Murphy’s Law was not propounded by Murphy but by another man of the same name.
All posts by Jim
My Favorite Saint Patrick’s Day
It was in March 2005. Maureen and several of her pals at Parron-Hall Office Interiors had been awarded a Kimball Office Furniture “SPIFF” to join a large group in Dublin. i tagged along.
It was my first time in Ireland. i immediately determined i could live there. We wandered the streets with my jaw somewhere around my kneecap in awe. There was this feeling of Keats, of Joyce, of Shaw, of Samuel Beckett. We ate Irish. The dinners were great. We went to Trinity College where i came up with my plot. We went across the street to a haberdashery and more Irish shopping to lure in tourists. It worked. i bought an Irish tweed sports coat, which i still wear today. It’s me.
We walked around the corner to a pub for lunch. I felt like i was in the “Quiet Man” pub. Next door there was an old, and i mean old book store. You could feel the dust on the shelves that contained first editions of Yeats, Joyce and Wilde works. We went back…several times. The churches, the city buildings smacked at history. The group had a small section of seats for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
i can assure you it’s an entirely different thing in Dublin compared to the silliness we conjure up in the good ole U.S. of A. There wasn’t a commercial float or ads on sides of the cars…in fact, don’t remember automobiles in that parade at all. It was high school bands. It was local bands of all sorts. It was amateur magicians, acrobats, and unicyclists. It was fun.
After the parade, we wandered into a pub just off of St. Patrick’s Close near that magnificent cathedral. It sat about fifty and the fifty were all Irish except for the eight of us and ranged from around four years old to about ninety. We had our Guinness. The bartender gleefully showed one of the several beautiful women in our group how to draw an Irish four-leaf clover on top of the foam.
On another sortie, we had gone on a tour to see a castle, the Irish Sea, and to an Abby turned restaurant, show place. We sat on picnic tables, ate traditional Irish fare, and the Irish band lulled us with Irish Melodies, and the rinnce fada, or the Irish step dance. It ended the show with “Danny Boy.” The young singer was beautiful and perfect for the song. i noted that Maureen, most of the other women, and even a few males, had tears running down their cheeks.
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Our next trip in 2015, ten years after visiting Dublin, was to join Joe and Carla, my brother and sister-in-law, in Tuosist, near Kenmare in County Kerry. i fell in love with the Beara Pennisulsa and Kenmare. The beauty, the peacefulness, the food, everything was damn near perfect. It did not possess the bustle and the big city feel of Dublin. And there was John Moriarty, the head barkeep at the Park Hotel. The man knows his whiskey, and in turn taught Joe and Carla wonderful things. i had perhaps the best whiskey i’ve ever had at the Park Hotel bar. There are several stories there, but i will hold them for a later time.
i remain entranced.
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As for that plot, i had: Sarah was choosing what college to attend at the time of our first trip. She had intimated she would like it to be in Europe. Trinity is the college of fine arts, including drama (the Irish system is much different from ours in the states where the various fields of studies are located together across the country, not in universities like ours that offer degrees in many fields). Sitting in that Sean Thornton pub in Dublin, i remarked to Maureen we could get Sarah into Trinity. To add to the bait, i noted we couldn’t afford to live in Dublin, but we could get a relatively inexpensive cottage thirty or so miles away. i continued to explain Ireland had a great train system (i was guessing), and we could spend a couple of years there giving Sarah moral support. The coup de gras ending was suggesting after two years when Sarah had her feet on the ground, we could get a place for a couple of years in Southern France.
Maureen liked the idea but she wasn’t exuberant. i passed right over that and when back in the Southwest corner, began my pitch to Sarah.
She wasn’t interested. If she was going to study abroad, she preferred England, London i think.
The next spring, Maureen and i were headed to Padre baseball game. We were waiting for the trolley when i re-launched my campaign, reiterating all the positives, and suggesting we could convince Sarah to change her mind.
i received the Maureen “look.” i said, “You really don’t want to do this do you?”
