i am sitting here as i normally do. What television we normally watch in the evenings didn’t demand our senses tonight: we left it off.

We had a wonderful repast of Maureen’s renderings. She is taking her bath and will retire with her kindle until she falls asleep. The fire is slowly dying as i sit besides the warm remnants. i will not last much longer. The night is calling me.

i just finished Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” It is an amazing, dark tale, captivating to me. Conrad’s talent in deep thought writing continues to blow me away. It occurred to me not many people nowadays would enjoy his work, or even finish it. It takes work. Good work with a reward if you think about it. Conrad takes me to the depths and width of human nature.

i should stay up a little longer to escape an absurd early rising, something for which i have gained a reputation. Nightly old age meds have been taken.

So, i simply am listening to music, my music, i have turned off Apple music and all of the other streaming music services. My library is about 4500 tunes of my music. i am going down the list, picking out the ones i want to listen to this solitary evening — the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream” just finished playing.

Lately, i have found a great deal of comfort in my music. In the beginning of this week, i pulled out the LP “The Essential Hank Williams.” A great playlist including “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “Move It On Over,” “Honky Tonkin’,” and two that mean a great deal with me. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” has been covered by a seemingly unending list of artists and almost every genre and remains one of my all time favorites. It is my “lonely” song. Then, there is “Kaw LIga” about the wooden indian standing outside the antique store who was in love with the wooden indian maiden who was bought by a rich man and taken away. But he stood there and never let it show. Such a wonderful story of human tragedy with so much meaning, deep meaning if you think about it.

And i got to sing it. Knew it by heart. My older cousin, Graham Williamson, who later played fiddle for Roy Acuff, was baby sitting me with his wife Mary Ellen and his band in their home — i think it was over on Sunset Drive — when i was about ten. His band was practicing. Then, he asked me to sing “Kaw Liga” with the band. i belted it out, knew every word, with feeling.

After listening to old Hank, i pulled out my Platter’s albums. Oh, “The Great Pretender” brought tears to my eyes. 1955, i was a blubbering, heads-over-heels in love as an eleven-year old and they played it at the soda fountain. i almost cried. And their songs accented my romances until i was well into my thirties.

And tonight, as i scrolled though my library, i thanked the gods of ancient wax for my appreciation of music.

Most of that story has been told here in various posts of the past. Perhaps the most impact on my music appreciation journey was WCOR. i worked AM, 900 on your dial on the weekends as the “weekend warrior with sounds to lay down…they may sound scratchy but it’s just the gold dust in the grooves.” i also worked 107.3 on your FM dial, which boasted of easy listening music and a plethora of public service announcements. My shift was weeknights from 7:00 to 10:30 P.M. when i shut down the station for the night. i also worked Sunday mornings on FM, following with my afternoon Top 40 stint.

For the first couple of months on FM, i played just what was required. i would pull down an easy listening LP from the shelves surrounding the studio from floor to ceiling. i would put it on the turntable, announce the artist, and let it play. When side one was over, i would play a public service announcement while turning it over and then play the other side. i would read a short news summary and the weather report on the hour and half-hour. i got quite a bit of studying done. i also got a little bored.

So sometime around the turn of the year, i invented the evening show, “A Potpourri of Music.” i played jazz, classical, show tunes, big band, and all sorts of other things i found in those shelves except for country and rock and roll — those records were down the hall in the AM studio. i would announce the artist and read some of the attributes from the back cover of the LP jacket.

In the summer after the station had revised the AM and FM formats, FM had a short headline or weather every ten minutes under the umbrella of “accent” news. i turned my “Potpourri” into “Summer Accent.” i would lead off with Tony Bennett’s “Once Upon a Summertime” over which i related the theme for the next three and one half hours.

It was enjoyable, i was learning a lot, but my studying took a hit. i then had to find time for that in between my work as the Wilson County correspondent for The Nashville Banner in the afternoons as i was commuting to MTSU in the mornings with Jimmy Hatcher and others.

