She is my niece. She is a wonder.

Stefanie Lynn Johnson has a birthday today.

She is a trooper. She is a Christian Soldier. She has taken on problems and won.

She has two remarkable children.

She has love.

She has a husband who is as remarkable as she is. So much, in fact, i feel compelled to include a photo of the two of them rather a single of her or one of their family.

They go together well, and they have faced their problems with resolution. The result should be a lesson for us all.

Happy Birthday, Stefanie. i am proud to be kin to you.

Family in Tennessee have  been sending me photos of the recent snow there.

In my usual smart ass curmudgeon manner, i reported it was cold here in the Southwest corner as well, and then added our highs barely got into the sixties and we almost had frost one morning. i did not point out yesterday was 72 and just about perfect. Today, i was glad i had not been that much of a…well, you know (someone reading this might take offense at my sailor language) because it turned Southwest corner winter again: highs bordering around sixty, cloudy with an ocean wind to make it seem chillier, and goodness knows (and i cleaned that up), it rained.

As i was dealing with all of this terrible weather, i remembered our Thursday and Friday respite. On Thursday morning i took my exercise walk along one of my routes. A section is a walking path along the edge of Bonita Canyon, a large open space area with hiking and riding trails (no off-road bikes, please) surrounded by development homes of which one is ours. Looking eastward from the path, i remembered my father being so amazed at the weirdness of Southwest corner winters and summers compared to back home. Here, the summers are brown and dry. Winters are…well, they are green.

i refrained from adding in my  response to my family we also have white in the winter too. i’m not talking about an hour or so east of here where they do have snow, enough for skiing. i’m talking about right here in the heart of the Southwest corner. They are Japanese pear trees. The streets around us are surrounded by this winter whiteness. Each time i see one, i think of my Aunt Evelyn Orr, who in her last trip out here this time of year in 1990 was effusive about how beautiful they were.

We are in California, you know. Lots of folks not living in California and quite a few who do live in California throw darts at the state for many reasons. i have sworn off politics and i won’t go there. But there are really some people out here who are like a lot of people elsewhere not quite in the mainstream of the way we go about living. This one, on that Southwest corner winter wonderland day caught my eye.

i guess what i’m trying to say here is there are good people here and there are good people there, wherever you are Mrs. Calabash. The weather can be good or it can be bad wherever you are. It truly is (one of my best buddies of the curmudgeon golfing troupe likes to explain with “it truly is” and i like it) up to you.

Don’t throw rocks. Enjoy.

After all, i remember a magic place where winter was magical.

i have to figure out how to be a little less impacted by loss of friends. This sad occurrence is becoming more frequent. The last several left me…well, they left me sort of lost.

The most recent one took a bit of my soul away.

When we were growing up, Beverly Hughes lived with her parents and her younger sister Patsy on Pennsylvania Avenue almost exactly one block east of our home on Castle Heights Avenue.

Back then, the entire neighborhood, roughly three square miles, was filled with children. Almost every house was occupied by a family with one to four children. There were no mobile phones, there was no internet. For the first decade of my life, there was no television except in a few homes of the well-to-do. There also were many less restrictions and far less concern about safety. We played outside, we wandered around, spending time with neighborhood friends in our yards or in each other’s home. Everybody seemed to know everybody else.

Sometime around the fourth or fifth grade, i discovered Beverly. She was beautiful to me even then.  i would duck under the top and only wire of the hole in our backyard fence and walk through Pennsylvania Annex to her house. We were just children playing. By junior high, we had become close friends. We never had a date, which in retrospect, i find unusual. But we were friends, close friends, always with someone else, but always close.

In junior high, it became a big deal to walk from Lebanon Junior High at the intersection of North Cumberland and East High west to North Greenwood and then to Hill Street, cutting over to West Main and then to Pennsylvania, roughly just over a mile. There were usually four to eight of us who would stop at Beverly’s home. A number of the boys and girls had paired off. “Going steady” was a big thing. My steady didn’t live in the neighborhood. But it did not matter. Beverly pulled out her 45 RPM record player. Sometimes we would play board games in the den, but most of the time, we just listened to the latest rock ‘n roll on Beverly’s record player. And talked of course, after all, we were in the early stages of teenage.

It was at Lebanon Junior High where i met Buddy Phillips. We played football together and did a lot of the goofy things seventh and eighth graders do together. Buddy was one of the friendliest and nicest guys, and funny. Yes, Buddy could be a riot. We ran around together. But Buddy wasn’t one of those who gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue. He lived in another direction.

Still it was soon evident to most of us boys, Buddy had a crush on Beverly.

I don’t know all of the particulars of their relationship. i soon went to Castle Heights and lost touch of all but a few of the goings on at the high school. But eventually, Beverly married someone else. After several years, the marriage fell apart.

Buddy was waiting.

The two married and every time i was privileged to see them, they were obviously very much in love. For forty-five years, they both were in love. Buddy was rewarded for his love that has lasted 64 years by my count.

They had an incredible life together. It was one of the best love stories i have ever heard. It was not motion picture stuff. It was real. And it was the way it should be.

Last Monday, Beverly passed away with Buddy and her children at her side. The ugly “C” word had taken yet another beautiful soul away from us.

I cannot imagine the grief Buddy is experiencing, just as i could not grasp when Betty Jane’s husband and my high school buddy, Jim Gamble, passed away almost a month before. Jimbo, by the way, was one of those constant attendees at the record playing afternoons at Beverly’s home.

It hurts losing friends that close. It hurts to see such loved ones taken from their life long loves.