She nodded her head.
I, flummoxed, asked, “Why not?”
She simply replied, “Too many pubs.”
Story ended.
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i am not Irish. Maureen is really, really Irish. We are locked into living here until we are not. There are now only two other places i would move. One would be back home. My near life-long fantasy has been to live in a place like the cabin my parents and aunt and uncle had on Old Hickory Lake. And to the Beara Peninsula. Neither will happen.
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This morning, Barbara Leftwich Froula sent a photo of her father’s column in The Democrat. It was about his Irish heritage. As usual, JB’s column was on point, thoughtful, and funny in the right places. i and many of his students in journalism labeled him “Coach.” His column ran for years in the newspaper. For several years, his column would run on Tuesday (i think) and mine, “Notes from the Southwest Corner,” would run on Thursday. For me, that was like validation of being a good columnist.
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i may not be Irish, but one of the greatest guys i have ever met is. Mike Kelly now lives in Houston. Jim Hileman introduced me to him. The three of us became golfing buddies and pals for years. Today, Mike posted a photo of his family when he was a young man. Mike is the second from the left on the back row. Now folks, that’s Irish:
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
A Short Cornucopia of Thoughts from the Goofy Guy
i sit on our patio. It is 3:33 p.m. in real time, 4:33 in political maneuvering, and 11:33 Greenwich Mean Time, the latter of which is all that matters. It occurs to me that at sea, the critical times are first light to shoot morning stars, twilight to shoot evening stars, noon to shoot the noon fix. The other important times was eight bells, that’s when the watch changed every four hours.
So instead of sun setting about an hour from now, it will set about two hours from now.
i am having a Martin (Thank you, Cyril Vaughn Fraser, Jr.) reflecting. The photo here is one i’ve posted before but it was earlier in the season. You see, the are subtle changes in the seasons of the Southwest corner, not noticed much untill you’ve lived here for about twenty or thity years.
The coral trees have lost their leaves and the corals are beginning to bloom, there are two or three buds on the coral tree in the photo. The lilac colored ice plant is finally beginning to bloom amidst the yellow and the orange. The Coronado (ground hugging kind) of bougainvillea is taking off.
i have had a good day. i fixed a couple of problems with an incredible mountain of technical support after listening to really annoying piano concertos for about 40 minutes. i picked up some Kona whole bean coffee and suffered a near heart attack when i found how much it cost, but what the hell, the aroma can knock you off your feet with goodness.
i chipped some golf balls and, as usual, thought i might have found a secret (Not). i found a photo that took me back to good times: Yosemite’s Command Master Chief, BMCM Weaver with the XO in Rota, Spain, 1983. He was as good as you could get for the liaison between officers and enlisted. Oh Lord, those days were just about perfect.
We’ve gone to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. We have lunched at Panama 66 in the Park among the Museum of Arts sculptures.
And all this leads up to where i am. There are naysayers out there who rant about how awful Californians are. i’m not going to lower myself to argue about that. i am sad that it would be financial disaster for my daughters and their families to move here. Home prices, rent, taxes makes moving here no sense whatsoever. But i was here before the insanity of inflated housing costs and have benefited greatly from it.
i can play golf all year. The Southwest corner has about thirty days a year when it rains. The temperature is a little warm, in the 80’s and low 90’s for a month or so. There are a couple of days of Santa Ana conditions when it can get to the high 90’s, even just around 100, and very dry. As i have noted on many occasions, i have seen a great deal of the world and nearly everywhere has more 10s out of 10 than here. That is because it is relative. There is no place on earth that has more 7s, 8s, and 9s.
As for all of its ills, i long have noted San Diegans denigrate Los Angeles but keep trying to be just like them. Places i love, Nashville, Austin, Seattle, Atlanta, seem to be doing the same, outgrowing their appeal, their uniqueness. Even my home of Lebanon, Tennessee appears to becoming a bedroom, suburb of Nashville.
