there’s something here;
you can sorta feel it;
you really don’t know
what the hell it is;
but,
then again,
you really don’t give a damn:
do you?
no;
so wander along in your nothingness,
enjoy what it is
or
whatever it might be;
enjoy the puritanical, the risqué, the commercialism, the naturalism
or
what ever it really is.
what might be there?
who cares what might be there:
it’s a quiet night;
it’s rather cool;
it’s pleasant:
so just sorta sit back,
enjoy the infinitesimal bliss
lying there for you.
From my old “in progress” files i found yesterday:
Words
who can muster words to flow
like some swirling sea,
still expecting the world to know
what’s beneath the waves and foam?
who can spray forth torrents
of loud and verbose brine
believing the following silence
means everyone else is like inclined.
Today, i had numerous things to get done. My top priority was to write on my book.
Didn’t.
Before i started, i created a file for the lateral file case in my home office. Putting it in its place i found three thick folders of things i had written i had not completed to my satisfaction, dating at least back to the middle 1960’s. As with most of my stuff, the shards of writing long ago had grammatical errors, oversights, typos, were too wordy and in general what you expect from a story teller not a writer.
i was fascinated.
i am now going through them, cleaning them up a bit (but never enough for critics and most of the time, me too, but hell, i’m a story teller).
So you are probably going to see a lot of stuff from those folders on this site. i apologize. But my muse made me do it.
Pompei
i went to Pompei today
in the rain;
left Naples in a bus;
a fat little man
mechanically spoke his piece
about Naples’ squares and statues
while pimps and whores and hustlers
and
little boys selling dirty pictures
crowded past the bus
while
the bus itself was composed
of innumerable people in one large box,
highly seasoned with the filth of a city
integrated with the smell of the diesel fuel.
in Pompei,
the rain turned gentle;
vendors donned their rain gear;
their umbrellas blossomed
to protect their wares,
slides, tour books, trinkets;
the fat little guide swept us along
in his unbemused fashion
telling of the grandeur, the beauty,
reeling off death statistics
like an accountant,
and
suggestively showing ruined rooms of license.
i left Pompei today in the rain;
the bus felt dry;
soon, near Salerno,
no,
Amalfi, at the crest it seemed,
the clouds broke out the sun
in its harsh, startling glory:
the Mediterranean waters sparkled below;
the hillside homes blanched white
against the breaking sun’s fury
as the bus wound its way
up and down the switchbacks
of the Amalfi coast roads
enchantingly
on the return to Naples.
i left the bus,
making my way
to a phone exchange,
waiting, calling
only to hear the unanswered rings
before
walking to the pier
to wait for the liberty boats
to take me to my anchored ship
alone.
Well, bless you, Coach, as in JB Leftwich, columnist and journalism mentor extraordinaire.
You see, one of the grateful moments of my short and oft interrupted life in journalism was to write a weekly column on the same newspaper, The Lebanon Democrat, while JB was writing his weekly column on another day of the week. Even when i had no hair…again…i learned from Coach about writing for a newspaper.
One thing i learned was if you have a column for a specific season and it is well received, keep submitting/posting it that particular season every year. JB did that with a column about his mother’s fruit cake (again, Leftwich family, please correct me if i got the kin or the dessert incorrect in my memory).
So on Thanksgiving, i re-posted my column about smoking a turkey. And now, i’m re-posting my column about a dark day of the Christmas season. i know it has been appreciated because my close friend, Pete Toennies, guffaws each time he reads it. Sometimes, i am embarrassed by the story. Sometimes, i wonder why i have told anyone about that dark day. Then, i recall what occurred. i start laughing. It is a good story.
i cutsied it up a bit last year and called it “No, Noel, No.” with a couple of photos edited to make my rather silly point. But it was the same column.
The saga continues. The “NOEL” sign in the original story was made of 1×2 pine, was much larger, had holes drilled into the wood for the lights, and weighed considerably more than the current version. But a couple of years ago, some of the lights on the original went out and it was just too complicated to replace the lights in the series. So i constructed a more manageable sign. i was very meticulous and before drilling the one hundred or more holes, i decided to check it out and just stapled the light strings on the front. i showed it to Maureen. She decided she liked it much better than the more regimented one with holes drilled in it. Since she is the one who has an eye for design (and it was one heck of a lot less work), i agreed.
So i put the sign up last year.
That’s when i noticed i had two different strings of white lights. The first string was “white;” the second string was “bright white.” There’s a difference, you know. i didn’t.
Now i should change them out to match. But you know what? It sort of looks like i made it. So it’s staying this way, at least for this Christmas season.
Noel.
The “NOEL” sign was created in memory of Col. Jimmy Lynch. My father-in-law at the time asked me to help put his up in Paris, Texas in the mid-1970’s. There is another story in that adventure for later. But i loved the sign and made my first one in the early 1990’s.
Notes from the Southwest Corner: An Embarrassing Christmas Moment
As I have noted previously, I am in Tennessee for Christmas, not in the Southwest corner. The below events, however, did occur near San Diego.
Have you ever had one of those days when everything turned into an embarrassment? I had a champion day like that several years ago.
It started innocently while I hung our outdoor decoration, a home-made “NOEL” sign from the eave of our garage, hoping to get it up before my wife’s friends arrived for their Christmas dinner.
Maureen and her six friends have been meeting monthly for dinners 15-plus years. They had this December dinner catered, did it up right. It was Maureen’s turn to be hostess.
It was dark when I began. I was at the top of my step ladder attaching the second of two wires from the sign to a hook secured to the eave when the ladder lurched and toppled. I grabbed a metal ornamental grating above the garage door.
