if you stop and think about it, it really was sort of incongruous:
perfect weather on a weekday
in the middle of a perfect September day,
seventy-five with a slight breeze
in the valley.

they call it Mission Valley now
named for the first California mission
further west in the valley toward the Pacific,
first one;
you know, the first one established by Junipero Serra,
the sainted friar, of course now being denigrated
because the naysaying destroyers of all things past
citing Fra Serra for not living up to today’s standards,
oppressing natives,
not allowing them to live like starving heathens anymore
while my forbears were fighting the Brits in the Carolinas
before crossing the Cumberland Gap to settle smack dab
in the middle of Tennessee with its limestone and sinkholes and
game,  lots and lots of game to live on
to eventually oust those natives across the continent
from Junipero Serra’s Kumeyaay
in a so much more brutal way
than converting them to catholicism.

then, the farmers came to the valley
to take advantage of the loam from
San Diego River sediment,
filling the valley with crops
before
the development men swept away the crops
to fill up the valley
with concrete, buildings, malls, stadiums, restaurants, offices, people:
lots and lots an lots of people and cars
so you can’t hardly move or breathe,
knowing when the rains come
(and they will definitely come),
the concrete will be covered with floodwaters
with the buildings and the people and their cars
isolated,
but the development men won’t care
’cause they will have their money in their pockets.

But this was now in the valley
on the eleventh green where deer graze —
hey, one of my foursome told of spotting
an eight-point buck grazing between
the twelfth green and thirteenth tee,
“not more than fifteen feet away from us,
“right there,
“nonchalant as if we weren’t there,”
he said,
reminding me of the herd of them deer
grazing on the fourth fairway
of the south course;
oh yes, the complex bounded by
the San Diego River to the south is huge,
navy huge: a park dedicated to
morale, welfare, and recreation,
but except for the golf course and RV park,
not used very much at all by
the military personnel for which it was intended
so the deer can roam freely,
not only deer but coyotes, one of which we saw in the winter
dashing pell mell out of the hills defining this valley to the north,
damn near mountains really,
this coyote going full bore,
ignoring us on the first green,
through the bunker into the ninth fairway
scattering the coots, culling one, a trailing one of course,
catching the forlorn coot in his jaws,
breaking the coot neck with a head snap,
dropping it there in the fairway
to catch another hapless coot,
dead with another head snap,
then puzzling over how to get them both in his jaws
before the maintenance man on his scooter turned mini-pickup
fruitlessly chased the coyote down the fairway
back to his lair.

Amazingly, i thought about all of this in a few seconds
on the eleventh green of the north course
called Admiral Baker in honor of the Naval Academy submariner who was
commodore of destroyer squadron 31 in the middle of the big war,
the one where they used this part of the valley for training aviators
to drop bombs just feet away from where
i missed my putt and where they found
some live remnants of those training bombing runs,
live bombs beneath the fairway just a few years ago;
the very selfsame fairway where a disabled plane a few years later
landed in an emergency unable to make it to Montgomery Field,
named for the man who did the Wright brothers one better in the 1880’s,
just over those hills to the north on Otay Mesa
(i’m betting that guy putting then missed his putt also
but with much more justification than me).

the other golfers left the green for their carts and the twelfth tee,
but i caught sight of something on the other side
of the arroyo at the bottom of those hills:
another flying machine of the animal kind,
a red tailed hawk, gliding up from what was most likely his nest,
skimming low over the yucca, acacia, manzanita, brush, cacti, and dead grass
for kill,
gracefully unaware of golfers and such,
flying low, in search of game,
then spotting a ground squirrel or something in the acacia,
divingquickerthantheeyecansee,
emerging with food to take home,
just like the shopper in the valley down river
emerging from Trader Joe’s
and
i watch the hawk, take a deep breath
thinking
jesus, take me home.

Maureen and Sarah often laugh at me about this.

Not so much Sarah as she is moving fast for work and rarely has breakfast with us. But she’s definitely in on the laugh thing. It has become a behind the back smirk kind of laugh because they don’t quite get it.

They shouldn’t. They were both waitresses in the previous lives and economy of service takes rule over formality.

i, however, am into formality, at least some of it…some of the time…when i want to be formal.

At least when it comes to place settings.