Once again, i am a lucky man to be living here in a beautiful place with a wonderful wife…
and i’m not leaving.
Murphy’s Second Law
Everything takes longer than you think.
A Tale of the Sea and Me – They Aren’t Around Anymore
Excuse the interruption. This sea story is not in chronological sequence. Last night, these thoughts about one particular sailor came into my head. i wanted to capture those thoughts now.
The Navy has grown with the times. Many of the sailors in my time on board ships (from 1963 until 1985, on and off, of course) would not be accepted into today’s Navy. The world has gone technical and the Navy with it. Consequentially, higher scores on aptitude tests and other hurdles to demonstrate smartness is required.
Many sailors, especially in my early days with the Navy, were not mental giants. Oh, we had plenty of intelligent enlisted as the draft was still rolling and many smart young men chose to ride a ship rather than pound the ground or watch aircraft head for the wild blue yonder. But there was a place for folks who did not have an excellent academic record. In fact, many sailors had not graduated from high school. i knew of a number of sailors from those years who were there because a judge gave them a choice of joining the Navy or going to jail.
In numerous cases i witnessed, the Navy was this kind of sailor’s life. They lived on the ship, a place to sleep with food to eat. The civilian clothes they had were in a locker storage place outside the base gate. When they went out, it was most frequently to a bar. There were only a very few who were incorrigible. Many went up and down the ranks like a yo-yo. i knew several that had made it to second or first class petty officers but kept getting busted and spent their twenty years as a seaman or fireman most of the time. Nearly all of them contributed in some way to an effectively run a ship.
The sailor in this tale was one of those. He was a fireman in the after engine room of the USS Hollister (DD 788). i was his Chief Engineer (1973-75). This particular sailor didn’t do much more than stand his watches back aft. He stayed pretty much to himself and was quiet. He had gotten into trouble occasionally, several times getting caught smoking marijuana, but that was about it.
There were two distilling plants on the Hollister, the large one in main control, the forward engine room, the smaller one in the after engine room. These two plants made feed water for the boilers and potable water for the crew. They were vital for operations and feed water, the latter used to power the ship through the four boilers always took precedence of the 300 or so souls in the crew and the wardroom. The forward evap (our term for evaporators or the distilling plants) could produce about 700 gallons an hour. The after evap could make about 250 gallons of water each hour.
i often wondered what evil genius designed these evaps. They made any Rube Goldberg invention look simple. It took genius to maximize their output along with stroking and petting them, believe it or not, TLC. During my engineering tour, i determined that along with everything else, the evaps was possessed by and ran at the whim of gremlins. Today, as i write, i know those gremlins jumped on my shoulders as i rotated to my next ship and now occupy any mobile phone or computer of mine.
The ship had transited to Pearl Harbor from Long Beach with her destroyer squadron. After a week of liberty, we were getting underway to return to home port when the forward evaps went down. Even my master chief machinist mate, an incredible engineer, could not coax the plant into making water. He kept trying, along with his first class and several others. i personally took soundings on the water tanks and kibitzed almost round the clock with the master chief on the next tactic.
The after evap was huffing and puffing and actually was making more water than it was rated to produce. The reason was the fireman i mentioned earlier. It was almost like he had a love affair with that contraption. He would twist the controls, of which there were many, tenderly, moving them just slightly — think of the Wizard of Oz twisting all those controls when Dorothy, Toto, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow discovered him behind the curtain.
We would have been in big trouble without that overproducing little evap and its master who tended to its needs.
As it was, we were on water hours for almost four complete days before the master chief and his boys got the big evap running again. Our captain sent a flashing light message to the commodore on the destroyer flag ship reporting we were going off water hours. The commodore responded, “Congratulations to CHENG. Please remain downwind for the next couple of days.”
The fireman got out after a month or so after we moored in Long Beach.
i miss those kinds of sailors. They aren’t around any more.