As documented, Maureen was gone on a lark for four days this week. The refrigerator was bare. i put off eating anything healthy for a couple of days, but before she returned Thursday, i decided to go to the grocery and fill the larder.

Ralph’s (folks back home should think “Kroger”) is about a mile down and up the hills from us. Maureen goes there all the time for the usual stuff, hits Costco for bulk items, and then goes to Trader Joe’s for her gourmet specials. When required while i was in the Navy, i went to the Navy commissaries.

Maureen does not like the commissaries, primarily from her introduction in 1983. We married. i left for the other coast within ten days and in another month, i sailed east for almost eight months. She remained in the Southwest corner where her career blossomed as an account executive, a high-end office interior firm. She dressed the part.

One weekday, she decided to go for a new venture, grocery shopping at the Navy Commissary at Naval Station, San Diego, known by seafarers as “32nd Street.” It was days of yore and the Navy was a bit different then compared to now.

Pay was only a smidgeon of what Navy folks get paid now. There were only a few very senior officers who drove Mercedes and i only knew of one officer, my good friend from Lebanon, LCDR Earl Major, who drove a Porsche. Very few of the enlisted owned their own cars and most of those were used. Many single sailors and officers as well lived aboard their ships. All of us received our pay checks or cash as we had indicated on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month. Credit cards other than American Express, which many officers possessed were pretty much non-existent. Direct deposits and auto-payments were years away.

So married sailors lived from paycheck to paycheck. The two monthly paydays was the days they went shopping…to the commissary, which was then, the Navy version of Costco. They would stock up with the staples, enough to get them to the next payday. Wives did the shopping at the commissary.

So Maureen, unfamiliar with this phenomena, decided to go shopping at lunch to the commissary on the 30th. As usual for her work, she was dressed to the nines. Then, the commissary was a cavernous quonset hut. She showed her dependent (hah!) identification card at the gate with her recently acquired base decal, entered through the gate, and parked in a full parking lot.

She picked up a handful of items and looked for the checkout line. It snaked around two of the aisles of food. There was no quick check out lines for a small number of items back then. She found herself behind a very large woman carrying a baby who was pushing one cart in front of her and pulling one behind her. Both were piled high with Twinkie’s, sugar-coated, frosted, flavored cereals and cartons of milk, cheeses, potatoes, and all things not necessarily healthy.

Maureen quietly placed her few items on the shelf beside her, turned around and walked out as unobtrusively as she could.

The only times she has returned was at my insistence, and i have given up trying.

* * *

After USS Yosemite returned to Mayport in 1984 and after we returned to the Southwest corner in 1985, i did my share of the cooking, especially after i completed my Naval service (with our daughter born that very day) in 1989. Along with that, i did most of the grocery shopping…at the Navy commissary until Maureen retired. Later in her career, i realized Maureen liked to cook and that was a break from her workday, and it soothed her. i had no problem relinquishing the kitchen duties to her. After all, she was and remains a gourmet cook. i am not.

But while she worked, i continued with shopping. i began to go on Sunday mornings. Church goers did not show up until after church. The commissary was less crowded in those hours. i not only shopped, i discovered several pleasures. The Navy commissary is a wonderful place to people watch. Folks of all sizes, nationalities, different tastes, hit the aisles with purpose. i realized i should not get in races, push to get past a crowd at one item, to take it easy and just watch the goings-on.

It was also fun to check out the shelves. With the variety of folks shopping the many variations on things to eat, and especially things to flavor what is eaten, my journeys were an education. Sometimes, i would shake my head in wonder. Sometimes, i would laugh. Sometimes, i found something i wanted to try.

This Thursday, i opted to go to the nearby Ralph’s. The commissary was further away and i had a bunch of chores and straightening up to do before picking up Maureen at the airport. Still, the experience of going up and down the aisles brought back memories of how much i enjoyed my commissary trips. They are mostly gone.

Of course, i do go back occasionally. You see, the North Island and 32nd Street Navy Commissaries are the only two places in the Southwest corner that carry Tennessee Pride Country Sausage.

