i am looking for posts i’ve written in the past to celebrate the birthday of my mate, my wife. Undoubtedly, i will post at least one on her birthday Monday.

i often wonder just how we ended up together and how she not only has put up with a really strange guy, but how she still loves me in spite of my shenanigans (a perfect word for me and my history: the second definition of the noun states, “silly or high-spirited behavior; mischief.”)

Then in today’s early, early hours of the morning, even earlier than usual, i awoke, and this thought came into my head: “as different as day and night.” That was it. Nothing more.

i tried to sleep. i wanted to get a couple of more hours before rising my Friday morning early for my Friday Morning Golf, more of a ritual now than when it first began with Marty Linville in 1991. i could not. i had gone to bed early. i cannot sleep much more than six hours with an old man party break…huh, that’s “potty break,” not “party break.” i moved out of our bedroom and lay down on the guest bedroom bed. Didn’t work. i arose, dressed for golf, and fed the cats. As i placed the cats’ dishes in their feeding places, the newspaper boy…er, no longer accurate: man in a car, pulled into our driveway since there are very few people who get the printed newspaper anymore, if at all, and tossed our paper on the driveway before backing out and continuing on his rounds. i walked out to get the paper. Standing there in the dark, well before first light, i realized the fog was setting in, the Santa Ana had broken. The half moon was hazy. The morning star hanging over Mexico could not be seen, nor Mount Miguel to the east.

i thought, “Night and day are about to mingle. First light will be more of a melding than a division.

“Like us.”

Monday, Maureen will be the youngest 71 i’ve ever known. i mean she ain’t no spring chicken, but she handles it well. She is beautiful and more, oh so much more importantly, she cares about every one, even the rapscallion she married.

Standing there in the seacoast town pre-dawn fog, i thought again, “Night and Day.”

i made the coffee, performed the now required stretches for the morning round and sat down and wrote the first cut of this:

Night and Day

the two of them
are as different as
night and day,
but
if you’ve noticed,
night and day go together very well
and
even if these two are different,
they match perfectly:
she is forever beautiful;
he’s a jolly old elf;
she is careful, planning, specific;
he is bumbling, taking off on whims;
yet,
they understand each other
and
anticipate each other’s needs and wants;

it’s beautiful,
like when
the morning star shines down
on first light
and
night meets day;
the question remains
who is night
and who is day?

This was going to be a long post with numerous photos of the Southwest corner in the “winter.”

For us, it has been a pretty tough winter (he wrote with tongue in cheek). i went through nearly a whole cord of firewood. Usually, i fall a bit short with a half cord. It was cooler but i have friends in Vermont and Maine who might shoot me if i called it cold. We actually had frost once or twice and there were a handful of days it only reached 60 degrees. Wet too. For us. We got about four inches thus far this year. But it was cloudy a lot.

This of course is a problem. Dry country. Fire danger. ’nuff said.

i really shouldn’t be doing this as  i have tasks to do and golf to play.

So here is a photo that captures what amazed my father about our winters:

It is a view of Mount Miguel on my morning walks/hikes. Daddy was always tickled that it is green here in the winter and brown in the summer.

Although this was at the very end of winter, it is a representative view of the slope in our back yard. Maureen and our gardener did this after i had implored to redo the slope in the manner of the much smaller slope at our previous home:

To paraphrase Phil Harris: That’s what i like about the Southwest…corner.

When i retrieved the newspaper from out front this Sunday morning and read the front page headlines, i recalled Dave Carey, my friend, business associate, and former POW, telling a group of seminar attendees of one Sunday morning, years ago, when his incredible late wife Karen asked him if he would like to read the paper.

Dave asked Karen if she found some good news in the paper to read it to him. She couldn’t find any good news.

i think that is one reason i am weaning myself off news entirely. “News” today is almost always biased. There appears to be no effort to write good news except for fuzzy stuff that makes us feel good at the end of a newscast or is buried in the middle pages of a newspaper, but of little consequence.

It occurred to me people, no matter how we categorize them or lump them together that category or lump contains the same kind of people that are in the other group.

Each grouping has good folks and bad folks. All the groups pretty much cover the waterfront on the degree of good and bad they have in them. There have folks who follow and support the good. They have folks who support the bad. They have a whole bunch of folks in the middle who can sway either way depending  on the time and the situation.

That kind of group composition has existed throughout the history of man.

We are no different today except technology has allowed stupid to expand exponentially.

The title term is from an entirely different perspective now as compared to, say, thirty years ago, and an even greater difference forty-plus years ago.

i am not likely to finish this tonight. After all, i’m slowing down a bit, and today began with leaving the house around 5:30, or actually 6:30, plus seven from Greenwich, not some political maneuvering in an attempt to fool us as to what time it really is.

