Perhaps it’s because of this Covid thing. Don’t know. But i do know i have been longing for home, the one where i grew up…well, it wasn’t up very much and there is some question as to whether i really grew up at all.

Just don’t know why the longing is occurring  now. Especially since mid-August is about the last part of the year i would really want to be back there. i mean 95/95, temperature and humidity rolling in every day with grave digging on my weekday schedule until two-a-day football practice over on Hill Street came to beat me up even more.

And i sit here under the ceiling fan in my office. You see, we have never felt the need for air-conditioning and use our heating system to knock off the chill for an hour or so in the winter mornings. We prefer the fresh air. And this is really the first time i wished we had AC. Not because of the heat. We’ve had Santa Ana’s running through here  before that would melt the soles off of your flip flops — hmm, i ‘ve got a pair but only for beach days, yet today, i’m flopping around like a penguin — but Santa Ana’s are dry: pools and the ocean can fix that, and buttoning up the house with the insulation Maureen decided to spray in our attic several years ago keeps us comfortable. But this stuff is Tennessee hot, hot and humid. i knew the signal when i retrieved the paper this morning, and looked at the sky just before dawn: cirrus, stratus, and up over the mountains to the east, cumulonimbus and nimbostratus were building: thunderstorm kind of stuff in the mountains, but the pink to reds and the spotty blue sky overhead likely meant no rain here, just hot and humid. See, all those Navy years pay off.

Considering we don’t have AC, i start listing friends to visit who just happen to have such in their homes. Then i realize that social distancing frowns on such. So, i start searching for something cool, like shade or underneath this ceiling fan. There is a gin and tonic in my future tonight. As i searched, it dawned on me the call back home was seated in the deep past.

August on Castle Heights Avenue in Lebanon, Tennessee, circa 1950’s and 1960’s. i searched for cool there and then also…in vain. Oh, the nights were almost bearable (if you didn’t mind the mosquitoes) even though at Baird Park ball fields in my catching gear, my green and white Texas Boot Company ball shirt would be soaked by the second inning, and you didn’t have but one jersey back then. And at 127 Castle Heights Avenue before we had air conditioning, i searched. There was one huge (and loud) window fan in the window above the stairs to upstairs. This was to provide moving air — still warm, mind you — for the two bedrooms, hall, and  bath. i would clear off my bed, strip down to my underwear and sleep at the end of the bed in a position to maximize air coverage. Didn’t work.

◊    ◊    ◊

Now, it’s getting personal. i have a number of friends who are dealing with health issues. i know. i know: As you get older, things happen, and damn near all of them aren’t good. Bodies wear out in different ways. It doesn’t make any difference. Still hurts. Losing people for whom you care is even worse. We ain’t likely to stop it.

Yet there’s this other thing going on right now. Our cleaning lady who has been around us for about a quarter of a century is as much a friend as a service provider. She and her partner have missed the last two cleaning days. Marde is from Mexico. Her aunt and niece just died, one from the coronavirus. Worse, she now has eight family members who have contracted this pestilence. And Marde can’t go to see them. Sad.

i have several family and friends who have been unable to see loved ones suffering from various ills. They aren’t allowed to be with their loved ones. COVID.

It is just flat not right.

◊    ◊    ◊

With our cleaning up to us for the next several weeks and being the bright boy i am, i took on the kitchen this morning. i cleaned and siliconed a window sill for smoother operation. i vacuumed and then i mopped, Spic & Span of course. Like i said: bright boy.

So tonight, fans will be whirring in the Southwest corner if they don’t pull the plug on electricity for an hour or so like they did last night — it’s a roving plan they call “brown outs.” Seemed like a black out to me last night, although i did smile just a bit when it happened thinking about all of those cool people with AC who suddenly found themselves in our boat.

Tonight, i will have sashimi from my favorite Japanese restaurant, take out only, mind you. And a white wine, chilled. Problem is this crazy Tennessee weather is supposed to carry on in the Southwest corner, even get a bit worse for another four days or so.

But there is also happiness around. A grunch of birthdays today.

Siena, our niece with her brother Sebastiani,  is  one.

Then, there is cousin Kinsley with her mother Renee.

And of course, there are grand nephews Max and Culley.

i probably got the relationships a bit mixed up, but it’s okay. i’m pretty much considered “crazy uncle jim” to all of them.

Hot here. Yeh. Got up to 86. Humidity is at 47%.