Tonight, i listened to the Platters again. “Twilight Time:” “Heavenly shades of night are falling / It’s twilight time / Out of the mist your voice is calling / ‘Tis twilight time. // When purple coloured curtains / Mark the end of day / I’ll hear you, my dear, at twilight time / Deepening shadows gather splendour / As day is done / Fingers of night will soon surrender / The setting sun…

Ahh, visions of past loves, innocence, the coolness of a summer night in that little town smack dab in the middle of Tennessee.

They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

A potpourri of thoughts over the weekend, most unfinished and certainly unedited…but it’s time for a nap.

The tree is up by me and decorated by Maureen. The “Noel” sign is up. It is all mine and an incredible jury rig (that’s for my sea-going friends), Rube  Goldberg affair, that if i keep improving for the next 20 years, it might look professional – a later post will repeat the horrors from about 25 years ago.

It’s been a weekend plus of stray thoughts running through this empty head. It hit me today’s sports announcers sound more like gossipers on the corner and tell me more than i care to know to support their latest analysis, accurate or not. Then, the ones for Sunday night football all predicted the Chiefs would win. I couldn’t put up with the post-game mumbo jumbo, but i’m betting none of them brought up the fact they were wrong: sullies their reputation they think, i guess.

The below were thoughts not yet well captured. i’m working on making them better, but i have been known to sluff off on finishing such things, so here they are:

antiquity me

i prefer a cedar Christmas tree
chopped down by us
in a world long ago
in a place far away
and
we decorated the tree
in the small living room
with only a real holly wreath
hanging on the front door –
i know because around six-years old
i stuck a holly berry
up my nose
requiring the family doc,
Doctor Lowe of local renown,
coming over to remove
the berry with tweezers –
they were simple decorations
compared to today’s lawns with
plastic myriads of comic characters,
religious figures, legends epitomized
with enough lights to light up Vegas
but
if they like fake,
go for it i’m okay with that
just prefer
something simpler
for i’m old fashioned.

storm clouds

i have seen the storm clouds gathering
over the horizon
two points off the starboard bow,
NNE or Nor, Nor, by NorEast,
storm clouds, cumulonimbus,
fearsome dark gray-black,
would bring us to the reality of
the omnipotence of the sea,
finding it beautiful,
fearsome, yes, but beautiful;
remembering, i wish
i could see them gathering again,
feel the power,
smell the coming rain
again.

no running

remember when you were a young’un
feeling the pure unbounded joy
of running?

i remember when i learned
my best friend’s mother
died too soon,
running as fast as i could
in a steady spring rain
until i thought my lungs would burst,
feeling some relief.

i remember taking up running
in the middle of the divorce,
not knowing how to pace myself,
then stop, winded
only a short distance
before walking home.

i remember running
through rice paddies, jungle,
a mud hut village
in Sri Lanka in the rain feeling
like i was a young’un again
running with unbounded joy.

i remember running on Coronado’s beach
at noon every weekday,
often with friends matching pace,
feeling like i was floating on the waves.

I remember the grinding up and down hills
in near euphoria;
endorphins i think they call them
and
later while grinding, panting,
finding it was now work, labor,
not near euphoria;
now, i walk,
doc’s orders:
says i’m too old to run,
something might break;
lord, when i walk,
it’s okay, even enjoyable sometimes
but
not like running;
not like running.

a place i knew

i would like to take you
to a place i knew
it is no longer there,
blown away by changes through time.

it was a lovely place
quiet, peaceful,
on the shoreline of a creek,
a spring just off the dock;
folks there didn’t lock their doors,
homes or cars,
until it was time to go to bed.
children played outside;
walked to school by themselves;
rode one-speed bikes with abandon
all over town,
often with baseball cards in the spokes
to sound like a motor bike,
hah!
men fishing on the bank
in the early morning,
late afternoon,
for crappie mostly;

this is no judgement of mine,
only the observation
old men remember fondly
things being not like then:
i’m too old to criticize the younger;
they will have their own memories
to cherish and miss.

