About a year ago, my niece, Dr. Kate Jewell Hanson, commented to Maureen and me that her father, my younger brother Joe, was a “putterer.” i applauded her assessment, but questioned the accuracy.

From what i’ve observed, Joe’s puttering is like painting their entire house in Queechee, Vermont. It seems like every time i call him, he’s doing a major putter.

i, on the  other hand, am a piddler, not a putterer (except on the golf course where i am not a very good putterer but do it a lot more than i should, or is that a “puttee”?), i have become more of a piddler, as our mother would have said, after stopping real work when i left Pacific Tugboat Services almost two years ago. i keep coming up with all of these magnificent ideas of incredible home improvements, which quickly become a bunch of tasks that need to be done before getting to the real one…and only one or two actually getting done.

Then, of course, i go way, way off track. Example: we have been working toward reducing all of the crap we have in our makeshift garage attic, made by my father and me with some old scrap plywood and discarded closet doors. A major part of that hoard upstairs is artwork that has been replaced in the house throughout the years. i like nearly all of that. So rather than giving it away, i looked for other options.

Since the first house Maureen and i have owned, i have had an office. This was primarily because i have always wanted to be a writer, and i have a rather ridiculous amount of books. The current home office is one of my favorite places on earth.

So what do i do with the artwork. i have made a second office in my garage workspace, the third car port in our three-car garage. i have kept a lot of my father-in-law Ray Boggs’ garage workshop pieces and tools. i have my own workshop and yard tools. Now i have a desk my father made for Sarah and the wall is now covered with artwork and photos of Blythe, Sarah, and grandson Sam.

After this bit of piddling, i decided to get organized, as in eternally not getting there. My sister Martha, brother Joe, and the goofy guy gathered at Martha’s home on Signal Mountain a little over a year ago to select photos from our parents, Aunt Bettye Kate Hall, and our grandparents for a digital keepsake Martha is scanning.

Both Blythe and Sarah had requested to have their grandparents’ photos not used in the project. So what we did not put in the project Martha, Joe, and i began, i took to Austin. But there was not enough time to adequately distribute them, so i brought them back to the Southwest corner. Added to that is a rather incredible amount of paperwork saved for books not written. i realized when going through the paperwork nearly all of the Navy related documents included my SSN, which must be redacted before tossing, or shredded.

So i made the shelves, found most of the stuff in a myriad of storage places and collected them. The intent is to go through them, keep the actual photo or paper if it might mean something to daughters or other family members, record them digitally, and shred or otherwise dispose of what i don’t keep.

i figure if i continue at the current pace, this will take me about forty-seven years, nine months, and seven days, or my one hundred and twentieth birthday.

But my garage is becoming my getaway place. i have an old computer speaker system, to which i hook up my iPod, which has 4700 songs on it from my 45’s, some LPs, and CD’s. i plan to add my cassettes and the rest of the LP’s and maybe even a couple of boxes of reel-to-reel’s up in the garage attic, which will more than double the current music list. This task will take about as long as the sorting project.

For now, i put the iPod on “shuffle,” sit at my (Sarah’s) desk, look at photos of my loved ones and some cherished artwork, write some stuff, play solitaire, read, or just sit and listen to Jimmy Reed, Ella, Frank, Dvorak, Handel, Jimmy Smith, Nina, and many others.

While listening, i think life ain’t bad. There have been a bunch of hiccups, and there are still some things that need to be fixed (besides the unending list of projects). Even with the hiccups, i’ve had a pretty good life, and no, it ain’t bad. It ain’t bad.

Today, Raymond V. Murphey on the Castle Heights Facebook page, posted the following:

Does anybody remember the command you call to order the platoon to turn into it’s self? Been trying to remember for sometime. Kinda like, to the rear march, but not…

As Richard Zack, Jr. informed us, “Counter column” was the correct answer. Raymond was thankful for helping him remember.

Several other responses followed.

Gary Moor: “Moor, get your head out …”

Cliff Kyle expanded the exact command to “Counter column march.”

Amy Beth Hale: “Oh, I was going to say column right. Well, I was close.”

The question and the responses brought back many memories. Army (J) ROTC drill was an amazing thing to me. At Castle Heights, we all took pride in doing it well, and we all claimed we hated it. There were some amazingly great lessons in the time we spent on the drill field.