Then, i read Eddie Callis’ emails about the arrangements after Beverly left us.

You see, they had Beverly’s memorial service yesterday. She was laid to rest. Yet the arrangements revealed a back story, another love story.

Beverly’s obituary gave the usual details one finds in such news items. At the end, it turned a bit different. The honorary pallbearers was simply listed as “Lebanon High School Class of 1962.”

Previously, i have written of this bunch. The couple who are the drivers of this cohesive group, Eddie and Brenda Callis, have no doubt been a big factor in keeping the group so close with reunions, class birthday parties, and other excuses to keep us all in contact. Eddie provides updates to all of the class on the significant events of all of the classmates.

i have been part of it. The LHS 62 class adopted me, even though i was a goober, a town boy at the military prep school across town. i consider being included one of the best honors i’ve received.

As Beverly’s notice signified, they are a love story, all of them.

Now, we, our class are 74, 75, and 76 in age. Our numbers are declining at a faster rate. i know, even though i am half almost a continent’s breadth away, all of them, like me, take such partings as Beverly’s hard.

For my part, i must get better with dealing with such losses. After all, it is a deep and forlorn feeling to lose those you love.

i was writing a post i wasn’t sure i should post. It was negative. i took a break when i answered a phone call from a friend who shared childhood, youth, and a couple of Navy times together.

Before i got back to that, i moved a few papers around in my futile attempt to organize or throw away a bunch, i mean a bunch of stuff when i ran across this, something i read rather frequently because it hits at the heart of me.

It is the first part of something my brother sent me when i turned forty, about half way around the globe in the middle of the Indian Ocean as the executive officer of the USS Yosemite (AD 19), you know, the deployment i’m wrestling putting into a book.

i have long maintained my brother Joe is rather fantastic and an amazing, amazing writer, far better than me. i think this poem proves it. i did not include the second part of the poem, which is a more personal note between brothers, five years different in age.

But read, my friends. It remains one of my favorite poems of all time, and not just because the author is my brother.

On the Bridge by Joe Jewell

Will you be alone on the bridge
when the moment comes?
Surrounded by the winking lights
on the night watch, the scopes that
tell you what’s out there;
the horizon etched in nothingness,
abstract as another’s death,
the indigo sky meeting and reflected
by the dark ocean, so only
the externals, the stars, tell you where you are.

One wrong move and it’s a plunge
into the depths of that darkness
Which is shallow compared to the depths
of You.
Can all those lights and signals guide
you there? It is a technical question
I realize, answering how, not why or who.
We’re tacking too close to theology there.

The externals tell you about entering a new
age, new year, new decade. I’ve never
believed them. Only know when you are.
History is just a record kept to tell us
about the others. We all cross that bridge,
but in a span of time, and make it Ours.
When you sit there in the dark watching the lights
straining to know the horizon, capsuled in steel,
knowing the tropic heat will come like a cat
to steal  your breath, remember, all moments
are the same and age like history an illusion.
It is the sequestered heart that brings you home.
Remember on your bridge to ask the right questions,
and
laugh at the coming day.

My wife quite frequently thinks i may have lost all of my marbles.

Tonight, she is totally convinced.

We watched the news i could stand to watch — pretty much the weather because all of the other news except some feel good features at the end of news programs, which, i guess, are supposed to make you feel better after all of the crap you just watched. We ate a marvelous dinner she prepared from one of her 2300 cookbooks.

And then i asked Sarah to help get back on to Starz on our streaming service. She did and i went to movies, scrolled down to “westerns” where there are at least 250 of that genre and spent about fifteen minutes scrolling through memories of the oaters i loved.

i finally stopped on something i probably saw sometime around 1954 unless i caught it earlier at the Capitol or Princess theaters a block off Lebanon’s square to the west and south respectively. 1954 was the year we got our first television set and Ruff ‘n Ready in his plaid cowboy shirt, stetson, and handlebar mustache would introduce the western of the day. For the record, it was a WSM program, but it doesn’t matter as WSM carried the only television station and selected the shows we could see from NBC, CBS, and ABC.

The movie was “The Cowboy and Senorita.” It’s a classic…at least in my mind. It was on screen in 1944. It was Roy and Dale’s first movie together before they married and met Bullet, Pat Brady, and Nellybelle (and if you don’t know who or what Nellybelle was, you have missed a big chunk of life).

You would immediately recognize this was a true “oater” when the opening credits showed Roy, and…not Dale, not Mary Lee who co-starred as “Chip,” not Guinn “Big Boy” Williams who was “Teddy Bear” and Roy’s sidekick, not Pat Nolan of the Sons of the Pioneers who sang and sang in the saddle. Oh no, not them or even John Hubbard, the villain. The lead photo for the credits were Roy and, of course, Trigger.

i watched the whole thing even though Maureen sat there reading or getting up and walking about, shaking her head in disbelief.

It was great. The acting was really bad. No one got shot with blood and gore in some insane attempt to be “realistic” or beyond. The stunts were slapstick. The plot was absurd. But i knew who the bad guys were from the start. i knew who the good guys were. i knew Dale was getting duped until the end when she realized Roy was the really nice guy and carried a big six shooter, no two big six shooters. i listened to some really old, honky music. i even watched the dance troupe in the finale do something that was supposed, i suppose, to be Spanish. i even recognized George McFarland, an older “Spanky” from Little Rascals as a brat in the opening scenes.

i loved it. i have spent the rest of the evening singing “The Cowboy and the Senorita.”

Hmm. i might skip the six or seven hours of insanity they call the Super Bowl, Sunday, and watch another oater.

i’ll bet i will feel better if i do.