once upon a time, in a place far away, a time long ago,
us’n boys were old enough to drink beer
after obtaining it illegally from the store man way out in the country,
and
pee on the side of the roads with the cigarettes we couldn’t smoke at home
hanging out the sides of our mouths:
oh, we thought we were grown up
but
young enough to still believe in ghosts
or
at least some of us still believed,
and
there was a run-down log shack out on Hickory Ridge Road,
on the corner of a rock road they now call Crowell’s Lane
and
the baseball players were goofing around in a 1953 sludge green Studebaker,
when they decided to mess with George:
they told him the shack was haunted by the black man who died there

but they were young and in the South in 1959;
so it ain’t likely they said “black man”
but, as i recall we did use the proper term of “negro,”
not the now infamous slur

and
they dared George to go into the shack to check it out;
not knowing the plot, i felt sorry for George,
and
volunteered to go with him into the haunted shack,
so,
like the dunce that i am,
i asked him if he would like me to go with him;
somewhat frightened it seemed to me, he agreed
while my buddies urged me to let him go it alone;
i did not
and
when we crossed the threshold of the log hut,
the old Studebaker peeled out, gravel flying,
and
George and i were alone in the country, sitting on the threshold of a ghost shack:

a half century later, i do not recall the meat of our conversation,
but
i remember after the boys returned in an hour or so laughing as they picked us up
and
i realized George was a great guy
and
i learned more about him than i would have ever known
had i not joined him in the dare to enter
the ghost shack.

i love my iPod, and i haven’t event touched its potential. i’m getting close thanks to George Lederer (thanks, George).

Today, i didn’t work on getting all the playlists organized or recording some more of my LP’s. I had work to do. Maureen had yoga and a birthday brunch with some of her closest friends. So i went to get a few items from Home Depot and pick up something for Maureen from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Now, i don’t know how your Sunday morning radio programming matches up, but in the Southwest corner, it stinks. i love fishing, but i don’t even understand why any fisherman would listen to someone talk about fishing for three hours (of course, i don’t understand how anyone would listen to any specialty talk show for more than five minutes). My other choices were church services or religious talk shows, which all sound too pious for me, or golf talking, or some ex-jocks telling me how much they know about all they don’t know.

There is some good programming on the FM side, but i just wasn’t in the mood.

So i hooked up my iPod and clicked to “shuffle.” i have 4700 tunes on my iPod.  This morning, i was amazed my “shuffle” seemed to hit my mood. But maybe, just maybe, i fit the iPod mood.

The playlist: Etta James “At Last;” Andrea Bocelli “Cieli de Toscana;” David Newman “Everything Must Change;” Bill Evans “Just You, Just Me;” Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong  “A Fine Romance;” Eliot Fisk, Vivaldi – “Mandolin Concerto in C;” John Lee Hooker “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer;” Nancy Wilson “At Long Last Love;” Charles Mingus “Portrait;” Frankie Vallie & the Four Seasons “Big Girls Don’t Cry;” Academy of St. Martin Orchestra, Mozart “Symphony No. 35; Academy of St. Martin Orchestra;” Percy Mayfield “Please Send Me Someone to Love.”

Damn near a perfect Sunday morning. i love my iPod.

i hope you had a good one as well.

George and Sarah, i killed what remained of your Bulleit Rye, small batch, tonight. It was good, but not quite as good as Mr. Dickel’s, even his Old No 12 Sour Mash. Besides Mr. Bulleit and i have just been introduced. Old George Dickel and i go way, way back, and we have talked into the deep of many a night, as we have done tonight after my brief introduction to Mr. Bulleit.

Maureen has gone to bed. I should have. i must rise early for Friday morning golf. She does not have to rise until she is damn good and ready. i was closing up the evening, setting all for tomorrow, checking the last emails and Facebook postings, hoping to find i don’t know what when i realized i had started a poem this morning, which was incomplete. So George – Dickel that is – and i worked on it some more. Here it is, first draft, which is usually my last draft. One explanation: On old steam warships like destroyers, directly aft of the bridge was what then was called Combat Information Center, or “CIC.” It was all radar and plots in red light to not destroy “night vision” to provide the electronic picture of what was going on in actual combat or enhance the visual perception of the bridge watch during peacetime steaming, either reporting contacts showing on the radar long before they would be sighted visually, or assisting navigation during piloting coastal waters.