Well, maybe it ain’t all that bad.

As noted previously, i am in an emotional no-man’s land with a situation where it would be completely inappropriate for me to write about now. This is one of those times where i wish i were still working: driving ships, managing safety and environmental compliance for tugboats, business development for military contractors, team-building, quality management coordinator, nuclear agency consulting and editing, Naval ROTC instructor, sports writing, newspaper editing, disc jockey, grave digger, lawn mowing: anything i had to do to take my mind off what’s going on.

So as i bounced around the house attempting to divert my attention, i also was trying to figure out when okra season occurred. No, no, not back home. i know when okra season is in Tennessee. i was trying to figure out what the season is in the Southwest corner. You see, okra does not proliferate in grocery shelves out here like it does back home. i have yet to find even a Southern themed restaurant with okra — The marketeers at Cracker Barrel drew their line for their stores at the Arizona-California border, probably for good reason; so the Danny Evins’ created feels-like-Tennessee restaurants aren’t an option. Up until now, i had to find a local grocery or the Navy commissaries that might, might have okra, and that was spotty, just by luck, kind of shopping.

Nancy Toennies and i share a love for okra and if either of us stumble across a place selling okra, the phone and text lines between us light up like “all hands on deck.”

With all of this craziness going on right now, it is even more difficult to find fresh okra. My  friend from Kansas, Marty Linville mentioned after golf last Friday, he had resorted to frying frozen okra. Later,  Nancy also confessed to this tactic. i remained stubborn. That was most likely because i had gone down that trail about thirty years ago and the frozen product i got back then was pretty much pure slime when thawed.

But i was desperate. i was planning a shopping trip to the dry side of the Naval Station, one of the few places i had found okra before and my source for Tennessee Pride sausage. But first, i needed some things from Ralph’s, no, not Cramden, Ralph’s is Kroger’s Southwest. It’s a short drive down and then up the hill from our home. i had decided to get okra if they had it in the freezer section. If it wasn’t slimy like its predecessor and worked like it did for Nancy and Marty, then i might have year-round access to one of my favorite meals. As i entered Ralph’s, i took a right turn into the produce section. Maureen wanted some cilantro. i continued along the produce en route to the meat and seafood section in the back. i wanted to check out the salmon, another favorite about which i’m stubborn and stuff of another tale.

Just before i left produce, i just happened to look below the mushrooms, and there, there it was: a bin of fresh okra. i emptied it.

So last night was my night. Cleared the kitchen from the hall monitor chef-quality wife who actually reads directions — i do too but only for my mother’s recipes and this one is mine, all mine.

Martini in hand, i chopped the okra and the onions and the olives. The chef creature had gotten out the diced tomatoes. i fried the sausage and chopped it into small pieces so she wouldn’t know. i mixed the other ingredients in a big bowl and slowly dispensed them to the cast iron pot from near fifty years of my ownership. Would have used bacon grease but we don’t have such in cans for such in this house. Health, you know. i put the burner on low and added a few secret ingredients and forgot to add a couple of others. No matter. All of my cooking, even from my mother’s recipes is an adventure, an exploration.

As my concoction, not goulash, or some Cajun thing because this is mine all mine, cooked slowly, i turned to the corn bread. The chef of the house wanted muffins and wanted them in those paper cup cake thingies. i like it in a pan and cut and served, but i always defer to the chef…well, maybe not always. i mix it from my mother’s unwritten instructions and forty-leben different ideas of how cornbread should be made. NO SUGAR. EVER.

i finish the mixture as the oven preheats. i fill the muffin pan. There is a good bit too much for the paper muffin thingies. So i try again to make a piece of cornpone from what’s left. My mother made it rarely, yet it was one of my favorites. i have attempted to replicate this glorious piece of pastry about a half dozen times with absolutely no success. But this time, oh, this time, it was sublime according to my taste, which tends toward comfort food.  i buttered the two small pieces and took one to my daughter. She loved it. i then dared to walk to the chef who had thus far been banned by my edict from the kitchen. She tasted it and…oh lord, she loved it.

Once allowed in the kitchen, she cooked the rice. Supper was served. It was, if i might be bold enough to judge, spectacular.

i was back home. Okra with sausage, tomatoes, and a whole bunch of other stuff with cornbread (and cornpone) with a nice zinfandel.

Take me home.

