Henry Dana traveled a similar route in 1732-34 (San Diego was a major part of Dana’s great book, Two Years Before the Mast). But i travel to the little corner at the end of India Street because i like to eat good food.

Perhaps our favorite dining in San Diego is at the Wine Vault and Bistro, an upstairs wonder in atmosphere and incredible pre fixe paired wine menus. The food, the wine, and the atmosphere just can’t be beat in our estimation. El Indio is one of the best known border Mexican restaurants. Many of the diners order and then take their meal across the street to a concrete picnic area.

Next to the Wine Vault is Shakespeare’s, a no-kidding English pub. Great British fare and i’ve never had anything but Guinness draught there, not even a “black and tan” (Guinness and Harp for the Irish version, Guinness and Bass Ale as the one i know best).

Close by is Saffron. Maureen claims it is the best Thai restaurant in San Diego, and i can’t argue with that. On the corner is Gelato Vero Caffe, which offers possibly the best gelato in the world.

Turning toward the bay on Washington and passing under the interstate is 57 Degrees. It’s a wine and beer tasting place with incredible appetizers, with an expansive array of wines from all over the world, over 100 bottled beers, and all twenty-eight San Diego craft breweries on tap.

Before the drive gets to all of this eating stuff, the roadside businesses hide a very informal, small, and casual place called Blue Water. For several years, we ignored it after it was established in 2006. But once Maureen just dropped in to check it out, it’s become one of our most frequented spots for fresh seafood.

We stopped for lunch today. There are all sorts of wonderful tacos, sandwiches, and full meals, but it is damn near impossible for me to not order their mussels. Today’s special was “bourbon, butter, jalapeño, and lime mussels and clams.”

Just about perfect.

About a year ago, my niece, Dr. Kate Jewell Hanson, commented to Maureen and me that her father, my younger brother Joe, was a “putterer.” i applauded her assessment, but questioned the accuracy.

From what i’ve observed, Joe’s puttering is like painting their entire house in Queechee, Vermont. It seems like every time i call him, he’s doing a major putter.

i, on the  other hand, am a piddler, not a putterer (except on the golf course where i am not a very good putterer but do it a lot more than i should, or is that a “puttee”?), i have become more of a piddler, as our mother would have said, after stopping real work when i left Pacific Tugboat Services almost two years ago. i keep coming up with all of these magnificent ideas of incredible home improvements, which quickly become a bunch of tasks that need to be done before getting to the real one…and only one or two actually getting done.

Then, of course, i go way, way off track. Example: we have been working toward reducing all of the crap we have in our makeshift garage attic, made by my father and me with some old scrap plywood and discarded closet doors. A major part of that hoard upstairs is artwork that has been replaced in the house throughout the years. i like nearly all of that. So rather than giving it away, i looked for other options.

Since the first house Maureen and i have owned, i have had an office. This was primarily because i have always wanted to be a writer, and i have a rather ridiculous amount of books. The current home office is one of my favorite places on earth.

So what do i do with the artwork. i have made a second office in my garage workspace, the third car port in our three-car garage. i have kept a lot of my father-in-law Ray Boggs’ garage workshop pieces and tools. i have my own workshop and yard tools. Now i have a desk my father made for Sarah and the wall is now covered with artwork and photos of Blythe, Sarah, and grandson Sam.

After this bit of piddling, i decided to get organized, as in eternally not getting there. My sister Martha, brother Joe, and the goofy guy gathered at Martha’s home on Signal Mountain a little over a year ago to select photos from our parents, Aunt Bettye Kate Hall, and our grandparents for a digital keepsake Martha is scanning.

Both Blythe and Sarah had requested to have their grandparents’ photos not used in the project. So what we did not put in the project Martha, Joe, and i began, i took to Austin. But there was not enough time to adequately distribute them, so i brought them back to the Southwest corner. Added to that is a rather incredible amount of paperwork saved for books not written. i realized when going through the paperwork nearly all of the Navy related documents included my SSN, which must be redacted before tossing, or shredded.