This was begun Wednesday, continued last night. i had to stop a couple of times to wipe away the tears.

The turkey is smoked and carved. Maureen is close to finishing the other dishes. We will have her sister Patsy, our nephew Mike, and Marti,a very nice lady who shares a home with Patsy over for the dinner. They will arrive shortly. i am very happy with the assembly. It will be a nice day.

But there is a dark cloud hanging over me.

It has been three days since it ended.

i don’t see it returning.

i, along with Fred Russell, J.B. Leftwich, and Bill Frame are dismayed at the end of an era.

Maureen and i made a hard decision and cancelled our subscription to The San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper this past week. Our last paper was delivered Monday.

i have been reading a newspaper or two or three since my earliest days. i suspect it was around four years old when i started looking at the comics. By seven, i was actually reading them. A year or so later, i started reading the sports pages and became enrapt with Fred Russell’s column “Sidelines” on the left hand side of the Nashville Banner’s front sports page.

The Banner was the afternoon newspaper. It leaned toward the liberal Southern Democrat persuasion(if there was such a thing) . The morning paper was the Nashville Tennessean. It was of the conservative Southern Democrat persuasion. i didn’t care. i was devoted to Fred Russell, Dudley “Waxo” Green, and George Leonard. Politics were not part of my world. Again to quote Bob Seger, “i wish i didn’t know now what i didn’t know then.”

i read the Banner and the weekly Lebanon Democrat. J. Bill Frame, our neighbor was the publisher and editor of that paper until i left for the Navy.

Going away didn’t stop me from reading newspapers. In my first tour on the USS Hawkins out of Newport, RI, one of my greatest pleasures was getting the New York Times Sunday edition, eating breakfast and with the Times‘ sections spread all over the living room floor, sitting there on the rug with my coffee and spending the entire morning reading the paper.

When i went to carrying Koreans to Vietnam and back, i grabbed the Navy Times and read it cover to cover. Also, my grandmother would send me the weekly “Route 7 News” by Mrs. Wesley Thompson. i was enthralled with Mrs. Thompson’s down home news.

And then, as i was contemplating how to return to sports writing after my Navy obligation was served, one of the best guys around, John (Yanch) Johnson, offered me a job at his family’s newspaper, The Watertown Daily Times in Watertown, New York.

It was an incredible two years there. i was the understudy to Jack Case before taking over the sports editor when he retired. i was up to my neck in sports. We covered all of the local sports, college sports, introduced me to college hockey. When Jack retired, i ran a full page of photos of Jack with luminaries of the 30’s and 40’s: Lou Gehrig, Sonja Henie, Max Schmeling, and Ray Robinson — Jack gave Robinson his moniker when, after an amateur bout Jack visited the victor’s dressing room and stated, “Ray, you are as sweet as sugar.”

i was immersed in the new and old of sports journalism. The Watertown Daily Times and the Sunday New York Times were intrinsic for my living — and there was something wonderful about sitting in that upstairs apartment reading the paper with five or six feet of snow outside.

Later, there was a short period of time when i was in newspaper heaven. In the mid-1980’s, we were getting the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego edition in the morning. In the afternoon, we got the San Diego Tribune. i felt…educated.

But the LA paper for San Diego went away. The Tribune was merged with the Union and became a morning composite, The San Diego Union Tribune. Original owners died. The paper was sold. Money for the corporations or major gazillionaires used what was left for their purposes, not for newspaper journalism as i knew it. Finally, the latest sale went to a corporation, much like the latest owners of the Democrat. Minimal staff, minimum news, financial thinking i don’t understand is apparently their guideposts.

Oh yes, the cost of reading a real newspaper has gone through the roof…for not much newsprint.

