Friday afternoon, i drove over to Mesa College for the Arnie Robinson Annual Track Event at Mesa College. Mesa College is a two-year community college about 20 miles from our home. The meet was for high school and junior college athletes from schools in San Diego, Orange, and Los Angeles counties.

i parked and walked around the track and football stadium to the upper area where many of the field events were being held. There were ten or so pop-up tents around the edge of the field. The last one was next to what looked like a batting cage to me. But then, my last track meet was attending the Florida A&M-Tennessee State meet in the spring of 1963, nearly sixty years ago. The cage, larger than a batting cage was where they contested the shot putt, hammer throw, and discus events.

That last tent was for the athletes competing for Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. And there, lying on her stomach talking to her fellow athletes was Danielle Lister. To accurately describe our relationship would take several pages. So i will just use the standard i use for kin: she’s a cousin; i’m her “crazy uncle jim” (CUJ).

Her real uncle, Eric Leo Johnson, had let Maureen and i know Danielle would be competing nearby. Maureen had gone to one of her events that morning, the hammer throw. i was there for the discus.

Before i get into my roiling in my thoughts on track and field, i just want to let you know i have a rather incredible young lady for a cousin. Danielle is pretty, a red-head, smart, engaging, witty, and one heck of an athlete. She is in the top level of JC athletes in California. And we had fun. Oh yes, she finished second in the discus with a personal best of 133′ 9.” There is yet another impressive thing she did at the end of the competition. i cannot divulge what it was for to do so would take away from what she did. Only a few other athletes and her coach know what she did, but i can tell you her ethics, morale, and doing what was right was more impressive to me than what she did in her events.

i am proud to say i am crazy uncle jim for Danielle.

When i created my last post concerning Maureen’s birthday, i could not find one photo i wished to include. i found it today. It is her senior high school photo:

And there is no way i can capture her laugh, which has brought down many houses in laughter. No way.

As i have said and written on numerous occasions, i am a lucky man.

i was going to attempt elegant again in honoring her on her birthday.

71. Doesn’t seem like it.

She admonished me. “Refrain from posting something about me,” she said.

i have written a lot about her. So here is a pictorial of sorts:

And the best part is she is even more beautiful in her heart.

Happy Birthday, dear lady of mine.

i am looking for posts i’ve written in the past to celebrate the birthday of my mate, my wife. Undoubtedly, i will post at least one on her birthday Monday.

i often wonder just how we ended up together and how she not only has put up with a really strange guy, but how she still loves me in spite of my shenanigans (a perfect word for me and my history: the second definition of the noun states, “silly or high-spirited behavior; mischief.”)

Then in today’s early, early hours of the morning, even earlier than usual, i awoke, and this thought came into my head: “as different as day and night.” That was it. Nothing more.

i tried to sleep. i wanted to get a couple of more hours before rising my Friday morning early for my Friday Morning Golf, more of a ritual now than when it first began with Marty Linville in 1991. i could not. i had gone to bed early. i cannot sleep much more than six hours with an old man party break…huh, that’s “potty break,” not “party break.” i moved out of our bedroom and lay down on the guest bedroom bed. Didn’t work. i arose, dressed for golf, and fed the cats. As i placed the cats’ dishes in their feeding places, the newspaper boy…er, no longer accurate: man in a car, pulled into our driveway since there are very few people who get the printed newspaper anymore, if at all, and tossed our paper on the driveway before backing out and continuing on his rounds. i walked out to get the paper. Standing there in the dark, well before first light, i realized the fog was setting in, the Santa Ana had broken. The half moon was hazy. The morning star hanging over Mexico could not be seen, nor Mount Miguel to the east.

i thought, “Night and day are about to mingle. First light will be more of a melding than a division.

“Like us.”

Monday, Maureen will be the youngest 71 i’ve ever known. i mean she ain’t no spring chicken, but she handles it well. She is beautiful and more, oh so much more importantly, she cares about every one, even the rapscallion she married.

Standing there in the seacoast town pre-dawn fog, i thought again, “Night and Day.”

i made the coffee, performed the now required stretches for the morning round and sat down and wrote the first cut of this:

Night and Day

the two of them
are as different as
night and day,
but
if you’ve noticed,
night and day go together very well
and
even if these two are different,
they match perfectly:
she is forever beautiful;
he’s a jolly old elf;
she is careful, planning, specific;
he is bumbling, taking off on whims;
yet,
they understand each other
and
anticipate each other’s needs and wants;

it’s beautiful,
like when
the morning star shines down
on first light
and
night meets day;
the question remains
who is night
and who is day?

This was going to be a long post with numerous photos of the Southwest corner in the “winter.”

For us, it has been a pretty tough winter (he wrote with tongue in cheek). i went through nearly a whole cord of firewood. Usually, i fall a bit short with a half cord. It was cooler but i have friends in Vermont and Maine who might shoot me if i called it cold. We actually had frost once or twice and there were a handful of days it only reached 60 degrees. Wet too. For us. We got about four inches thus far this year. But it was cloudy a lot.

This of course is a problem. Dry country. Fire danger. ’nuff said.

i really shouldn’t be doing this as  i have tasks to do and golf to play.

So here is a photo that captures what amazed my father about our winters:

It is a view of Mount Miguel on my morning walks/hikes. Daddy was always tickled that it is green here in the winter and brown in the summer.

Although this was at the very end of winter, it is a representative view of the slope in our back yard. Maureen and our gardener did this after i had implored to redo the slope in the manner of the much smaller slope at our previous home:

To paraphrase Phil Harris: That’s what i like about the Southwest…corner.