It is three-by-four inches, black leather bound. The traditional fouled anchor was more than just a chief’s emblem in 1944 because it is in gold seal on the front of this packet carried by a machinist mate, automotive, second class petty officer in  the 75th Construction Battalion.

i am not sure  how Jimmy Jewell first obtained it, but he carried it for over two years while in the Southwestern Pacific during World War II. i guess he either bought it at the PX in Gulfport, Mississippi while literally waiting for his ship to come in, or his wife, Estelle, sent it to him with all of the photos already in their enclosed jackets.

It was in that baby blue and faded pink “Deluxe Baby Gift Box” that once contained “Baby Powder • Baby Cream • Baby Soap • Baby Oil” by “Johnson & Johnson” with locations in “New Brunswick, N.J.” and “Chicago, Ill.” i’m guessing someone gave the gift box to my mother for tending to me while he was gone, and when he returned home in December 1945, he noticed the six-and-a-half by nine by two-and-three-quarter inches empty box was just the right size to store photos and memorabilia from the war, many of which shouldn’t be shown to polite folks.

i don’t know where he kept it, but in 2003, he gave it to me. i’m sure he had forgotten about it, and ran across it when he was moving with his wife to a smaller home after living in their home for sixty-two years. i think i just happened to be there when he found it and didn’t know what to do with it. So he gave it to me.

There are many treasures there and many still should not be shown to polite folks. But this one is special.

The cover’s pocket above the insignia has some kind of transparent protection. According to the explanatory note inside, the pocket holds a four-leaf clover, the work of the Panama Canal Zone “Wire Chief.” The process for preserving the clover is explained, but after seventy-three years, it has lost most of its green and slid catty-wampus in its pocket.

Apparently, it did as promised with the blessing of “Good Luck, Good Health, Good Fortune” and brought one Jimmy Jewell through New Caldonea, Guadalcanal, Bouganville, Banika, New Guinea, and Leyte with the enemy always coming close but not too close.

Through it all, he carried this little leather packet of nine photos and the card explaining the four-leaf clover. i imagine it in that small left breast pocket on the dress and undress blues, but i don’t think they wore them very often, if at all, once the liberty ships landed in Espiritu Santo, the New Hebrides island where the indoctrination to Southeast Asia began.

All of the photos have faded. i suspect most of the degradation came from the tropics in that corner of the world. It is not a kind place for any kind of equipment or treasure. The first photo always stirs some deep emotion with me. i have doctored it a bit here. It’s the little bungalow they rented in Gulfport in May. i surmise they must have rented two. Aunt Naomi, his older sister, was a major contributor for the drive in her car with the new tires, rare because of the rations, Bob Padgett loaned her for the trip. Friends and family threw in their ration cards for gas to ensure they could make the round trip journey. Somewhere in these piles of memories, i recently found a photo of my grandmother with me suggesting she was on the trip as well. So i’m thinking the other two women shared a room. i keep thinking they were women who did not play by the rules of then.

The second and third photo in the packet shows where his heart truly lay. The first is the two of them next to his parent’s home on West Spring Street. By the swell of her abdomen, i’m thinking it was his first return in late September/early October when he had finished boot camp at Parris Island and was on a round about trip to Davisville in Rhode Island. And then, the second photo of the couple about two months later. November perhaps. He had completed his training and was headed to Gulfport to await for the inevitable call to board a ship and head out to places he could barely imagine. After all, his life experience had been in  Middle Tennessee with trips to Gatlinburg and Florida. That was about it. But crossing oceans were about to provide him a look into a world he could not imagine.

Estelle looked marvelous for someone into her sixth month of pregnancy. She loved him with  no reservations. When she was fifteen down on South Cumberland Street , she was visiting her mother, , who held a 24/7 job — They didn’t call it that back then. They might have said,  “Mrs. Prichard works around the clock nursing people to provide for her children since their daddy passed away two years ago.” — The visit  coincided with the young man in his bib jeans walking home to West Spring Street from the high school where he helped his father in the janitorial tasks. She pulled her mother out on the front porch as he passed by. She wanted her mother to see the man she loved.

He had other women in his life. His stately and elegant older sister Naomi lived at home and worked as an operator at the phone company office over on Gay Street, walking there every day. i wish i had asked if she worked seven days a week. i suspect she did, and i know the pay was paltry. He dropped out of high school before his senior year to work at a motor car company beginning with washing vehicles and changing tires. Between his $13.00 a week salary and Naomi’s, they kept the family above water. Culley Jewell had contracted tuberculosis in 1934 and could not work until he passed away in 1939. So Mama Jewell, Naomi, Jimmy and the youngest brother Huffman lived in the family home.