So we ditched it and are using…yep, you guessed it, the cloud, for our news. To bring me some succor for such a wound, we are getting the Sunday edition of the New York Times. i am blown away, even with this as the sports section has become a separate entity. i read superb journalism, wishing i could match their knowledge, their research, and the ability to put words together.

My era of the daily newspaper is over for us. We’ll get by, but it’s been a part of our morning ritual for over thirty years: the morning paper with breakfast and coffee.

And now, i have to figure out what to use to start our evening fire in the hearth.

Another post from the past. There have many good ones, but this has a special place in my heart. From my Lebanon Democrat column in 2017, ten years after my grandson Sam was born.

Christmas is the big family deal. Several of mine have been away from family. Navy, you know.

But i’ve pretty much blown the roof off when it comes to missing Thanksgiving with the family. Actually, it’s not that much. i have spent six Thanksgivings with shipmates either at sea or in some foreign port where whatever Thanksgiving there is is celebrated is on-board.

They were okay. Bittersweet and oh so lonely amongst my Navy friends, but okay.

There also have been about four or five where the celebrating has been with just my wife. This duo celebration seems to have increased in the last decade. That happens when you live in the Southwest corner and are growing older. i have found these to be almost as nice as the ones with large groups of family and friends. After all, i can be happy anytime i am spending time with just Maureen.

i like Thanksgiving. It is not an absolutely silly requirement to honor someone when we should be honoring those people all of the time, like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, President’s Day, Neighbor Day, Sibling Day, Fifth Cousin Day, Trash Man Day, and Lord knows what other group day. Thanksgiving doesn’t have the somber celebratory tone of Easter. It is not one of those national things we have hyped up to give everyone free time to play instead of work on Fridays or Mondays. It is not celebrating the birth of our nation like the Fourth, or honoring those who served like Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

It is not like Halloween, which has become sort of weird party for the kids to get all of the things they shouldn’t eat and now get them at some school or church instead of hitting all of the homes gone gonzo decorative with tombstones and bones of body parts sticking out of the yard — has the number of kids stopping by your house for “trick or treat” dwindled to a handful like it has at ours? — Still Halloween is fun for the kids and the kids in us so i’m okay with it.

And it’s not like Christmas, the big daddy of them all. Celebrating the birth of a savior, having as many family together as possible, waiting for the gift openings, hoping for snow, singing carols, giving each other more than just presents. Yeh, that one is special.

Thanksgiving is one i really like as well. It has morphed into a thing of itself from those pilgrims and indigenous folks getting together to thank each other (what a concept, huh?) with a big meal. Thus far, it hasn’t reach the massive ad campaign of just about every other holiday. There’s this appreciation factor that may be in the other celebrations but seems to get lost.

My favorite Thanksgivings runs the gamut of different settings.

One away from home that sticks in my mind is the one in Seoul, Korean, 1970. i was with Blythe’s mother’s family in their comfortable senior officer housing on base. The Lynch’s were always great at throwing parties and this one sticks out. We got up at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night to watch the Texas, Texas A&M football game. Blythe’s mother and i weren’t even engaged yet. The Lynch’s were allowing me respite from my cycle of carrying Korean troops back and forth between Pusan and Vietnam.

Then there was the one in Naples, 1972. In August, i had returned to active duty and flown to meet my new ship, the USS Stephen B. Luce (DLG 7) a month after Blythe was born. i don’t even remember the onboard celebration, but i do remember the loneliness when i called from the Naples base phone exchange and talked to wife and family. There’s not many things more lonely that hanging up a phone late on Thanksgiving night after talking to the mother of your infant daughter.

Then, there was the one on Yosemite. Man, that was a some feast. We were anchored off of Masirah, Oman (a total of 55 days at sea). Our supply department did us up fine. We even had that Martinelli’s sparkling cider (white) and apple-grape (red) instead of wine. That wardroom of forty-four officers celebrated just like we were family…because we were.

