While Maureen was away, i once again demonstrated an incredible talent for procrastination. As i often do, i sought out another pile of photos to sort and organize rather than something important with an actual chance of completing in the next hundred years.

But, you know what, i enjoy such dalliances. Memories are a treasure chest for old men.

Like the photo on the left. Ray Boggs, my father-in-law and one of my best friends is shown here. He is in the basement workshop of the San Diego Aerospace Museum, his version of heaven. He is creating the pilot seat of a World War II cargo plane. Plans and specifications had been lost over the years. The museum was creating a replica. Ray drew up the blueprints, researched other planes of the era and came up with the plans. Then, he built the seat, which was installed in the replica. The plane was flown once and then lowered through the roof and hung as an exhibit in the museum.

Ray, being Ray, did not brag about it, but it was obvious he was proud of his contribution.

The photo on the right is precious to me. We opted for Sarah to attend a Montesorri school for preschool and kindergarten before first grade. As Mister Mom, i got to take her and pick her up most of the time. Here she is on graduation day. There was one proud dad ther

The quest for more procrastination continues.

As documented, Maureen was gone on a lark for four days this week. The refrigerator was bare. i put off eating anything healthy for a couple of days, but before she returned Thursday, i decided to go to the grocery and fill the larder.

Ralph’s (folks back home should think “Kroger”) is about a mile down and up the hills from us. Maureen goes there all the time for the usual stuff, hits Costco for bulk items, and then goes to Trader Joe’s for her gourmet specials. When required while i was in the Navy, i went to the Navy commissaries.

Maureen does not like the commissaries, primarily from her introduction in 1983. We married. i left for the other coast within ten days and in another month, i sailed east for almost eight months. She remained in the Southwest corner where her career blossomed as an account executive, a high-end office interior firm. She dressed the part.

One weekday, she decided to go for a new venture, grocery shopping at the Navy Commissary at Naval Station, San Diego, known by seafarers as “32nd Street.” It was days of yore and the Navy was a bit different then compared to now.

Pay was only a smidgeon of what Navy folks get paid now. There were only a few very senior officers who drove Mercedes and i only knew of one officer, my good friend from Lebanon, LCDR Earl Major, who drove a Porsche. Very few of the enlisted owned their own cars and most of those were used. Many single sailors and officers as well lived aboard their ships. All of us received our pay checks or cash as we had indicated on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month. Credit cards other than American Express, which many officers possessed were pretty much non-existent. Direct deposits and auto-payments were years away.

So married sailors lived from paycheck to paycheck. The two monthly paydays was the days they went shopping…to the commissary, which was then, the Navy version of Costco. They would stock up with the staples, enough to get them to the next payday. Wives did the shopping at the commissary.

So Maureen, unfamiliar with this phenomena, decided to go shopping at lunch to the commissary on the 30th. As usual for her work, she was dressed to the nines. Then, the commissary was a cavernous quonset hut. She showed her dependent (hah!) identification card at the gate with her recently acquired base decal, entered through the gate, and parked in a full parking lot.

She picked up a handful of items and looked for the checkout line. It snaked around two of the aisles of food. There was no quick check out lines for a small number of items back then. She found herself behind a very large woman carrying a baby who was pushing one cart in front of her and pulling one behind her. Both were piled high with Twinkie’s, sugar-coated, frosted, flavored cereals and cartons of milk, cheeses, potatoes, and all things not necessarily healthy.

Maureen quietly placed her few items on the shelf beside her, turned around and walked out as unobtrusively as she could.

The only times she has returned was at my insistence, and i have given up trying.

* * *

After USS Yosemite returned to Mayport in 1984 and after we returned to the Southwest corner in 1985, i did my share of the cooking, especially after i completed my Naval service (with our daughter born that very day) in 1989. Along with that, i did most of the grocery shopping…at the Navy commissary until Maureen retired. Later in her career, i realized Maureen liked to cook and that was a break from her workday, and it soothed her. i had no problem relinquishing the kitchen duties to her. After all, she was and remains a gourmet cook. i am not.

But while she worked, i continued with shopping. i began to go on Sunday mornings. Church goers did not show up until after church. The commissary was less crowded in those hours. i not only shopped, i discovered several pleasures. The Navy commissary is a wonderful place to people watch. Folks of all sizes, nationalities, different tastes, hit the aisles with purpose. i realized i should not get in races, push to get past a crowd at one item, to take it easy and just watch the goings-on.