Now both of them know more about place settings than i do. Maureen finally informed me years ago i was putting the knife down with the blade pointing the wrong way, pointing out rather than in. i had no idea. But there are a lot of things Maureen knows that i have no idea about. But these two women have that efficiency thing going. They don’t put out any silverware that isn’t going to be used.

Not me.

You see, i think i’m a lot like others raised the way i was. The children took part in daily chores. One of our chores was putting out the place settings for meals like breakfast: plate, knife, fork, spoon, glass of orange juice for every one, glass of milk for the three children, and coffee cups and saucers for mother and daddy. On the round oak table. We didn’t use place mats. We sure as hell didn’t use chargers. Those chargers were for fancy meals like Thanksgiving and Easter and Aunt Evelyn’s and Uncle Pipey’s in Redbank.

We didn’t put out napkins either. Don’t know why. i do know when Douglas Lawrence came to visit from Gotha, Florida one summer, and we all sat down for breakfast, Mother had put napkins at every place setting. Some smart-ass kid asked why we had napkins out because we never usually had them. It was a moment i will always remember because my mother did the great curse on me with her legendary raised eyebrow scowl, behind Douglas’ back, of course.

But anyway, setting  out the place settings and getting the kitchen for the empress chef to do her magic. It is a routine, something i rarely have these days. But is my morning salve, meditation, quiet time, if you will, even if it is continually interrupted by the two cats who crave my attention then and ignore me pretty much the rest of the day.

There are connections, you see. It takes me back to 127 Castle Heights Avenue. That is a good feeling. It connects me with my father. After my parents moved to Deer Park, he gradually took over the meal preparation from my mother and her frailties, saving the really good stuff times for her to either take over or take charge, sometimes a bit of both when Tennessee country ham, biscuits, red-eye gravy, fried corn, squash casserole, and fresh tomatoes; meatloaf with mash potatoes, and the aforementioned biscuits, and several other legendary mother meals were to be served. But most of the time, it was my father in that pretty much new territory called the kitchen and breakfast table.

He always got up early. It became a daily thing after they both retired. When i visited Deer Park, i normally stayed in the guest bedroom with an adjacent wall to the kitchen cupboard. i would awake to his sliding the door back and getting out the morning fare, putting the coffee on, and rumbling around setting the table, getting everything ready (he specialized in cereal, especially Sugar Frosted Flakes with Tony the Tiger. Then he would call, “Mother, breakfast is ready.”

i get up early too, significantly earlier than he did. Perhaps that comes from my years at sea. i feed the cats, get the paper out of the driveway, grind the coffee beans (he got his from the Folger’s big tin can), start the coffee, put Maureen’s 647,000 condiments, chocolate, frothing machine, grater, and lord knows what else so she can make her coffee her way…with very little coffee but a lot of other stuff. i turn the kitchen sink faucet into a drip because Bruce Willis, the cat, likes to drink his water straight just like my coffee black, period: perhaps it’s a male bonding thing. i put a bowl of water out for dainty Dakota, the female cat. i get out the vitamins and the standard prescriptions for this old folk, i open the blinds so we can look out the window. Sometimes, i will get out the Bluetooth speaker and set it up for classical guitar during the meal, but i usually forget, and then…

i set the table.

From the table, i remove the table linen my great grandmother made by pulling out the threads in a decorative pattern for the border — my sister Martha once admonished me for calling it crochet and corrected me with the correct name of the craft, but of course, i forgot — and the flowers in the vase, usually Maureen’s roses, which leads me to humming Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Our House” and put them on a nearby counter. i pull out the place mats like the ones we never had growing up, i retrieve our napkin rings from their drawer — Now i know about napkin rings for when i got to my first Navy ship, the wardroom meals were formal to the nth degree, place settings perfect, the messes perfunctory formal, damn near religious in the unvarying courses, and napkin rings, round silver napkin rings, individually marked with care — and put them in their proper place.

i get out the silverware. We have about 368 sets of silverware for reasons far beyond my ken, but i like a certain set. i put the fork on the left side of the mat; the knife on the inside on the right side, blade facing inward, and then THE SPOON outside of the knife. Unless we are having soup or cereal, the latter being rarely, Maureen and Sarah never put out the spoons.

Then i turn out the overhead light and admire my work. The spoons are in place.

i know when they see the settings, they will laugh behind my back. Silly boy.

Don’t care.

