Tonight, we are headed to Mabel’s Gone Fishing, one of favorite eating places.
This is for Maureen’s 73rd birthday. She has given me the okay to play golf on her actual birthday tomorrow.
i have written a lot about her. She says too much. i have included a lot of photos of her. She says too much. She may be right, but i can’t stop. i’m a lucky man, far luckier than i realized when we sort of jointly proposed to each other about 43 years ago.
Our love has grown. We keep finding ways we match or fit together because we don’t match.
Even our slope is celebrating her birthday. The coral trees are not completely in bloom but you can see a few buds in the foreground.
About too many photos, this is a brief pictorial history of one heck of a woman:
The photo here is not a dirt dauber’s nest. It is in the top of our breezeway between the garage and house entrance. That little dark blob is a bat.
About a half year ago, we were getting droppings in our breezeway every morning. Maureen swore it was rats. That didn’t make sense to me, but i went along with her assessment. i know better than disagree…she’s usually, usually, right. But we hired this guy to get rid of some gophers that had decided our slope was an attractive abode. As he was leaving one day, i asked him about the droppings. He got down on one knee, looked closely at the droppings and then, looked up. He pointed to the dark blob i thought was…yep, a dirt dauber’s nest, and said “bat.”
i asked him how to get rid of the bat. He said when the bat had gone out for his nightly rounds to paint the area where he slept at night. i waited until dark, saw the bat was on his rounds, got out my tallest ladder, and painted the area. i woke early and as first light was showing, checked the breezeway. The bat had returned. Then Maureen read about a concoction to spray in the area that the bat didn’t like, boiled water, sugar, and peppermint oil. The next evening, i sprayed. The bat went somewhere else. He was gone. We rejoiced.
Fast forward to about a week ago. Maureen came in one morning to report the bat was back on the other side of the breezeway top. She made another batch of the magic elixir. Last night, when our buddy had headed out, i sprayed. This morning we were elated when no bat was where i sprayed. About an hour later, Maureen came inside laughing.
“He’s back in his original hangout,” she laughed. i laughed with her.
Bat 2, Us 0.
Tonight, i will spray again. Wish us luck as i am thinking this could become an Abbott and Costello routine.
i wished Sarah were here. When she was young, she and i would often go to the zoo. She always wanted to first go to the bat exhibit, a large cage. We would watch the bats hang out for a while and hit some other places that day. But each time, we would always go to the bat cage first.
i was also enthralled when Sarah and Blythe took me to that bridge in Austin, Texas. It was famous for the thousands of bats that hung out underneath the bridge. When startled and they took off, it was a sight to behold.
i like bats and am just glad we only have one for competition.
late at night, after watching the game, after reading the shipwreck novel before studying Doctor Warren’s poem, the old man sits in the chair, his chair, remembering the dragon that ravaged Warren’s world a generation before he, himself, wandered into this world, a war baby they said before the sociologists began to nickname the generations; he remembered the dark of the deeply spiritual woods where cedars and oaks and maples and hickories hid the beasts, even Warren’s dragon that brought destruction and fear, mostly fear, even if it did not exist, but made the unknown bestial, violent tragedies believable. sitting in his chair in his plastic world where money is no longer what is earned; comfort, ease, and that money are more desired than fear of dragons, he rubbed the cover of the poetry book with his fingers of both hands, rough and veined from the sea and age; he closed and opened his eyes while taking deep breaths trying to remember his dragon and the woods.
It was in March 2005. Maureen and several of her pals at Parron-Hall Office Interiors had been awarded a Kimball Office Furniture “SPIFF” to join a large group in Dublin. i tagged along.
It was my first time in Ireland. i immediately determined i could live there. We wandered the streets with my jaw somewhere around my kneecap in awe. There was this feeling of Keats, of Joyce, of Shaw, of Samuel Beckett. We ate Irish. The dinners were great. We went to Trinity College where i came up with my plot. We went across the street to a haberdashery and more Irish shopping to lure in tourists. It worked. i bought an Irish tweed sports coat, which i still wear today. It’s me.
We walked around the corner to a pub for lunch. I felt like i was in the “Quiet Man” pub. Next door there was an old, and i mean old book store. You could feel the dust on the shelves that contained first editions of Yeats, Joyce and Wilde works. We went back…several times. The churches, the city buildings smacked at history. The group had a small section of seats for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
i can assure you it’s an entirely different thing in Dublin compared to the silliness we conjure up in the good ole U.S. of A. There wasn’t a commercial float or ads on sides of the cars…in fact, don’t remember automobiles in that parade at all. It was high school bands. It was local bands of all sorts. It was amateur magicians, acrobats, and unicyclists. It was fun.
After the parade, we wandered into a pub just off of St. Patrick’s Close near that magnificent cathedral. It sat about fifty and the fifty were all Irish except for the eight of us and ranged from around four years old to about ninety. We had our Guinness. The bartender gleefully showed one of the several beautiful women in our group how to draw an Irish four-leaf clover on top of the foam.
On another sortie, we had gone on a tour to see a castle, the Irish Sea, and to an Abby turned restaurant, show place. We sat on picnic tables, ate traditional Irish fare, and the Irish band lulled us with Irish Melodies, and the rinnce fada, or the Irish step dance. It ended the show with “Danny Boy.” The young singer was beautiful and perfect for the song. i noted that Maureen, most of the other women, and even a few males, had tears running down their cheeks.