The fourth photo was another shot from the Gulfport trip. i was pretty small, but they obviously were proud of me then. They knew then Jimmy would be leaving soon, getting on that liberty ship. They did not know his ship ( i regret he never told me her name) would head through the Panama Canal up to San Francisco where they would embark the last of the 900 troops on a ship designed to hold 550, and then sail west for a month to Espiritu Santo, one of the southernmost islands in the New Hebrides chain — it was the jumping off place for allied troops into the war and the fictionalized location of “South Pacific,” the musical developed from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific.

Next is a photo of my aunt holding me back in Lebanon. Bettye Kate, Estelle’s youngest sister, and her husband, Alvin “Snooks” Hall, were very close. When Jimmy, James “Pipey” Orr, and Bill Prichard went to war, Snooks, deferred because he was a farmer in Shop Springs, became the male support for the women of the Prichard clan. In the mid-1950’s, he partnered with Jimmy for “Jewell and Hall,” a vehicle maintenance shop and a gas station (Mobile petroleum products featuring a sign in front with a rearing Pegasus). The two were best friends, almost as much brothers as the sisters. When several of Jimmy’s long time fishing partners passed away, he talked Snooks into fishing. They did almost everything together along with their wives. Aunt Bettye Kate was my second mother.

Then there is a photo of just me, i’m guessing four months. Today, i look at it and am amazed how i’ve returned to my origin: chubby body, fat cheeks, bald head. It is upside down in the packet. i try to imagine him in the jungles of New Guinea (i’ve been there and can attest there are jungles, plenty of them, dark with vegetation) where at night, the tree rats would crawl across the sleeping seabees in their tents. i think after he got out his flashlight to scare away a rat, he would reach into his clothing and pull out the packet, turning it to this photo, turning it to the side to look at his son. i hope, lord i hope, it made him smile, gave him some hope, made him think about that little place across an ocean and a continent he called home. Yes, i hope i helped him just a bit.

The last enclosed photo in the packet reveals the Prichard family closeness. When the men became husbands and the woman became wife of the Prichard’s, they immediately and forever became family. He was. And his love for family shows in this one. Nancy and Johnny Orr in the side yard of his home, the first of the next generation of the Prichard clan. He held them dear, treating them as his own, and they in return, calling him “Uncle Jimmy” and the other “Uncle Snooks” but knowing they were more like fathers in the queue more than just uncles.

Finally, there is a photo included in the packet but not in the slips for the photos, loose like the four-leaf clover card. It is Jimmy Jewell. i’m pretty sure it was a year or two earlier. It may have just been put there when he was going through the box, not taken to war. i like to think it was included. It is a dapper man looking like he owned the world, his leg propped up on the rock wall where he sits. His wife’s image is cut off. The photo most likely was taken in the Smokies. The family, most Lebanon families thought the Smokies was the get-away place. Even though he has on a light wool suit and sports white dress shoes. He looks comfortable. i imagine him looking at that photo in his motor pool on Leyte thinking, “I’m going home and we are going to the Smokies, and I am going to relax.”

As i wrote this, i kept feeling i had published a great deal of the information before. But it just seemed like it needed to go here. It fit. It was Jimmy Jewell in the war with his special packet of photo memories in a special “four-leaf clover” packet.

i also thought i am not sure he  would like this. He could be sentimental when it came to his wife, his children, his family. i have seen that. But he was not sentimental about himself. He talked very little about himself. It was only when i was past middle age when he said anything about the war. Then, it was mostly sharing war stories. He never talked about how he felt. He, along with damn near every man who left his home, put on a uniform, and headed into the unknown war theaters, would say it was just something they had to do.

They did have to do it. And boy, did they carry through. i hope all of them had a packet with a four-leaf clover and photos to get them through the rough times of getting the job done.

Every once in a while i pull up a poem i wrote a number of years ago. It sort of puts me in my place and then revives a passion i think i have always had and always will have. i do not know why. i’m not particularly good at writing. My grammar is often shaky. i often break the rules. My editing is terrible. I sometimes get “smarmy” as Sharry Baird Hager once desribed my writing. And i can get on a roll and go over the top, writing what i really didn’t mean to write.

