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  • A Day Early

    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:

    Happy Birthday, dearest Maureen.

  • Einstein on Love

    Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

  • A Tale of the Sea and Me – Liberty

    There was one more big operation that occurred before i left the USS Hawkins (DD 873) in December 1969. In between at-sea time, it was party time. Oh, we worked and worked hard, but if we didn’t have the duty, it was liberty, fun.

    One of my favorite escapes was when Andrew Nemethy, the Damage Control Assistant (DCA) and Rob Dewitt, Main Propulsion Assistant (MPA), and moi, Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer (ASWO) did not have duty on the weekends. i hadn’t had a vehicle since the wreck in ’68 summer Newport with Rob as my passenger who took a bigger hit than i did, and after my divorce when my former wife took our car home with her. So i was always a passenger. However, i took turns driving when the trio headed to the side of Virginia.

    Andrew had a Fiat Spider and Rob had a powerful BMW road bike (Rob or Andrew, you will have to provide the details on that beautiful beast). We swapped off from driving the bike, to driving the Spider, and riding shotgun. i was more shotgun than anything else. Our target was to visit the hills with the primary focus of taking in women’s colleges. Mostly, we would just spend time in the elements of real Virginia. Rob had his banjo, Andrew had his guitar, and both were accomplished. Me? i played a very poor jaw harp. But i did stay in rhythm. Oh, i don’t think we met any of the students at those women colleges. But damn, it was fun.

    And then, there was Naval Station, Norfolk; Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Naval Air Station, Oceania, and the Army’s Fort Story. Each of these, some with a couple each week, would open the gates to folks of the human persuasion and invite them to a dance or event at their officers’ clubs. Now today, this is politically incorrect and i’m guessing most females back then weren’t real pleased with us calling these gatherings “hog calls.” An officer could, if his body could tolerate it, attend a hog call every night of the week in the Norfolk area. In fact, the “hog calls” was pretty straight up, not like the “Westerner” in National City, close to the Naval Station, San Diego where sailors went with hopes of meeting up with “West PAC widows,” wives of sailors who were deployed to the Western Pacific and looking for some side action. i have several friends who met their wives at these so called “hog calls,” and they weren’t hogs at all but pretty, intelligent women. Think of the Richard Gere movie “Officer and a Gentleman.”

    My favorite was the Tuesday and Thursday nights at the O’Club at the Amphibious Base, Little Creek. When you entered, you were handed a song book. “Pappy,” a rotund, old, bald, and great piano boogie woogie player would sit down at his 88 keys and begin. Every one sang along with all of the old piano standards. The favorites and oft repeated service ‘s song, the Navy’s “Anchors Away,” the Army’s “When the Cassions Go Rolling Along,” the Marine’s “Marine Hymn.” The favorite for everyone in Pappy’s place was when he would bang out the Air Force’s song. Everyone would raise their steins and lustily sing, “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder…Crash!” and the song would end.

    Time at sea was work, hard, long work. We didn’t feel guilty when we hit the beach, hard.

  • Bat 2, Maureen & jim 0

    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.

    As long as he’s only one.

  • RPW’s Dragon

    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.