It was also fun to check out the shelves. With the variety of folks shopping the many variations on things to eat, and especially things to flavor what is eaten, my journeys were an education. Sometimes, i would shake my head in wonder. Sometimes, i would laugh. Sometimes, i found something i wanted to try.

This Thursday, i opted to go to the nearby Ralph’s. The commissary was further away and i had a bunch of chores and straightening up to do before picking up Maureen at the airport. Still, the experience of going up and down the aisles brought back memories of how much i enjoyed my commissary trips. They are mostly gone.

Of course, i do go back occasionally. You see, the North Island and 32nd Street Navy Commissaries are the only two places in the Southwest corner that carry Tennessee Pride Country Sausage.

And that makes my now short, quick trips worthwhile.

i heard her footsteps
but
she wasn’t there;
i turned to speak to her
but
she was gone;
the cats looked lost
when­
her lap was missing
and
eyed me questioning
when
i put them up for the night;
oh, she’s only gone
for a couple of days,
a respite in Monterrey
with a friend;
‘twas too soon to pine,
too short to hurt;
but
it was downright scary
to be lonely;
over forty years,
love evolves;
infatuation, passion
pass with age
dependence on each other,
expectations grow;
we know each other
as well as our own palms;
that’s sometimes good,
sometimes not so good,
but
after forty years.
i can tell you
it can be downright scary
to be lonely.

­­

I paused. Just before we commenced our normal late afternoon routine, i sat in my spot in the family room and paused. I had sat the book on the side table next to my chair. I tried to capture how i felt.

I broke from the spell. As Maureen fed the cats and gave Bruce Willis his meds, i set up the dinner trays next to our spots, placed the napkins and silverware on the trays, changed from my contact lenses to glasses as any hard exercise was put off until tomorrow. After all of my preparations were done and Maureen had commandeered the kitchen to create yet again a culinary piece of art i will find different, interesting, and like very much, i repaired to the refrigerator freezer and poured myself a “martin” (bless you, Mister Fraser) into the frozen unbreakable martini glass Sarah gave me a couple of years ago, complete with unstuffed pitted olives, preferred by my friend Marty Linville.

I delayed as long as i thought i could in turning on the television without raising Maureen’s ire. She likes to have the television on while she cooks. It is “soothing” or something. Since there is little i like to watch, i am not a big fan of television noise, and my nature compels me to actually pay attention to whatever is on. As usual, i choose the local news to at least get the weather forecast (70 degrees with morning marine layer clouds and a slight breeze.

It matters not this afternoon. I normally ignore the news(?) unless it is something that might affect us. But today, i was deep (for me) in thought.

I had just finished the third short story in the tome of Joseph Conrad: Complete and Unabridged. I sat thinking about how i felt akin to the almost Polish, before it was Ukraine, Russian born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. The story was “Lagoon.” As you might have ascertained, it captivated me.

I had read Conrad much earlier in life. I’m pretty sure i read Lord Jim while either a junior or senior at Castle Heights Military Academy. I think Major Harris was the professor who assigned that reading, but i could have just picked it up myself. I was a pretty voracious reader back then. I remember finishing with a feeling i had learned something. I just wasn’t quite sure what i had learned.

But my attraction to Conrad was his short stories about life at sea on ships. It was an adventure i could not imagine. I felt the sea and the struggles and deep rooted joy of men who were enveloped by the sea and the people they met far away from the reality they had known in their early life. There was a finality to it all. I felt it.

But i put Conrad and his sea stories away for more esoteric pursuits: southern literature, sports writing, partying, loving women… and, oh yes, for many diverse reasons, going back to sea.

And finally, i made it to his playground: the South Pacific, and even got a taste of seamen on ships, non-military ships. I went to Vietnam first and got a taste of life much like the Malaysians. More impactful to me was riding merchant marine manned USNS ships, carrying Korean troops to Vietnam and back to Korea. It was a complete change from my Navy experience. I felt Conrad. I felt his stories of the sea. I felt men at sea and in strange worlds dealing with the essence of living. It just didn’t quite sink in for me right then.

Then after really sort of giving up on my hopes to see the world, i went to a ship on the West Coast. I hit the western Pacific on a continuing basis…and i loved it. I went to Australia four times within four years. I spent ten days in Singapore. I stayed at Conrad’s go to place, Raffle’s Hotel and sat in the bar thinking of him. Visiting and transiting the Straits of Malacca, the narrows between Malaysia and Indonesia where literally thousands of merchant ships created a gauntlet for navigation brought Conrad’s stories to the forefront of my thoughts.

