When i finished the book last night, i sat down and began writing this with the intent to email it to my immediate family. This morning when i sat down at this infernal machine again, i decided i would like all of my family and friends to have access to it. i changed it a little, added a little, and…here it is:

I did not read The Blackboard Jungle. I saw the movie shortly after it came out in 1955. It was Sidney Poitier’s breakout film starring Glenn Ford. It was also disturbing to me for many different reasons. I did not realize until tonight it was written by Evan Hunter.

I did read Far from the Sea. i finished it tonight. It was equally disturbing for me for many different reasons than The Blackboard Jungle movie.

I am not recommending any of you, especially Blythe, Jason, Sarah, Maureen, or even later Sam read it. That should be your choice, and Blythe, knowing your dislike of sad endings you so well expressed after i got you to read Hemmingway’s Farewell to Arms, i don’t think you should consider it at all. The ending is not exactly sad, but the ending is more along the lines of the feelings i got at the end of The Graduate.

How did i get to this point?

Well, i read a ton of the 87^th precinct police novels, which Evan Hunter, nee Salvatore Albert Lombino, wrote under the pen name Ed McBain, wrote and wrote and wrote (He wrote an astonishing 100 novels under that pen name). It was a long time ago, but i read at least a dozen of the crime novels. I liked his stuff. When i learned he wrote more “serious” fiction, i read his novel under the name of Evan Hunter. I don’t remember the novel, not even the name but i was impressed. Sometime around then, i bought Far from the Sea and put it in my library. Over two months ago, i pulled it out of the bookshelf.

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Reading again. You see i have been dormant in my reading for quite some time. There were always other things to do, which seemed so much more important at the time. And to be truthful, it hurt to read or re-read the authors i once loved to read: Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Greene, Wouk, Doctorow, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tolkein, and my two favorites Faulkner and Warren, because i was writing more and knew instantly with each sentence read, i would never achieve their incredible talent for writing. So i sort of quit, one, two, possibly three a year. But i wrote a lot.

You see, when i retired i had for years been building my library. I would hate to think, as my mother worried over and over again, how much money i spent on books, music, and sports, both participating and watching with the two last spending activities. It was a chunk, enough to feed the poor in a small third world country. But i have a magnificent library for me now. It’s behind me as i write, or most of it. The Durant’s histories, the Harvard Classics, The Franklin Library collection, sports, leadership, management, religions, politics, Navy, history, philosophy. When i retired…er, completed my Navy active duty service the day Sarah was born in 1989, i planned to read them all, and more. Haven’t got there yet, but hell, it’s only been twenty-nine years and counting. But i have been working and writing a lot…and playing golf and exercising and watching sports and going to symphonies and going to plays (no, not many movies: i watch my old favorites on television occasionally). Excuses.

So as this old age thing started catching up with me, i vowed to myself to stop with the excuses and get back to the reading i loved. After all, i did love it and still do. Just haven’t done it. So i have read three books this month and starting on my fourth.

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This one, Hunter’s Far from the Sea, has been difficult. First off, i didn’t like it. i didn’t like any of the characters. i did not like the premise. i did not like the plot. i didn’t like the focus on sex. i almost put it back in the bookshelf several times, but that would have betrayed my oath to myself, so i plodded. Just a little over half way through, i discovered i couldn’t put it away for a while, couldn’t quit thinking about it when i did. It was still difficult to read. i still did not like much about it. i could put it down, but i began to go back to it in shorter and shorter times in between. Two days after turning seventy-five, i sat down and read for more than two hours, a new record for the old me, and finished around 2230.

As i said, i felt like i felt at the end of “The Graduate.” Only it seemed so much more personal.

Hunter had a lot to say to me. i didn’t want to hear it but i did and it finally made sense. It was really a happy ending after what i thought was the denouement. But it didn’t feel like a happy ending.

It was powerful, and if i hadn’t read it and know what i know now, i would read it. i got a lot out of it for me. Personally.