It’s tradition, it’s connection. It’s me being me like where and how i was raised.

Laugh away.

i know i have a lot of friends who are Vol, Gator, Tide, War Eagle, Trojan, Bruin, Buckeye, Spartan, Blue Raider, Moc, Aztec, Longhorn, Aggie and many, many other fans to the exclusion of any other athletic program but their particular favorite.

i’m not that way. i root for a bunch of college athletic programs — and root against those that appear unsavory to me in their moral, or lack thereof, to college athletes and their sports — but i have rooted for Vanderbilt for as long as i can remember and by 1962, they became and remain my favorite. Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor for athletics, David Williams, a giant of man with a long and impressive career, announced his retirement from his position in a year from now to return to his love of teaching. i wish i could take a class of his.

When i learned of this, i wrote an email to numerous friends and family who have ties or are supporters of Vanderbilt. Afterwards i received a nice note from Andrew Maraniss, the author of Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South. Andrew included his Facebook post about Dr. Williams.

The text of my email and the link to Andrew’s FB post follow:

Maureen is off to a “movie date” with her “girl friends.”

Sarah is going to the San Diego Zoo with one friend and then to Safari Park (nee Wild Animal Park) with another.

Billie Holiday, the catahoula mix; Dakota, the pampered princess; and Bruce Willis, the epitome of a “fraidy cat” are with me for the day.

i am taping the Vandy-Nevada game to watch a bit later and skip all of the stuff other people must find somewhat interesting, and of course the never ending stream of commercials dedicated to making money and disrupting the flow of the contest.

And it’s been a while coming back to my briar patch, my writing place. i’ve been working on the book and dealing with the fact “old” is here in the house. i’m reminded a lot of the time from an annoying shoulder and neck issue, which may not go away. Ever. Part of life, i surmise.

Been thinking, too. That is a scary thing.

 *     *     *

It all began this morning when Maureen and i started giving each other shit about our faults. i was going to describe it in another way, but we both sort of lean on D.H. Lawrence’s idea about making profanity not profanity because after all, they are just words, and even though it seems the mass of our population now seems to believe words can be destructive, it’s the people saying them that are destructive, not the words because i know because they taught me somewhere around five or six years old “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” and Owen Wister knew it when he had his hero (the Virginian, of course) deal with the novel’s  asshole…oops another one of those words, but this one is what my bunch of friends who rally around the Friday Morning Golf game proudly take that title as a compliment… in a way best be described by an excerpt from Wikepedia:

The novel begins with an unnamed narrator’s arrival in Medicine Bow, Wyoming from back East and his encounter with an impressively tall and handsome stranger. The stranger proves adept at roping horses, as well as facing down a gambler, Trampas, who calls him a son of a bitch. (At the time, the word was an unacceptable insult in any society, except between joking friends.) The stranger lays a pistol on the table and gently threatens, “When you call me that, smile!” 

And…where was i?…oh yes, Maureen and i this morning giving each other shit about our faults, which, by the way, we no longer consider faults but just differences and things we actually admire about each other but would never admit it and when we do give each other shit, we roll our eyes, evoking my mother’s famous facial expression, and laugh and then we go to each other and hold each other in our arms and warmly laugh and say, “i love you” expressively, which we do and which sort of defines us now because we have passed from the passions of youth although we were a bit beyond youth when our passions were in full bloom and our admiration for all of our strengths and things one might admire in us although my strengths and list of admirable traits are damn short, especially compared to hers, and we have advanced, not because we are old, at least not because i am old because she still reeks of youth compared to me, but because we are experienced and we know, perhaps knowing all along through the passion and the admiration that subconsciously we understood the good, the sharing we would have then and have now that we are two humans who happened to connect at the right time with the right feelings about life and about each other and someone somewhere smiled on us and let us understand what love really is about.

i think we love a lot of other people more because we have stumbled on that understanding.

    *     *     *

Then i read about some silly ass (oops, again) idea that passing gold chains on the sidelines of the Miami Hurricanes football team to someone who made a sack was becoming a big deal and other college teams were trying to outdo the Hurricanes with their own gimmicks, and then i thought about how silly and inane such gimmicks are, and then i realized pretty much any sport not on a sandlot or empty court or empty field by someone unsupervised under the age of…a moving target, this age thing as i played for the game until my twenties, but now in the age of supervision, orchestration, marketing, product selling, and false idolization of plastic heroes and heroines, the age is probably around six or less.