It did give me a respite from my worries, put me right back smack dab in the middle of Tennessee. And Maureen declared the next time corn meal was considered, i would make cornpone.

Oh, i forgot the mushrooms.

My world is a little off its bearings right now. i don’t feel it is appropriate to expand on that first statement, at least not now. But as my orbit was being knocked off its course a bit in the last several days, for a couple of months actually, i wrote this:

Hmm…

i am not who i was then;
i am not who i am now;
I am not who i am
whenever I think about
who i might be when.
whoa.
i do not understand how
it all got so turned around, upside down
then, now, beyond
because
i am beyond concern
about who i was,
who i might have been,
who i am,
who i will or won’t be,
and
the same i could say
about any of you:
you see,
i only know
i care,
and
if all is to be right with the world,
you also care.

i had difficulty making out my aunt’s cursive written word on the back of the photo.

It was a single photo amidst many in the envelope my cousin, Nancy Orr Winkler Schwarze, had sent me a couple of years ago. As the pile collected on my desk, this one intrigued me.

i had heard about my aunt Evelyn Prichard at Cumberland. She was a star student, a basketball player, a campus leader, and attractive enough to win the affection of a wonderful man, James “Pipey” Orr whom she married after they graduated. She also cooked fried chicken for her grandfather’s breakfast, walked two miles to Cumberland from his home on Hunter’s Point Pike, attended her morning classes, returned to her grandfather’s where she cooked his lunch, returned to Cumberland for afternoon classes and basketball practices, and at the end, walked back to her grandfather’s where she cooked supper with the help of her younger sister (my mother), her youngest sister, and probably not a great deal of help from my eight-year old uncle.

So i was intrigued with this photo and the one word and the year written on the back. i thought maybe it was “Debutantes, 1931.” The cursive writing became smaller and difficult to make out at the end. The lettering was small and neat, not as neat and orderly as her two sisters wrote, but it contained the same characteristics. The letters looked like the perfectly formed letters, large, above the blackboards in every classroom of every grade in elementary school that i remembered. That’s what their cursive looked like. My sister’s writing had that too. My brother’s also, but he formed his with a backward slant, something i had always intended to ask him about. Toward the end of this exhibit of cursive reminded me of mine, hurried, different, some suggestion of an older style or at least a cruder style. This has been amplified in my later years, this recklessness with the cursive lettering. Perhaps it was college that did that to me. i wondered if it had done that with my aunt.

i asked Maureen to decipher the lettering. She immediately decided it indeed was “Debutants .” i should have dropped it there, but i kept looking. i think the old news reporter kicked in with Coach, JB Leftwich, looking over my shoulder.

i got out my desk magnifying glass i had claimed from my father-in-law’s estate. Under the glass, the writing looked like “debutees.” It seemed like a good word to me, but it was unfamiliar. i looked it up. Google, where else?

It was French as i had guessed. The plural was also feminine, meaning “to start,” “to debut,” to make one’s debut.”

And there it was.

She and her friends. i think i recognize one or two, but i will not hazard a guess as to whohe fr these 1991 Cumberland University students were. i’ll let my Lebanon friends determine if they can put names to the frosh faces.

It seems like a simpler, magical time to me. But as with all periods of history, including the current times, it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Hmm…i think i’ve read that somewhere else before. That’s my Aunt Evelyn Prichard Orr on the left.

About a thousand years ago…oh, okay, it was 1952, Mad Magazine debuted. Two years later, this crazy wonderful magazine adopted this rather bizarre character who had been used in FDR’s campaigns for president in the thirties as their icon. i did not realize, perhaps because i would not have even thought about such things until i grew up about a year ago — okay, okay, i haven’t really grown up really — how prescient Alfred E. Neumann was in my case.

i have done my thing. Hopefully, i will continue to do my thing. i don’t have a prejudice bone in my body, at least i don’t think i do, although i do have a bias against stupid, illogic, fear, and hatred.

But a couple of months ago, i swore off caring about political positions and not judging those who get so worked up about such things.

i want to enjoy the rest of my life. i don’t think i have done too much wrong, and i have certainly earned what i have…okay, okay i was blessed with, not earned an incredible wife, two wonderful daughters, and a grandson i am so proud of my buttons might burst.

So Alfred, tonight at seventy degrees at five in the afternoon, no clouds, an ocean breeze in the Southwest corner, i’m in, man.

What, me worry?