So i can get frustrated, swear i’m going to give it up, decide there are better, more productive things to do, declare i don’t have any desire to be published, and on, and on, and on…

Then i run across this poem again and realize i ain’t gonna quit. i don’t know why.

Dreams and Innisfree

Mr. Yeats, that revolutionary son of a bitch,
wrote of the Isle of Innisfree,
creating yet another dream for me,
which i did not need for
i have dreamed all my life;
it’s time to put aside such distractions.

tomorrow, i will meet a young woman,
not needing some dreamer to interfere;
we will converse, enjoy our time
discussing possibilities
in the ambience of the avant garde eatery:
she will go away again,
forging her own path.

i will go home to
play my role,
subjugating my dreams;
it is time i gave up dreaming,
but
then that ole sum bitch Yeats
tempts me with Innisfree:

I will succumb and dream again.

Maureen had asked me what  i wanted to do for my birthday yesterday, and i made a short list, modifying it as predicted rain made modification required.

But unwavering, even with the threat of rain, we drove to Balboa Park, one of my favorite places on earth. The schedule modification dropped the zoo from our schedule. But we figured with the rain, the museums would be virtually empty.

They weren’t. We were astounded at the amount of cars in the parking areas even though it was a little less crowded than usual and disbelieving that many people would be in the park. They were.

We walked down the colonnade on the south side of the El Prado, the avenue from the large Bea Evenson fountain on the east end of the park to Plaza de Panama (a large number of the park buildings were built for the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition) and stopped in the San Diego History Museum, one of several in the Casa de Balboa, which was featuring the structures created by  Irving Gill, a renown architect. It was our first time in that particular museum. We will go back.

Coming out, i gaped, as usual at the architecture. Across the prado was the Casa de Prado, the sister of the Casa de Balboa. The beauty of this place never ceases to make me feel good.

To get to  the San Diego Museum of Art, we continued down the colonnade to the Plaza de Panama, the center of the park. The plaza has gone through many renovations. Recently, they banned parking there and soon will reroute traffic around it . That makes me feel good. To me, the beauty of this place is in its ties to a century ago and makes the current beauty of the surroundings even more beautiful. Standing on the edge of the plaza, we are in the heart of the place. The Prado, a restaurant with an atmosphere of old charm, serves a mixture of California, Southwest, and Mexican cuisine (at least, that’s what i call it).  The patio in good weather makes me feel elegant. And the bar area with no real bar makes me think of the Long Bar at Raffles in Singapore where the Singapore Sling was invented (the original tastes like cough medicine). But before being renovated into upscale, this one was where my father-in-law, Ray Boggs liked to stop for a Beefeater’s on the rocks with a twist. Of course, i went along.

Outside the Prado where we were yesterday, we were a stone throw away from the Japanese Gardens, the Mingei Museum dedicated to folk art and craft, The Timken Museum featuring classical paintings, the Lily pond, and on and on.

It is a gathering place for all kinds of folks, families, just a place to relax. Beautiful.

On the north end of the plaza is my favorite, the San Diego Museum of Art. It was the reason i wanted to include the park in my birthday. In particular, i wanted to see the “Visible Vaults” exhibition. The museum has made it possible to experience the many, many works of art that has been in the archives, not available for viewing. The collection is astounding. With every piece displayed and with every drawer upon drawer Maureen and i examined, i thought of two people: my daughter Blythe and my friend Maren Hicks. i knew they would understand more and consequently enjoy more than me this treasure.

Our final stop in Balboa Park was at the Museum of Man. i had not been there for a score of years, and i remember being fascinated by the exhibits. It has been upgraded and is now very children friendly. In fact, Maureen and i kept laughing at how our grandson Sam and other boys between six and seventy-three would enjoy some exhibits. They had a special “cannibal” exhibit, there was the evolution of man exhibit, and the Egyptian exhibit featured mummies. For the older guys, there was the “Beerology” exhibit. Maureen and i laughed at a number of ancient civilizations which drank as much as four gallons of beer a day, especially the ones in Peru which practiced shrinking heads.

The Egyptian exhibit had a mummy not of that civilization. The “Lemon Grove Mummy” was that of a young woman and a child curled into a fetal position. She was the one that captivated me those many years ago. She got her name because two San Diego teenagers stole her from a cave near Chihuahua, Mexico in 1966. Getting home, they became afraid of what their parents would do if they knew and stored the mummy in a box in a friend’s garage. Shortly afterwards, they were sent to serve in Vietnam. They and the mummy became separated. In 1980, the mother of the friend was cleaning out her garage when she found the mummy (i’m still trying to imagine her moment of discovery) and donated it to the museum.