Then there were the quiet ones with Maureen. We always picked one of our favorite restaurants. And we thanked each other for being each other and together. Doesn’t get much more thankful than that.

The Tennessee Thanksgivings will remain special in my memory. They were in all of the places of family. There were those at our house. The old folks and the older children were crammed around the dining room table. Before the family room had been added, the younger kids ate on a card table in the breakfast niche, then later at the oak table in the breakfast room. The womenfolk cooked like there was no tomorrow and it was all good.

Then there was the same going-ons when we held our celebration at the Hall’s home on Wildwood and later Waggoner. We would go to Red Bank in Chattanooga where the Orr’s hosted the feast of Prichard women, almost like the two in Lebanon, but quite a bit larger (we all sat at the dining room table) and a bit more elegant. Then on numerous Thanksgivings, we would travel to Rockwood to be with Mama Orr. It was an incredibly fascinating Victorian labyrinth of a home with a downhill across the street where we would find large pieces of cardboard and slide down (or without cardboard simply roll and roll and roll down that hill.

Ah, memories.

But far and away, there was one Thanksgiving i love the most. Here. The Southwest corner. 2007. Sam was seven months old. His first Thanksgiving. My family was together. Maureen’s sister and her family joined us. i smoked a turkey. It was a warm and dry day, not the full-blown beyond hot and dry today, but nice. Our family was together. That was enough.

Later today, we will drive over the bay bridge to Coronado. We will celebrate with Pete and Nancy Toennies and their family. After all, we are about as close to family with the Toennies as anyone can get.

It will be a nice way to give thanks.

i hope everyone i know has a wonderful Thanksgiving in their own way. i hope all of us will stop for just a minute. Not watching football. Not eating a ton of turkey. . Not pontificating about the state of the world and our country. Just pausing to give thanks for what we have had and what we have.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

It doesn’t quite fit with the expectations of Thanksgiving. It wasn’t even the same time of year. But today, for a few quiet moments, i took time for a few moments for reflection. At my time of life, reflection comes a lot more frequently.

It was close to midday. Maureen had gone shopping. A few tasks around home had been completed. Preparations for smoking the turkey had been accomplished. Some financial matters had been addressed, a post had been completed. It had been a good, productive morning.

i took a break and moved out to the backyard patio. It was Southwest corner incredible. The sun was rolling across the heavens. My seat was bathed in warmth. The autumn’s early mornings out here are best in a long sleeve shirt. Not much more. It is cool. But at this moment, i could feel the warmth flowing over, into me.

i thought of my mother.

When Estelle Jewell and her husband would spend a month or so with us in the early winters, she would often disappear around this time of day. i would find her in our courtyard or one of the backyard patios. She would be sitting in a chair but leaning back basking in the sun fully clothed.. Her eyes would be closed. She would be absorbing the Southwest corner sun, undoubtedly reflecting. It is a pleasant memory for me, catching her in such repose.

She and Jimmy Jewell loved to watch humming birds. They had a couple of those sugar water hanging things to attract the small birds outside their home. She would report her sightings of the little things with glee.

i’ve reported here, with the funning of Jim Hicks, of our humming birds. Since Maureen and our longtime friend and landscape expert, Paul Shipley, have turned most of our yard to native blooming plants, the hummingbirds have proliferated.

Sitting there basking in the sun this morning, a humming bird dropped in and hovered to a succulent’s bloom just beyond the patio. Flitting about, the humming bird fed off the blooms, hovered some more, dashed about and returned.

It seemed during its hovers, the humming bird was studying me.

Now, i’m not into physic kinds of things. But i’ve got to tell you in those moments of the warmth of the sun and that humming bird studying me, i felt as if i was connecting with my mother.

Whether it was that or not is irrelevant. i connected with her, and in my reflections, i silently paid tribute to an incredible woman.