Suffice it to say i rose early, even for me. The curmudgeons played our usual Friday Morning Golf and had our usual tradition of beer afterwards. Then i took my daily tradition of a nap, lasting a bit longer, and then Maureen and i went to see Lang Lang. No, that’s is not a panda at the zoo. That is one incredible classical pianist who played Schumann and Bach. i was captivated but i was also tired and declared to Maureen he was named Lang Lang because his performance needed to be about half in length, like his name.

We got home after eleven, a record for staying up of sorts for the past decade or so, and i, having to communicate with several friends and family, made it to bed after midnight.

It is now Saturday morning. i continue to ramble.

As i mentioned last night, Lang Lang was an incredible virtuoso. And i was tired, which increased my fidgeting. The concert was in the incredible Spanish style Balboa Theater built in 1924 with renovations that did not destroy its charm.

An aside: when Maureen was  a teenager, a date took her to the theater in downtown San Diego, not for a concert of classical music but to the movie “Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Glad i was more sophisticated in taste, but not really since she was the engineer for acquiring the tickets for this excursion.

While Lang Lang played, i thought of artists like Hoagy Carmichael, Bill Evans, Ray Bryant, and Keith Jarrett. Different ways of beating on the ivories. All amazing.

i envied Lang Lang’s hands: long, gracious, elegant. If my stubby fingers had the length of his, i might have played more and better, even now in my bumbling practice. However, i knew that is my special illusion. Those digits are not going to grow, and i will always have trouble reaching much farther than an octave.

i thought of my grandmother, Katherine “Granny” Prichard, who could play gospels that would make you dance and sing at the top of your lungs.

i thought of my sister, who taught the piano for years and wondered why i didn’t learn more.

And i thought of my mother, not because of the wonderful music.

Almost every Sunday at the 11:00 service, Estelle and Jimmy Jewell sat in the first few rows with their children (but not the first two) in the right hand section of the sanctuary in the old United Methodist Church in Lebanon.

Their eldest child was a bit capricious. Fidgety, not because he was tired as i was last night. i have long maintained one trait i got from my father was the one my mother described as “He’s like a worm in hot ashes.” The worm was in the full running mode in those church services, especially during long prayers and the sermon.

Telling me to stop or even whispering  her demands for decorum was viewed as impolite to the rest of the congregation or the pastor, i guess. But she had another method of halting my fidgeting: she would pinch my thigh or my bottom. This was painful, especially in the summer when my attire was usually a dressy outfit of white shirt, coat, and shorts. Then, the pinch, or plural, was applied to my bare legs.

Perhaps that is why, last night, in the middle of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations, BMW 988,” i flinched when Maureen shifted and moved her hands.

The book, Steel Decks and Glass Ceilings: An Executive Officer’s Memoir, is getting closer to printing. The heavy work of editing, except for a look at the finished product before it goes to press is done. For an old man, it was quite an effort over the last several days to get it back to the editor and designer.

Now, i have a little time to breathe and, of course, tell stories. And when i awake in the middle of the night, some other things than the book come into my mind. This one visited me last night. i couldn’t get it out of my head.

Tonight, maybe i can get some sleep.

Ghost Riders

 the radar blipped across the screen;
seen many times,
but
that was on a machine-gray obelisk
in a cramped compartment of red lights
called CIC
or
under a rubber hood
in the pilot house,
both on haze-gray greyhounds
of the fleet:
Xenas in the steel armor of a knight
called tin cans
or,
better yet, their nomenclature of
destroyers.

this radar circular sweep was from the sky,
a ball with projections circling our orb
sending its dot dash to the earth
to viewers of flat screens
across the world
showing not the enemy’s fleet,
nor the tankers, cruise ships, fishing boats,
but
revealing the terror of the weather
by famous and scientific weather guessers
abetted by blips in the sky.

on the big screen occupying one house wall,
the green, yellow, and orange clouds on the screen
roll down with the Japanese Current from the Artic
while Japan lolls in the Kuroshio Current
coming up from the equator,
clockwise, you see,
as the Gulf Current allows lolling
on the American east coast
and
the blips on the radar are…

ghost riders in the sky
like Vaughn Monroe sang about
years and years ago
driving me to fault those who
futilely tried to cover
Vaughn’s one of a kind voice
and
his ghost riders in the sky

ghost riders in the sky
painted in a mural on a wall,
driving their steeds from the stampede
behind them
in the clouds
in a hamburger joint
incongruously named Boll Weevil
in the Southwest corner
where the folks weren’t likely
to have a clue
the boll weevil destroyed cotton crops.

ghost riders in the sky
In the sky, lord, in the sky:
radar blips
forecasting the storm a’coming,
riding like Samurai on the Japanese current
but
less frightening than a blip on a tin can,
a contact on radar repeater
to be designated “skunk alfa”
with constant bearing, decreasing range,
which was termed “CBDR,”
which meant collision course,
something to be avoided
at all costs
so not to become
ghost riders in the sky.