And then i thought about touchdowns and how much i wanted to score one in a real game (i did: one on a punt return, 447 yards according to The Lebanon Democrat in 1957 in a Lebanon Junior High Colt game at the old high school stadium on Coles Ferry Pike) and how i imagined crossing the goal line and passing the football to the referee, letting my actions speak for themselves and not go into some kind of idiotic dance and attention-seeking histronics, which is now sadly de rigueur. But then, we can understand as it seems our very existence, all marketing, all political posturing, all just about everything focuses on gimmicks and we buy into it big time, ignoring what is really important, which is one of the reasons corporations like Nike don’t care if the gimmick is negative because the notoriety sells their products (and i’m not taking a stand on Colin Kaepernick, the National Anthem as i have said my piece and no one seems to have listened and they are still arguing apples and oranges and it has done nothing but deepen the chasm between those people who are intent on taking sides.

Nah, i’m talking about dealing with the essence of things, dealing with people face to face, not creating false idols or false enemies, not taking sides but believing in the goodness of most of us, all of us, which seems to be pushed into the background as folks keep trying to kill all of those demons hiding under their bed at night…like ten year olds.

    *     *     *

Most of you should know by now i’m not a formally practicing Christian. There are many reasons, but the biggest reason is hypocrisy. Those in churches who are not into hypocrisy seem to get shuffled into the back of the room But i do believe in the tenets of Jesus Christ as i interpreted his lessons from the Bible’s “New Testament.”

And then with all this gimmickry and stuff, i got to thinking about everyone wanting and buying things and ideas to make it easy. Then i thought what a ridiculous idea it is to seek making it easy. As my good friend Dave Carey said, “It (life) ain’t easy. It ain’t supposed to be easy.” i would add it would be awfully boring if were easy and all of the gadgets, technology, innovation, etc., etc. to make it easy don’t work. Easy and money ain’t the answer. Living well is the answer. Doing the right thing is the answer. Enjoy life, learn. Take care of others. Get off this easy shit (oops again).

    *     *     *

You probably have figured out it ain’t morning any more. And i’m still rambling. So i watched my taped version of Vandy drubbing Nevada, a good show, but the real tests are yet to come. It was fun, and my fast forwarding through all of the stuff except the game, i watched the three-hour broadcast in about forty-five minutes. Just right.

    *     *     *

And then i went to a little slice of heaven for lunch. Well, maybe not heaven but a good place, good enough for me anyway. The Bonita Golf Club. i sat at the bar. Val is one of the daytime bartendresses (my word, obviously). She is a neat young lady and very, very busy on Saturdays. Everyone knows her. She knows everybody as well. All of the bartendresses, waitresses, and waiters seem to know everyone.

The place is packed. The bar when i arrived had one seat. It’s that way most of the days i go there. The food is standard bar fare. But there is nothing bad and mostly great. The cheeseburger is splendid. The onion rings are special. The chili is really, really good. And then there is the club sandwich, the shrimp tacos, and the carne asada quesadilla: my favorites.

There are nine televisions in the bar and the other sitting areas, but not on the outside patio. They all have different sports events except three have the pro golf tournament.

But the best part is the people. There are all kinds of people of every skin tone, many origins, different political and religious positions, the spectrum of educational levels. There is a Pearl Harbor survivor who parks illegally in a spot right outside the door. i usually write nasty notes and put them on the windshields for people who park illegally, but not him. He’s earned it. There’s a retired Navy SEAL who is there almost every day. i often avoid him because i know i will enjoy the discussion so much i will overstay my time.  There is this one Latino who talks really loud, but laughs a lot and it seems like everyone with him is having fun. There is this one guy at the end of the bar who is buying every kind of drink and beer for what seems like three or four groups of golfers, men and women. The basketball player who played professionally in Europe is not here. He and i laugh and talk about foreign places and golf courses. Kevin Mitchell, the outfielder who played most notably for the Giants is not there. i talked to him a couple of times. Nice guy. Those two are here most of the time.

It is a fun place.  i’ve never seen an argument there. It’s people, all kinds of people, golfers and non-golfers, having fun with each other.

If it’s not heaven, it’s sort of like i imagine heaven would be.