♦︎ ♦︎ ♦︎
Our next trip in 2015, ten years after visiting Dublin, was to join Joe and Carla, my brother and sister-in-law, in Tuosist, near Kenmare in County Kerry. i fell in love with the Beara Pennisulsa and Kenmare. The beauty, the peacefulness, the food, everything was damn near perfect. It did not possess the bustle and the big city feel of Dublin. And there was John Moriarty, the head barkeep at the Park Hotel. The man knows his whiskey, and in turn taught Joe and Carla wonderful things. i had perhaps the best whiskey i’ve ever had at the Park Hotel bar. There are several stories there, but i will hold them for a later time.
i remain entranced.
♦︎ ♦︎ ♦︎
As for that plot, i had: Sarah was choosing what college to attend at the time of our first trip. She had intimated she would like it to be in Europe. Trinity is the college of fine arts, including drama (the Irish system is much different from ours in the states where the various fields of studies are located together across the country, not in universities like ours that offer degrees in many fields). Sitting in that Sean Thornton pub in Dublin, i remarked to Maureen we could get Sarah into Trinity. To add to the bait, i noted we couldn’t afford to live in Dublin, but we could get a relatively inexpensive cottage thirty or so miles away. i continued to explain Ireland had a great train system (i was guessing), and we could spend a couple of years there giving Sarah moral support. The coup de gras ending was suggesting after two years when Sarah had her feet on the ground, we could get a place for a couple of years in Southern France.
Maureen liked the idea but she wasn’t exuberant. i passed right over that and when back in the Southwest corner, began my pitch to Sarah.
She wasn’t interested. If she was going to study abroad, she preferred England, London i think.
The next spring, Maureen and i were headed to Padre baseball game. We were waiting for the trolley when i re-launched my campaign, reiterating all the positives, and suggesting we could convince Sarah to change her mind.
i received the Maureen “look.” i said, “You really don’t want to do this do you?”
She nodded her head.
I, flummoxed, asked, “Why not?”
She simply replied, “Too many pubs.”
Story ended.
♦︎ ♦︎ ♦︎
i am not Irish. Maureen is really, really Irish. We are locked into living here until we are not. There are now only two other places i would move. One would be back home. My near life-long fantasy has been to live in a place like the cabin my parents and aunt and uncle had on Old Hickory Lake. And to the Beara Peninsula. Neither will happen.
♦︎ ♦︎ ♦︎
This morning, Barbara Leftwich Froula sent a photo of her father’s column in The Democrat. It was about his Irish heritage. As usual, JB’s column was on point, thoughtful, and funny in the right places. i and many of his students in journalism labeled him “Coach.” His column ran for years in the newspaper. For several years, his column would run on Tuesday (i think) and mine, “Notes from the Southwest Corner,” would run on Thursday. For me, that was like validation of being a good columnist.
♦︎ ♦︎ ♦︎
i may not be Irish, but one of the greatest guys i have ever met is. Mike Kelly now lives in Houston. Jim Hileman introduced me to him. The three of us became golfing buddies and pals for years. Today, Mike posted a photo of his family when he was a young man. Mike is the second from the left on the back row. Now folks, that’s Irish:
i sit on our patio. It is 3:33 p.m. in real time, 4:33 in political maneuvering, and 11:33 Greenwich Mean Time, the latter of which is all that matters. It occurs to me that at sea, the critical times are first light to shoot morning stars, twilight to shoot evening stars, noon to shoot the noon fix. The other important times was eight bells, that’s when the watch changed every four hours.
So instead of sun setting about an hour from now, it will set about two hours from now.
i am having a Martin (Thank you, Cyril Vaughn Fraser, Jr.) reflecting. The photo here is one i’ve posted before but it was earlier in the season. You see, the are subtle changes in the seasons of the Southwest corner, not noticed much untill you’ve lived here for about twenty or thity years.
The coral trees have lost their leaves and the corals are beginning to bloom, there are two or three buds on the coral tree in the photo. The lilac colored ice plant is finally beginning to bloom amidst the yellow and the orange. The Coronado (ground hugging kind) of bougainvillea is taking off.
i have had a good day. i fixed a couple of problems with an incredible mountain of technical support after listening to really annoying piano concertos for about 40 minutes. i picked up some Kona whole bean coffee and suffered a near heart attack when i found how much it cost, but what the hell, the aroma can knock you off your feet with goodness.
i chipped some golf balls and, as usual, thought i might have found a secret (Not). i found a photo that took me back to good times: Yosemite’s Command Master Chief, BMCM Weaver with the XO in Rota, Spain, 1983. He was as good as you could get for the liaison between officers and enlisted. Oh Lord, those days were just about perfect.
We’ve gone to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. We have lunched at Panama 66 in the Park among the Museum of Arts sculptures.
And all this leads up to where i am. There are naysayers out there who rant about how awful Californians are. i’m not going to lower myself to argue about that. i am sad that it would be financial disaster for my daughters and their families to move here. Home prices, rent, taxes makes moving here no sense whatsoever. But i was here before the insanity of inflated housing costs and have benefited greatly from it.
i can play golf all year. The Southwest corner has about thirty days a year when it rains. The temperature is a little warm, in the 80’s and low 90’s for a month or so. There are a couple of days of Santa Ana conditions when it can get to the high 90’s, even just around 100, and very dry. As i have noted on many occasions, i have seen a great deal of the world and nearly everywhere has more 10s out of 10 than here. That is because it is relative. There is no place on earth that has more 7s, 8s, and 9s.
As for all of its ills, i long have noted San Diegans denigrate Los Angeles but keep trying to be just like them. Places i love, Nashville, Austin, Seattle, Atlanta, seem to be doing the same, outgrowing their appeal, their uniqueness. Even my home of Lebanon, Tennessee appears to becoming a bedroom, suburb of Nashville.
Once again, i am a lucky man to be living here in a beautiful place with a wonderful wife…