And that makes my now short, quick trips worthwhile.

i heard her footsteps
but
she wasn’t there;
i turned to speak to her
but
she was gone;
the cats looked lost
when­
her lap was missing
and
eyed me questioning
when
i put them up for the night;
oh, she’s only gone
for a couple of days,
a respite in Monterrey
with a friend;
‘twas too soon to pine,
too short to hurt;
but
it was downright scary
to be lonely;
over forty years,
love evolves;
infatuation, passion
pass with age
dependence on each other,
expectations grow;
we know each other
as well as our own palms;
that’s sometimes good,
sometimes not so good,
but
after forty years.
i can tell you
it can be downright scary
to be lonely.

­­

I paused. Just before we commenced our normal late afternoon routine, i sat in my spot in the family room and paused. I had sat the book on the side table next to my chair. I tried to capture how i felt.

I broke from the spell. As Maureen fed the cats and gave Bruce Willis his meds, i set up the dinner trays next to our spots, placed the napkins and silverware on the trays, changed from my contact lenses to glasses as any hard exercise was put off until tomorrow. After all of my preparations were done and Maureen had commandeered the kitchen to create yet again a culinary piece of art i will find different, interesting, and like very much, i repaired to the refrigerator freezer and poured myself a “martin” (bless you, Mister Fraser) into the frozen unbreakable martini glass Sarah gave me a couple of years ago, complete with unstuffed pitted olives, preferred by my friend Marty Linville.

I delayed as long as i thought i could in turning on the television without raising Maureen’s ire. She likes to have the television on while she cooks. It is “soothing” or something. Since there is little i like to watch, i am not a big fan of television noise, and my nature compels me to actually pay attention to whatever is on. As usual, i choose the local news to at least get the weather forecast (70 degrees with morning marine layer clouds and a slight breeze.

It matters not this afternoon. I normally ignore the news(?) unless it is something that might affect us. But today, i was deep (for me) in thought.

I had just finished the third short story in the tome of Joseph Conrad: Complete and Unabridged. I sat thinking about how i felt akin to the almost Polish, before it was Ukraine, Russian born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. The story was “Lagoon.” As you might have ascertained, it captivated me.

I had read Conrad much earlier in life. I’m pretty sure i read Lord Jim while either a junior or senior at Castle Heights Military Academy. I think Major Harris was the professor who assigned that reading, but i could have just picked it up myself. I was a pretty voracious reader back then. I remember finishing with a feeling i had learned something. I just wasn’t quite sure what i had learned.

But my attraction to Conrad was his short stories about life at sea on ships. It was an adventure i could not imagine. I felt the sea and the struggles and deep rooted joy of men who were enveloped by the sea and the people they met far away from the reality they had known in their early life. There was a finality to it all. I felt it.

But i put Conrad and his sea stories away for more esoteric pursuits: southern literature, sports writing, partying, loving women… and, oh yes, for many diverse reasons, going back to sea.

And finally, i made it to his playground: the South Pacific, and even got a taste of seamen on ships, non-military ships. I went to Vietnam first and got a taste of life much like the Malaysians. More impactful to me was riding merchant marine manned USNS ships, carrying Korean troops to Vietnam and back to Korea. It was a complete change from my Navy experience. I felt Conrad. I felt his stories of the sea. I felt men at sea and in strange worlds dealing with the essence of living. It just didn’t quite sink in for me right then.

Then after really sort of giving up on my hopes to see the world, i went to a ship on the West Coast. I hit the western Pacific on a continuing basis…and i loved it. I went to Australia four times within four years. I spent ten days in Singapore. I stayed at Conrad’s go to place, Raffle’s Hotel and sat in the bar thinking of him. Visiting and transiting the Straits of Malacca, the narrows between Malaysia and Indonesia where literally thousands of merchant ships created a gauntlet for navigation brought Conrad’s stories to the forefront of my thoughts.

Now, the man may have been the best writer of the greatest novelist of all the English writing novelists. And English was his adopted language. His descriptions of any scene can just blow you away independent of the story line.

But more so, he writes of humanity, good, bad, faulted, and it resonates with me.

I hesitate to recommend you read him. He’s mine. His stories resonate with me. i will read all of his stories and may even reread him again.

As much as i identify with him, feel as if i am connected to him, there is a difference. He is a great writer, one of the best at writing short stories and novels. i am a storyteller.

I just hope he didn’t like the original Singapore Sling at Raffles any more than i did.