Now, the man may have been the best writer of the greatest novelist of all the English writing novelists. And English was his adopted language. His descriptions of any scene can just blow you away independent of the story line.

But more so, he writes of humanity, good, bad, faulted, and it resonates with me.

I hesitate to recommend you read him. He’s mine. His stories resonate with me. i will read all of his stories and may even reread him again.

As much as i identify with him, feel as if i am connected to him, there is a difference. He is a great writer, one of the best at writing short stories and novels. i am a storyteller.

I just hope he didn’t like the original Singapore Sling at Raffles any more than i did.

Nope. Ain’t buying it. i don’t call meteorologists by that name since around December 1968, actually even before that.

In 1974, my commanding officer, CDR George Phelps, aboard the USS Hollister (DD 788), anointed the three line department heads one day as the “Wind,” “Rain,” and “Seas” controllers. As CHENG, i was the “Rain Control Officer,” not a bad job in Long Beach. The CO believed we had as much capability of controlling or predicting the weather as those proclaimed meteorologists whom we called “weather guessers.” i still identify them with that term, “weather guessers.”

Those guys (and girls) who claim meterologistism (my word) have grown in numbers and viewership. They even have a channel called “The Weather Channel.” This is the channel that sends folks out in the teeth of storms or floods or other earthly disasters to tell us the weather is bad while having difficulty talking into the their microphone or holding on to various parts of their clothing.

Now, these folks don’t make their money off of good weather, normally the domain of the Southwest Corner. Nobody has said much on any weather forecast about the Southwest corner for quite some time, except of course, for the local weather guessers who are filling the airways with tales of gloom and doom about how the unusual amount of rainfall has produced a lot of plant growth that could become a potential wildfire disaster when it dries out and the Santa Ana winds revisit the land. They make their money by scaring the bejesus out of us with the dire impact of the portending weather’s next Armageddon.

And so we come to this weekend in the Southwest corner. Our plight has been broadcast coast to coast with the pending maelstrom of Hyper Hurricane Hillary coming up from Baja. Maureen and i are being contacted by friends and family from other parts of the country concerned about our well-being.

i am not referring to the hurricane or Hillary being hyper. i’m talking about the weather guessers predictions and how folks in the Southwest corner are reacting. It’s all hyper.

When my sister, Martha Duff, expressed her concern to me via a text message this morning, i responded:

i don’t think it’s going o be anywhere near as bad as predicted, but we are securing all that might be impacted by winds. The mountains could be in trouble. The cold Japanese current coming from the Arctic is still cool enough to negate some of the effects. However, if it rains a lot in August as predicted, this whole area is going to be a zoo.

The National Weather Service to which i check when i have any real concern about weather, had this report this morning:

Tonight
A chance of showers and thunderstorms, then showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm after midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 69. Calm wind becoming northeast around 5 mph after midnight. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

Sunday
Showers and possibly a thunderstorm. Some of the storms could produce heavy rainfall. High near 78. Windy, with a north wind 5 to 15 mph increasing to 25 to 35 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. New rainfall amounts between three quarters and one inch possible.

Sunday Night
Showers and possibly a thunderstorm. Some of the storms could produce heavy rainfall. Low around 66. Breezy, with a west wind 20 to 25 mph becoming south 10 to 15 mph in the evening. Winds could gust as high as 35 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New rainfall amounts between three quarters and one inch possible.

Monday
A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 72. South wind 15 to 20 mph becoming southwest 5 to 10 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

Folks, for a mariner, even as long ago as it was, 30 knot winds, even gusts to 50 knots, is of concern, but panic is not needed. We occasionally get those kinds of winds here in the winter storms, and other than lowering umbrellas and securing light outdoor furniture, no other preparations are required.

Of course, the Southwest corner folks, including my wife, are not taking chances. Today, i will be securing out exterior from a storm beyond description. We are moving and tying up plants, relocating and tying down lawn furniture, securing any loose items with chains or something. We haven’t gotten to the point where she is specific about that, but i will not be surprised if she inquires where we might get an anchor.

Bottom line: Don’t worry about us. The Hyper Hurricane Hillary rolling through here is not likely to cause major harm to us or our belongings.

However, if you want to see a zoo, watch the Southwest corner when and after the rain hits us, less than two inches max is predicted here in Bonita. Folks out here can go berserk trying to cope with rain.