So i made the shelves, found most of the stuff in a myriad of storage places and collected them. The intent is to go through them, keep the actual photo or paper if it might mean something to daughters or other family members, record them digitally, and shred or otherwise dispose of what i don’t keep.

i figure if i continue at the current pace, this will take me about forty-seven years, nine months, and seven days, or my one hundred and twentieth birthday.

But my garage is becoming my getaway place. i have an old computer speaker system, to which i hook up my iPod, which has 4700 songs on it from my 45’s, some LPs, and CD’s. i plan to add my cassettes and the rest of the LP’s and maybe even a couple of boxes of reel-to-reel’s up in the garage attic, which will more than double the current music list. This task will take about as long as the sorting project.

For now, i put the iPod on “shuffle,” sit at my (Sarah’s) desk, look at photos of my loved ones and some cherished artwork, write some stuff, play solitaire, read, or just sit and listen to Jimmy Reed, Ella, Frank, Dvorak, Handel, Jimmy Smith, Nina, and many others.

While listening, i think life ain’t bad. There have been a bunch of hiccups, and there are still some things that need to be fixed (besides the unending list of projects). Even with the hiccups, i’ve had a pretty good life, and no, it ain’t bad. It ain’t bad.

Today, Raymond V. Murphey on the Castle Heights Facebook page, posted the following:

Does anybody remember the command you call to order the platoon to turn into it’s self? Been trying to remember for sometime. Kinda like, to the rear march, but not…

As Richard Zack, Jr. informed us, “Counter column” was the correct answer. Raymond was thankful for helping him remember.

Several other responses followed.

Gary Moor: “Moor, get your head out …”

Cliff Kyle expanded the exact command to “Counter column march.”

Amy Beth Hale: “Oh, I was going to say column right. Well, I was close.”

The question and the responses brought back many memories. Army (J) ROTC drill was an amazing thing to me. At Castle Heights, we all took pride in doing it well, and we all claimed we hated it. There were some amazingly great lessons in the time we spent on the drill field.

And there were some humorous moments also. i vividly recall when the football team came to practice after a rare drill session at the beginning of the 1958 school year. Snookie Hughes and Gordon “Happy Harper,” two post graduates from Carthage who were recruited for the football team were in Company C when the drill was held.

The squad leader had been giving instruction on how you should never execute a right face when at right shoulder arms. Snookie and Happy were at the head of the squad line. After the instruction session, the squad leader put the squad through several right, left, and about face commands. Then he ordered right shoulder arms. Happy, unused to such drill, hoisted his M1 and held it parallel to the ground, rather than at a 45-degree angle on his shoulder. The squad leader to test his boys ordered “Right face.”

Everyone properly did not execute the order…except for Happy. He turned quickly and whacked Snookie in the back of the head. The tellers of this tale said it knocked Snookie out. i cannot verify that.

My response to Raymond and the responses:

Are you kidding? The Navy got all of that kind of knowledge out of me. In 1974 when discussing the change of command ceremony to be conducted on the USS Hollister in Long Beach, the outgoing captain, XO, and department heads considered what the options were when it rained.

Our dilbert weapons officer suggested that we move the ceremony from the 01 deck (with attendees in folding chairs on the pier) to the reserve armory about 3/4 of a mile away. The captain asked how were we going to get the crew there.

The weapons officer replied, “We’ll march the crew there, sir.”

At that, the captain, the XO, the Ops officer, and yours truly, the chief engineer fell out of our chairs laughing at such a debacle.

The discussion reminded me of a story from one of my best golfing buddies, Marty Linville. Marty, an Army major who was awarded the Silver Star for his actions as an artillery officer in Viet Nam, was stationed at the Naval Amphibious School primarily as the director of the Navy’s gunfire support range on San Clemente Island.

During a rare command personnel inspection, Marty was in charge of the gunfire support personnel. He was having them take position for the inspection as was about to give them the command “dress right, dress,” but had second thoughts. He called his master chief petty officer to the front to consult.

“Master Chief, what should I expect if i order the troops to “dress right dress?”

Without hesitation, the master chief replied, “Chaos, sir; absolute chaos.”

So Raymond, i don’t think my answer has any credibility.