i consider myself a lucky man to have been at sea in the Navy before we became so sophisticated and electronic. It was a time, long gone, of a sense of self-reliance, where ship and mariners worked as one, a whole entity against the elements, especially in fog. i suspect i will make several revisions to this one. But George (Dickel), Mr. Bulleit, and i wanted to share it tonight.

fog

i arose this morning to grayness;
morning light was suffused into the grayness;
the street and driveway were gray;
the bright house paints were muted
by the cast of gray mist;
the hills, even the sky itself had vanished
in the thick gray of the fog.

at sea, fog would envelop me and my ship
as if it were a cold, cold blanket
intent on plunging inside and extracting life’s breath
from me and from my ship:
gray unto gray unto gray unto gray;
“set the low visibility watch”
and
two deck seamen fight through the darkness,
the gray darkness
to the bullnose on the forecastle
and
the stern chock on the fantail
to peer into that darkness
but
more importantly to listen, listen
for a sound, a fog horn
hopefully far away
detecting a direction:
unlikely expectations,
and
the conning officer on the bridge
just hopes there are no other lonely transits
on the open sea
or
at least spotted on the radar
in the red lit combat center aft of the bridge
to warn him of the impending danger
as the midwatch wears on into the dark night.

Yet, open ocean fog is a piece of cake
compared to entering port
in the murky mist of coastal fog,
and
the sea detail watch on the bridge
cannot see the bow, much less the channel buoys
and
the watch relies on combat again:
“radar holds us on track,
“twenty yards to right of mid-channel,
“nearest shoal water two hundred yards
“off the port beam,”
the sound-powered phone talker
repeats the words of the CIC watch officer
to the bridge watch
while the navigator stares at the chart
while his quartermasters plot the course
with their own radar repeater
confirming combat’s report
as the conn and the captain
peer into the gray nothingness
hoping to see some dark figure
that might be a building or landfall
from which they might see
through the gray fog
where they really are.

The birthday wishes, lots of them, are over. Sarah and George are in flight back to Austin. Maureen warmed a splendid ragu sauce and spaghetti dish we had with a salad and a nice merlot for dinner. Just the two of us. She is now listening to the news in the family room with the fire i built earlier dying down.

i may put on another log later and read a bit. There’s this Robert Penn Warren book,  A Place To Come To,  i want to finish. i started reading it about six months ago, and unlike most of Warren’s work, this one is hard for me to get into. Warren and Faulkner remain my two favorite novelists, and this novel is just a bit disappointing. But i find it difficult to not finish any book.

Tomorrow, i plan to start my year of seventy-two. Of course, there is a golf round involved. This one with one of my best friends, Pete Toennies, whom i’ve known since we were both on an Amphibious Squadron staff deployed to the Western Pacific in 1979-80. That deployment was one of the craziest and most rewarding in my span of nine long deployments.

There’s this bathroom wall i need to mend. i hope to repair at least one fault a week in our 26-year old house from here on out. Houses a quarter of a century old require attention, and i haven’t been very good at addressing aging problems, with the house or me.

It will probably take at least the rest of the month to work out our travel plans and budget for the year. This fixed income stuff is a little tiresome when it comes to our desires to see people and things. So we are going to be a little more proactive and plan ahead. Maureen is good at detailed planning and budgets. i’m not. i’m also, as Ricky Nelson sang, a “Travelin’ Man.” It is hard to get that out of my blood. i’ve seen enough places but there are others i would like to see with Maureen and return to my favorites. Now, i am more interested in seeing friends and family than places, but those friends and families are spread just about everywhere. So travel can accomplish both of my needs.

If it were just me, there would be constant travel, but there is this lady, you see, who likes to spend her evenings with me at this home with a fire in the fireplace with music playing while we read. And she likes to fix me breakfast and eat the same at our kitchen table every morning looking out the breakfast room window and hopefully catching sight of a humming bird. Strange, i think, in the quiet of this evening after the whirlwind weekend with Sarah and George, strange that i enjoy the evenings and the breakfasts and the fire and the humming birds and, most of all, being with her, probably more than she does. And all the while, i’m thinking of hitting the road to somewhere. Strange, indeed.