And there were some humorous moments also. i vividly recall when the football team came to practice after a rare drill session at the beginning of the 1958 school year. Snookie Hughes and Gordon “Happy Harper,” two post graduates from Carthage who were recruited for the football team were in Company C when the drill was held.

The squad leader had been giving instruction on how you should never execute a right face when at right shoulder arms. Snookie and Happy were at the head of the squad line. After the instruction session, the squad leader put the squad through several right, left, and about face commands. Then he ordered right shoulder arms. Happy, unused to such drill, hoisted his M1 and held it parallel to the ground, rather than at a 45-degree angle on his shoulder. The squad leader to test his boys ordered “Right face.”

Everyone properly did not execute the order…except for Happy. He turned quickly and whacked Snookie in the back of the head. The tellers of this tale said it knocked Snookie out. i cannot verify that.

My response to Raymond and the responses:

Are you kidding? The Navy got all of that kind of knowledge out of me. In 1974 when discussing the change of command ceremony to be conducted on the USS Hollister in Long Beach, the outgoing captain, XO, and department heads considered what the options were when it rained.

Our dilbert weapons officer suggested that we move the ceremony from the 01 deck (with attendees in folding chairs on the pier) to the reserve armory about 3/4 of a mile away. The captain asked how were we going to get the crew there.

The weapons officer replied, “We’ll march the crew there, sir.”

At that, the captain, the XO, the Ops officer, and yours truly, the chief engineer fell out of our chairs laughing at such a debacle.

The discussion reminded me of a story from one of my best golfing buddies, Marty Linville. Marty, an Army major who was awarded the Silver Star for his actions as an artillery officer in Viet Nam, was stationed at the Naval Amphibious School primarily as the director of the Navy’s gunfire support range on San Clemente Island.

During a rare command personnel inspection, Marty was in charge of the gunfire support personnel. He was having them take position for the inspection as was about to give them the command “dress right, dress,” but had second thoughts. He called his master chief petty officer to the front to consult.

“Master Chief, what should I expect if i order the troops to “dress right dress?”

Without hesitation, the master chief replied, “Chaos, sir; absolute chaos.”

So Raymond, i don’t think my answer has any credibility.

This may end up as a Lebanon Democrat column, but the wonderful afternoon has made me post this in advance.

Maureen and i are looking at options. She is now officially, if not actually, old, and i passed that stage a bunch of years ago. We are now on a fixed income with the exception of stock market and bonds fluctuation, and my continuing thoughts of changing this site to a subscription-base blog (with the help of my friend and freaking brilliant multi-media expert, Walker Hicks).

So we are constantly looking for ways to ensure we can enjoy the rest of our lives in the manner we desire. Relocating is a major consideration. Why? California is one hell of an expensive place to live.

Then things happen like today. Maureen went to yoga, and i did some heavy lifting (for me) yard work. We had Maureeen’s smoothies and her chicken salad for lunch. Then, Maureen suggested we take the rest of the afternoon off.

We did.

We went to Coronado, a place which should be called heaven when i lived there as a single Navy Commander and remains one of my favorite places on earth.

i parked about a half-block from Ocean Boulevard. We walked down the beach access steps, and i was in my wonderful world of long ago. On my last Navy tour, my job was at the Naval Amphibious Base. Nearly every day i was there during lunch, i would run the beach almost six miles to the Navy’s North Island security fence and back. At the west end (the beach faces south), there is a dog beach.

My old lab, Cass, would body surf there. i would wade to waist deep, toss his toy beyond the breakers. Cass would crash into the breakers, find his toy, and body surf back to me. Sometimes i would turn around and as many as one hundred beach goers would be gathered to watch him. i could have kept doing it until he would have given out and drowned.

This place is a solace for me.

First sight walking onto the beach. Point Loma and the Pacific is in the background. Bike racks and beachgoers loving the 70-degree weather.

On the horizon, two “Ro-Ro’s,” large vehicle carriers so named because they are “Roll on, Roll off,” these most likely from Japan or South Korea, that have not been able to enter the bay, moor, and discharge their cargo for reasons i don’t understand (Please explain, Alan Hicks). This folks, is big, big money while the large person sitting in the surf and the others frolicking didn’t spend a dime to be on the beach (of course, they could have spent a fortune to get there).

A young girl, her two brothers, and their young mother admiring their sand castle.