There I hung, my arm intertwined with the “O” of the sign. If I tried to drop, the sign could catch my arm and do some pretty bad stuff.
I yelled, but Maureen had Christmas carols at top volume and didn’t hear. I tried to think of what to do while simultaneously wondering how long I could hold on. The dog wandered underneath, occasionally looking up as if I was a very strange person hanging there.
After several minutes, a neighbor’s son and friend pulled into the driveway several houses away. As they emerged, I swallowed my pride and yelled “Help.”
At first, they could not discern who was calling. Then they spotted me and came to help. The dog decided to protect me and began barking threateningly. The boys hesitated. I assured them the only danger was being licked to death. They finally righted the ladder and helped me down.
I thanked them profusely and then studied whether I should tell Maureen or not. Now that I was back on solid ground, I decided it was too funny not to tell her. She was incredulous and not particularly amused.
I did not realize my embarrassment for the night was just beginning.
While Maureen made final arrangements for her dinner, our daughter, Sarah, and I went to a local spot for supper. The little place was an oasis of sorts in Bonita, where there were only Mexican, Italian, and fast food restaurants. The attraction was being different and having a wide-range of ales and beers for golfers finishing a round across the street.
When we arrived, two couples were at tables and three guys sat at the bar. As we neared the end of our meal, the largest of the guys at the bar walked to the door and then turned back. I noticed his eyes seemed glazed. Then he walked back to the bar.
Suddenly, this guy and the one on the other side grabbed the guy in the middle off his stool, slammed him into the wall and started pummeling him with their fists. The three male diners, me (instinctively) included, approached from one side and two cooks approached from the back. Sarah had retreated to the door with the two lady diners. I grabbed the big guy. He spun and fell backward, slamming us into our table, knocking it over with shattering glass. It gave me some leverage, and we spun to the floor with me on top and knocking the wind out of the big guy. The other two diners helped me hold him until he calmed down. The cooks had quelled the other assailant. The two left quietly.
Even though the waitress wanted us to not pay our bill, we paid and left for home. On the way, I talked to my daughter about what I should have done (directed her outside before joining the fray) and what she should do the next time if she were ever in a place where a fight broke out (get out and away and not come back until she was sure it was over).
I was feeling pretty good as we arrived home. Then Sarah dashed out of the car, ran into the house and yelled to her mother in front of the caterer and her six friends dressed to the nines amidst fine china, Christmas decorations, and haut cuisine, “Mom, Dad got in a fight in a bar.”
Some days, I just can’t get a break.
May your holiday season be embarrassment free.
And may all of you have a most wonderful and amazing Christmas Season, and please, please, please (as James Brown would implore) remember the reason this all occurs every year.
i know i have recounted this story before, many times orally and once or twice on paper, or this poor excuse for paper that shows up on your computer screen. The other day on the US Navy Gearing Destroyer group on Facebook, there was an entry from someone who had served on the USS Brownson (DD 868). The name generated my recall of the story. i love it, and now that i’m hooked up with some destroyer men on Facebook, i wanted to share it again.
For those of you who weren’t around the Navy’s Destroyer School in 1973, you may not have heard this story about the USS Brownson (DD 868). Three of the Brownson’s junior officers, including one who was stashed there waiting for department head school in Newport, Rhode Island, related it to me at a late afternoon tea…okay, okay, a couple of pitchers of beer for happy hour at the small annex to the officer’s club up the hill from the destroyer-submarine piers.
CHENG (chief engineer for landlubbers) on the Brownson had won the respect of the ship’s officers who were with me in the six-month course was just on the south side of daffy and apparently had done several wild and goofy things while aboard . But he was a superb engineer and somehow the captain tolerated all of the shenanigans.
The gang swapped sea stories about CHENG’s antics. The sea stories were surprising, sometime a bit shocking. Then they told me the best one:
The Brownson had been operating for about two weeks with exercises in the Atlantic op areas off of Newport but had been independent steaming for several days. There was not much going on, no shipping to speak of, and relatively calm seas. Those watches, especially at night, are boring where you struggle to stay awake. CHENG had the midwatch on the bridge, nine total bodies on the bridge in the dark. In watches like that when i was OOD, i would query the watch standers about the actual names of the 16 points in the compass, like “one point off the starboard bow” is “nor, nor by nor east.”
But Brownson’s CHENG had a bigger idea. About half-way through his mid-watch, he transferred steering control to after steering. Then he shifted the entire bridge team to the flying bridge on the 04 level directly above the bridge. Finally, he had the Boatswainmate of the watch go to the 1MC (the ship’s loudspeaker system) and pipe attention, followed by the announcement, “Captain to the Bridge!” On old destroyers or for that matter any Navy ship i served during my career, every captain when underway spent his nights in the “sea cabin” immediately aft of the bridge so he could quickly access the bridge in an emergency — apparently, the new age of commanding officers no longer feel required to sleep in the sea cabin but choose the much larger, more comfortable Captain’s Cabin below the bridge for the evening.
So the pipe has called attention and the Boatswainmate has called the captain to the bridge. The captain erupts from his rack, crashes out of the sea cabin in his pajamas with his housecoat dragging behind…and there in the middle of the night on the “darken ship” bridge no one is on the bridge.
The officers telling the story did not explain what happened after that except to say, the captain and CHENG had a meaningful conversation in the wardroom the next morning.
i keep trying to imagine what ran through the captain’s mind those first thirty seconds or so when he ran onto the bridge ready for an incredible emergency and the bridge was empty.