Somehow, i connected the mummy to some old destroyers. In 1974, they had been taken out of mothballs and were moored on the quay wall of the Long Beach Naval Station,  just aft of the U.S.S. Hollister, on which i was the chief engineer. When we found out the destroyers were to be used as targets for missiles and sunk on the Pacific Missile Test Range, we went aboard to salvage any supplies we could use. i also acquired a magnetic compass, an engine order telegraph unit, and a brass plate off a main feed pump of one destroyer. The brass plate is a paper weight in my office, the compass is part of Maureen’s arrangement including a metal cruise box, cacti, and orchids on the stoop of our courtyard porch.

But i saw a relationship between those ships and the mummy. That’s when i wrote this poem:

Thoughts about the discovery of the well-preserved and very old remains of an Incan boy and young woman high in the Andes Mountains of Peru, circa 1995

the magazine photos riveted attention, fascination:
children, forced to grow up and die
before their time in our time
yet probably not a great deal more
than their time in their time.
did they volunteer to the sacrifice?
now they are a source of interest in ages past,
and macabre beliefs:
i only feel sadness.

hulks.
dead, empty hulks.
eyeless sockets staring out
into a world gone techno,
not a great deal more advanced from
what they saw when they could see:
world still full of ignorance, hatred and religious zealots
out to rid the world of all other gods.
the hulks,
not just dead, but dead and gone, yet not gone,
still here, rediscovered,
creating fascination, ghoulish interest in such relics.

hulk: dead warship lady
i wandered through during my navy days
hulk.
lady warship “mothballed” with foam
until cleaned up for her sacrifice,
i, sailor man, entered the hulk,
semi-official equipment scavenger
for my man-of-war, pronounced female,
herself already obsolescent:
aboard: quiet and eerie,
a presence here beyond me felt:
an old unfinished letter,
desk drawer of a small stateroom forward,
“Dear Clara,” was the only identification;
nothing much more than the opening hello;
no great heroics here,
just a khaki clad lieutenant
meeting obligations to clara.

down below in the steel machine guts of the lady,
the clang against the emptiness of fireroom ladders,
once filled with hiss and heat and screams over the blowers
stirring the moist heat to just above tolerable.
it was more incan.
i could see the sailors shirtless sweating,
changing spray nozzles as the orders from above
required they rev up the steaming to where
the sides of the boilers heaved.
gone.
just as gone as the incans.
eye sockets empty,
bodily fluids extracted or dried up long ago.
sacrificed,
but no petrification here.
no, she will be hauled to sea
to feel the heat of missiles,
practicing the art of war,
slamming into her innards
as her body is twisted, rent asunder,
gaping holes filling with the briny sea
as she slides, stem down
into deep bliss.
sacrificed like the incans,
dead and gone,
but no longer seen
like the incans.

at least the old war lady
will have some peace and quiet.

After leaving the museum, we departed the park and drove to The Rose in South Park. The Rose is a special place for us and it seems we spend a number of our special days there: light dinners and good wine. Yesterday, it did not  disappoint.

The rain had been kind to me, stopping in the late morning before resuming after nightfall, a break just for our trip. In fact, it rested until i brought in an ample amount of firewood.

The television was not turned on until i went to bed. i sat by the fire and read in silence. Maureen was stretched out in the love seat across the rug with the two cats asleep on her legs.

Not a bad day.

Before i finish this post, it will be 8:30 a.m. Lebanon, Tennessee time.

It hit me that is the time my parents would call every year on this day when i was accessible by phone. After i would say the perfunctory “hello,” they would burst into “Happy Birthday.” As they aged, the voices were a little more scratchy, a little more off key, but i could feel the love pouring out over the phone like they were in my room hugging me.

It did not occur to me until this morning, they would wake me up at 6:30 a.m. PST, because that was the time i was born. They loved to tell the tale of how Daddy finagled a week of liberty, by cobbling together several liberty passes from his Seabee friends. He took the train from Gulfport, Mississippi where his 75th Seabees were waiting to be shipped to parts unknown. I was late, so after the instruction of Dr. Charles Lowe, he walked Mother around the neighborhood, “not until she was tired, but until he was tired.” It appeared not to be working. i was stubborn even then. But finally on Tuesday, they went to the hospital. My grandmother, Katherine “Granny” Prichard was the attending nurse. i was anxious to get out i guess as Dr. Lowe did not have time to get in his gown and delivered me in his shirt sleeves.

i think of Daddy waiting in the lobby. i wondered what he thought as he waited. He had a new house, his future was more uncertain than we can comprehend now, his wife was going to have to take care of a newborn while he was away, there was this war going on.