Our walk took us to the Hotel Del Coronado. Some of you who have not traveled to San Diego may remember it from the Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemon movie, “Some Like It Hot.” It has changed, expanded, gotten more expensive, but remains one hell of a place to visit.

I cannot ever create the photographs of Brian Lippe or Lotus Carroll, but this catches the flavor of the walkway at the “Hotel Del” as we call it on the walkway extending toward the beach. i took this photo sitting at the bar of the Gazebo towards the end of the walkway. They used to have a new age combo perform on afternoons like this where all the umbrellas are. The pina coladas are the best  (perhaps it’s just the atmosphere). My parents, Bob and Carol, and many other family and friends have been escorted there by us for the atmosphere and the pina coladas — my parents, especially my mother loved them.

The two small windows in the top center to the left of the famous cupola is the suite where Maureen and i stayed for our twentieth anniversary. We had made reservations for our “getaway” weekend about 15 miles from our home. Upon arrival, we were taken to an interior room about the size of a large closet, the going room for the price we paid. Vowing to make the most of it, we laid down to take a nap.

The phone rang and the receptionist announced that since it was our anniversary, they had upgraded us. The suite was large and the two windows has one of the best views ever. It reminded me of the enormous suite Blythe and i had at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, B.C., again a room assignment sheerly out of luck.

This is the interior courtyard of the Hotel Del Coronado. i would like to have had my older daughter’s wedding and reception here, but that was a wonderful venue in Austin. i would like to have it for my younger daughter’s reception there and a renewal for Maureen and i at some far away time, but i simply don’t have a gazillion dollars to pull it off. Still, it is a nice place to just sit for a while.

On our walk back along Ocean Boulevard, we passed the Spreckles’ home. It has had many owners since the original Spreckles family, notably Larry Lawrence, who owned the Hotel Del Coronado and was the United States ambassador to Switzerland in Clinton’s administration. In the old days, the island was actually two islands, Coronado and North Island, separated by a marshland filled with the Pacific during high tide. Coronado’s polo field, now houses, was on the edge of the Spanish Bight. Spreckles would house a complete polo team in this house and their horses were stabled in the back…a different time.And we took one more look as we turned down the block to our car. Point Loma, beach goers, dunes: a world apart from just across the street.

But folks, i gotta tell you: this kind of stuff makes it awful hard to even consider anywhere but the Southwest corner.

It is quiet now. Maureen, now well into sixty-five is trying to stay awake in her usual place: stretched out on our den love seat with the two cats languishing, one asleep on her legs and the other  next to her side.

Her day has been mostly quiet except for her yoga and numerous phone calls from well wishers.

We capped the day in our preferred way, dining at The Rose in South Park. We shared their special salad and the margherita flatbread. Maureen had a glass of Amalya Malbec and i had two glasses of the Antano tempranillo, concluding with Maureen’s special dessert and my cup of coffee. The Rose is a small place with a relaxed, comfortable atmosphere, much like what we hope our future will be.

Even though we realize it is here, neither of us feel old. She remains beautiful, inside and out. i remain…well, a bit goofy. Life is good, even with all of its troubles.

This is in response to a post from my very good friend, Lisa Engle Lill. She is married to Master Sergeant Markus Lill, whom i also consider a good friend. They are stationed in Beaufort, South Carolina. Her post recalled a story i heard years ago:

In 1973, i learned from the wife of a neighbor in Fort Adams housing about an admiral’s visit to Guam. The neighbor was attending Naval War College while i was on the USS Luce (DLG 7) homeported in Newport and then in Destroyer School for the department head course. Fort Adams housing was for Naval officers and enlisted personnel.

At a neighborhood party, the neighbor related the story about when her husband was stationed in Guam and the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, a four-star admiral, had visited the island.

He asked to meet with all of the officers’ wives. The meeting was arranged, and the wives entered the large conference room at the officer’s club. They were instructed to sit from front to back by rank. My neighbor and several other wives of mid-grade officers, lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, were confused, and not knowing where to sit, stood in the back of the room while the wives of captains, commanders, and others jostled to get the seats according to their husband’s rank.

As this seat controversy rolled on, the admiral came to the podium. He said, “I want to applaud all of you ladies who remain in the back standing up. You are correct. You don’t have rank.” Now, everybody please sit down like civilized people so we can discuss some important matters for dependents.”

i sure wish she had a video of the faces of the wives who had jockeyed for position.