And as this afternoon wound down, i received a wonderful phone call. Blythe, my daughter, wished me “happy birthday,” and then, Samuel James Jewell Gander, my grandson with the middle names honoring my father, pronounced, “It’s good you have lived so long,” (or something like that: Blythe, please correct because i think his actual pronouncement was funnier).

Here is Blythe’s correction on the Sam quote: “Hey, good job on staying alive for so long.” and i was right: it is funnier.

After  a brief conversation, i asked him how he was, and he replied, “Amazing.”

Made my day, and now, i will sleep well tonight.

i am violating one of my rules to post this today. i normally wait a day to post my column from The Lebanon Democrat. But what the hey? i’m 72 by three hours and i want my friends to read this on my birthday. i will return to my normal column posting practice next week. i have received a grunch of well wishes, mostly on Facebook concerning this event. This morning, i vowed to respond to every one. But there are a lot of them, and i am old. So it will take a little time, a little time, but thanks in advance.

BONITA, Cal. – When you read this, I will have just turned 72.

Dr. Charles Lowe delivered me at 7:35 am, Wednesday, January 19, 1944, ably assisted by my grandmother, Katherine Webster Prichard at McFarland Hospital. I’m sure Estelle Jewell was glad to get rid of me, unaware of what she would have to put up with for the next 70 years.

My father for whom I was named was in the waiting room. The next day, he caught a train back to his 75^th Construction Battalion in Gulfport, Miss.

I have thought about that day and this day, and what it means to me. I am not sure why 72 seems like such a significant age.

Turning 60, 65, and 70 didn’t bother me. Oh, I celebrated like everyone else on those significant milestones with black balloons and bad jokes, but my participation was to make my family and friends who were honoring me feel good about the celebration. I really wasn’t all that caught up in the symbolic meaning.

But why 72? Why does this year seem different, more significant, if you will?

Perhaps it’s because 1972 was a pivotal year in my life. Perhaps it is because part of that significant year was my first daughter, the beautiful and talented Blythe was born. Perhaps it was because my career intentions as a sports writer took a U-turn: I gave up my sports editorship of The Watertown (NY) Daily Times and rejoined the Navy with a four-month Mediterranean deployment at the end of the year.

My life had been altered dramatically.

Perhaps that is why “72” seems significant.

Regardless, I feel I have crossed a meaningful threshold today. Except for a number of minor maladies (which a generation ago would have probably killed me) and various aches and stiffness, I don’t feel old. But this weekend, I took my younger daughter Sarah to Disneyland for her adventure with five friends. I confessed to myself I was old.

After I returned from my chauffeur duties, I considered where I have been and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Although I officially left Lebanon as my home almost a half-century ago, my hometown has been a major factor throughout my life, perhaps more so now than since I left in 1967 for Navy OCS. Lebanon, my family, and my friends have been a wonderful influence on me.

I realized I loved to write and have been doing so ever since Lindsey Donnell and Tom Harris hooked me on writing and J.B. Leftwich hooked me on sports journalism at Castle Heights. The Navy took me to places I would have never seen (even a few I would have cared not to see) and gave me a look at the world and people I would have never appreciated had I not spent about 15 years at sea.

I found websites providing facts about today. One stated my “Life Path” number was 11. I usually ignore such things like horoscopes, fortunetellers, etc., but one of my football jersey numbers was 11, so I read on. My number supposedly meant I possessed “intuition, idealism and invention,” and had “the potential to be a source of inspiration and illumination for people.”

I like that, but it is relatively unimportant when I am 72. The “illumination for people” part intrigues me. I have long thought the older crowd should be a source of information about the past. My mother and father provided me many tales of Lebanon and my family. Their stories enriched my understanding life and helped in my decision making.

Providing stories and observations from the Southwest corner is now my goal. I hope I can provide stories to help younger people make better decisions in their lives – not to emulate me for mine has been a bumpy ride, but what they can consider in determining their own paths.

Sometime today, I will remember a conversation I had with my father when he was 86 and on his last trip to the Southwest corner. We were on a task in the garage, when he stopped, looked at me and said, “Son, I’ve had a good life. I have a wonderful wife, good kids, and great grandkids. Now, I only want one thing: When I go, I want it to be quick.”

Celebrating my 72^nd birthday, I completely understand what he meant.