After he saw me, he caught the train back to Gulfport and was not UA (Unauthorized Absence).

And for sixty-nine years, they sang to me as close to 8:30 a.m. Lebanon time on this day.

i do miss that rendition of “Happy Birthday” and them.

Seventy-Three. 73. Birthdate year 1944.

Seventy-Three is not a magic number. i mean it’s not like 75. If it were my 75th, i could steal from the anniversary connections and say this was my “diamond” birthday. i can’t. They don’t have a connection like that even for anniversaries for 73, let alone birthdays. i figure this birthday should be connected to lead.

Seventy-Three is not even significant in most categorizations. Seventy-Two seemed, not magical, but certainly mathematically clean and associated.

So why am i so obsessed about turning seventy-three tomorrow. i don’t know.

But i have an excuse: i’m old.

Now if i live as long as either one of my parents with a sharp mind to the end as they did, i could have at least twenty-four more productive years left, maybe twenty-five. But i won’t: i lived one hell of a lot harder and wilder life than they did.

So i figure i will be damn lucky if get another twenty years out of this thing called living.

That’s okay. Either way.

Now, it’s time for me, as i have written, to reinvent. It won’t be hard. There are things to remind me of how to do it. Two Tuesdays ago, i played golf with one of my all-time best friends, Pete Toennies at the Bonita Golf Club. For a number of years, we have watched two red-tail hawks soar the heavens looking for game and survey their prospects from a dead eucalyptus, a sentinel  near the sixteenth green. In that recent round, they perched on their outpost, almost like telling me to do it right. They did.

But that is just a recall of a wonderful moment.

With the seventy-third inevitably upon me. So is the rain. So we prepared for the rain, five days of it, an unheard of event in the world of the Southwest corner since the rains of the late seventies. So Maureen prepared, with my help. Her orchids were pulled out from underneath the overhangs in our courtyard so they could bask in the downpours headed our way for the next five days.

Then, i made my last martini…ever…i think. My age does not handle booze well. It is time for me to back off or quit entirely. The trial, hopefully successfully segueing into my lifetime habits, excludes hard liquors and limits all of the others. Appropriately, i had used the last olive already, so i had to forego garnish. Not a big deal but symbolic. So i wandered into the front room, sat down at the piano, arraigned a jury-rigged coaster out of my ever present bandana, placed the martini there for occasional sips. i played a simple piece i made up a hundred years ago and makes me feel like i can do this sort of thing. Then i began “Stardust,” which i learned out the Hoagy Carmichael songbook years ago, but now it requires relearning after layoffs like this long one. i got almost two-thirds of the way through, slowly, haltingly, but always expressively, when the number of my inabilities made my playing un-fun and i stopped. After all, Maureen is making shrimp with risotto, a new dish, so it is time to get on with it.

And then it’s on to night time. i bring in some firewood  and light the fire. Fire in the hearth has become a standard part of our routine from late November through February. It is one of my connections to the past. We never had one fire in our living room fireplace on Castle Heights Avenue. My parents were practical people and they converted from goal to gas with no thought of  connecting to their past with a fire in the fireplace. But my fire tonight is a beautiful fire. i think of my Uncle Pipey Orr, who in his living room fireplace in Red Bank outside of Chattanooga seemed to always have a fire. i think of Uncle Remus. For some reason, i always imagine him telling me his stories of Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, Brer Fox, and all of the other wonderful creatures in those tales while we sit by a fire in a slave cabin made of logs. Tonight, i thought of Uncle Remus.

And Uncle Remus is a good place to start. He has become some kind of “Uncle Tom” symbol to some folks, who apparently didn’t understand he was the hero, making good when it was hard to make it, living like a piece of furniture, owned. Yet he was the one who did things right. The “white” folks in the that film, which had no real connection to Joel Chandler Harris, except for Uncle Remus and his stories, are really the bad guys, not understanding, bigoted, blind. And Uncle Remus survived.

And he is old, like me.

That’s what i hope to do at seventy-three and beyond: be like Uncle Remus.