And after all, that is really what reading is all about, isn’t it.

I’m still not recommending you read it.

Begun last night; finished tonight:

No, i wasn’t on a ship, but it felt a little like it. Like the evening watch, 2000 to 2400.

i had read about tonight’s lunar eclipse. i have seen several partial eclipses in my time. i’ve been around a number of solar eclipses, but never saw much sense in looking at a light so powerful it could ruin my eyes, even with filters or  pinholes in cardboard or whatever. i’m a little shy on the eclipse viewing scale, so i thought i would check this one out.

i left my chair by the hearth and a warm fire and wandered into the night. As with standing watches back in my day, i turned off the lights. Darken ship. Night vision. i had binoculars, not as heavy or as powerful as the olive green ones which used to hang around my neck, but it sort of felt like those other days. i was dressed warm enough for what is call cold in the Southwest corner: mid-fifties. i had on a tee shirt under a blue chambray cotton shirt — ahh, the best working uniform a sailor ever had, so we ditched them for all sorts of less useful things but the coveralls and who would want to dress like a submariner? Over the shirt, i had pulled on a green hoodie. It made me think of the best jacket ever made: the Navy’s drab olive green foul weather jacket. Oh, how i have often wished it had been part of my personal seabag, not an issue for ship wear. i could have used one about a gazillion times since i left the sea.

Earlier, the weather prognosticators had predicted rain, which meant cloudy skies, which meant this would be a bust. The rain however slid north as it often does. The clouds were thin and sparse. Looking up at the full moon, i knew i would be okay on that point. The bright beauty of the super full moon rises just a tad south of dead east in this neck of the woods and climbs in an arc diagonally over our home. It would be at about a sixty or seventy degree angle south by southeast  from our back yard when the eclipse occurred, perfect to view from the uncovered patio at the back of our yard proper. In this neck of the woods, when it would occur, the moon would be smack dab in the middle of the constellation Cancer the crab. The twins, Gemini would be at 11:00 from both on the direction clock of the sky.

i was out early. It looked like there was a stray wisp of a cloud covering the bottom of the moon. Initially, i was disappointed until i realized it was the shadow of the earth. The eclipse was beginning. i sat from around 2220 until around 2250, in a patio chair, not the captain’s chair on the starboard side, mind you, but in the XO’s chair on the port side, my ultimate, final location. Appropriately. Maureen and Sarah wandered in an out. It takes patience to watch an eclipse and for a rare time in my life, patience was in my approach. Sarah brought out my telescope Maureen gave me one Christmas, which i vow to use prolifically each year and either give up because of the complexity or my clumsiness or simply never get to it. We could not get the big scope to work. Now i have another to-do on my list. We shared the two sets of binoculars for…oh, about ten minutes.

They went inside around 2240. i remained a while, looking skyward, looking at the heavens, checking Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini, before returning my gaze to the darkening moon. It was not “blood red” here, but i could make out a tint of red.

No matter. As i peered at the heavens, i was taken back to being at sea, on the bridge of a ship with a star to navigate by and then further back when the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and probably every other group of humans in the world at the time, without our seemingly limitless knowledge (Remember: Mose Allison intoned, “…I’ve been sitting around thinking about ultimate knowledge and such//The smartest man in the whole round world really don’t know that much//Well ain’t that just like living, blame it on your wife/Ain’t that just like living – what ever happened to real life?) and those folks back thousand of years ago awed by the vastness of the universe they didn’t know, making their sense of it.

And, as i did on the rushing Cumberland River in a fishing boat, then so many times at sea, and letting the petrified chunks of wood roll through my fingers as my nine-year old daughter Blythe frolicked in the Petrified Forest, and in the Christmas Eve service when they sing “Silent Night” with the lights off and each of the congregation holding candles aloft, i got this feeling inside, warm and calm, not induced, not invoked by someone else, but there: peace.

And wondering: why, oh why can’t we rise above our pettiness, our selfishness, our need for confirmation of our worth at the expense of others when we are so insignificant in so many ways, yet so much a part of this whole thing far beyond what we can discern even now with all of the knowledge we have gained along with (“the smartest man in the whole round world,” we really don’t know that much. And the thing that separates us from the animals and all else is this idea of humanity, going beyond the instinctual self preservation to be humane, kind to others, true justice seeking.

And it matters not, i think as i go inside in the chill of the night as the eclipse begins to wane. It has to be me, or you if you prefer, who chooses to live in the spirit of what i felt, a oneness in the vastness of it all, a mariner with his stars and his Cancer and his Gemini and his star to navigate by, to live as well as one can, knowing what is right deep inside just as the feeling that i felt then and now.

It is time to be human, real, kind, in peace.

For 75, it was a good day.

Southwest corner weather has been like old Southwest corner weather. i used to say sometime between November and March, we would have thirty days of rain and cloudy weather with enough of our typical 8 out of 10 rated weather to keep us satisfied. That has not been the case in the last five or six years or so. Now, we’ve been into about three weeks of that old time winter weather but a mild Santa Ana crept back in for our Friday Morning Golf (FMG: since it’s been happening since 1991, it has acquired its own acronym) and the beauty of San Diego winter weather remained for my birthday. Symbolic? i think not. After all these years, i remain amazed at how our green time of the year is January and February. By March , the hills and open areas are beginning to turn brown again and pretty much stay that way the rest of the year. Yesterday every time i would look at the hills, i would think of my father who, like me, always marveled at the green of Southwest corner winter.

We had lunch with our nephew Mike Boase at City Taco in old La Mesa, a wonderful hole-in-the-wall diner, looking like it might be a chain but isn’t, with unique and extremely good tacos of all sorts, great sides, an outdoor sitting area in the back, and, of course, Pacifico Beer, my favorite from all of those from South of the Border although the memory of my father and father-in-law taking a break with me and enjoying Dox Equis Amber out of my long gone half refrigerator just for beer in the garage puts Dos Equis right up there. We had a delightful conversation and catching up with Mike, a good soul. As with many others, i vowed to make such get togethers more frequent.

Then we met Sarah at the Zoo. And in the middle of Africa Rocks with the baboons having a group fight in the background, my daughter Blythe and grandson Sam conversed with us via Facetime, the highlight of my day.

The zoo, my long time favorite place to go, was right up there on the good of the day. We covered at least five miles and it seemed nearly all of the animals were to be seen rather than hiding from sight as many do during daytime visits. The San Diego Zoo has been a mainstay in my world since i first came here to live in 1975. i took Blythe there every chance i had. Later, when Blythe stayed in Texas, the zoo was always at the top of our lists when she visited. Sarah and i began our treks in the early nineties. She is now an aficionado and is pretty much our tour guide when we go.  And in addition to marveling at the beauty of the beasts, i have many memories to wander through my mind about special times there.

We finished our day at The Rose. It has become our go to place for special occasions, birthdays and anniversaries. Superb cooking, superb wine offerings, superb atmosphere, and superb customer service. We sit at the bar. They even gave us a special berry and apple tart topped by homemade strawberry ice cream gratis with a candle on top.

i came home to televised sports and an early bedtime.

It was a wonderful day for an old man.

This morning, they were forecasting rain moving in by late afternoon, pretty much assuring we won’t be able to observe the “Super Blood Moon” lunar eclipse this evening.” Too bad. It would have been a good end to a birthday weekend.

So it is time to move on. It is time for the next quarter of a century or however long i last. i plan to be a little bit different: doing all i can do and not doing things i shouldn’t, recognize my limitations and my possibilities, leaving my grandson, not to brag about my accomplishments (which seem pretty average to me right now) but to give him some examples of living from which he might learn something to do or something to not do — i will not tell him those things: that is for him and his parents to figure out.

And you know what?

Life goes on.