Once upon a time in the Southwest corner, i facilitated customer service training. It was fun. i think i might have made a little bit of an impact on creating satisfied customers for the firm who used my program. It was one of those times i could feel the click in the eyes go on when my trainees realized what customer service meant.

i’ve seen little of that kind of customer service since then and that was in the mid-90’s. In fact, it seems to be dwindling. Sean of the South’s experience is oh so familiar. And it’s worse, far worse, with “chats” and most, but not all, phone calls for customer service aren’t a great deal better because.

Thanks, Sean. You made me laugh and accept i’m not alone:

https://seandietrich.com/customer-service/

Maureen and i received our booster for the Moderna vaccine at Rite Aid yesterday afternoon. We both have sore arms and are fatigued today but believe it will be gone quickly.

We went ahead for several reasons. Neither one of us really want to catch COVID, especially at our age. If we do, we want the affliction to be as mild as possible, which of the people i know who have contracted COVID after vaccinations, the effects have been milder.

But the primary reason we went ahead, we want to do everything we can to protect other people. We wear masks in indoor settings outside the home. We also want to make those folks who are very concerned about contracting COVID to feel a little more comfortable.

Unlike some people who claim they know more than medical experts and scientists, we do not, and while we question some of the regulations, none seem to threaten us or people around us, so we go with it. We aren’t quite so into political games to believe it’s some plot of some government, especially ours, cause those folks just aren’t smart enough to pull off something that complicated. We don’t think anyone is going to turn into a cannibal or a vampire if they get vaccinated (although that might be an upgrade for some of those folks) and we are pretty sure women will still be able to become pregnant and deformed children will not be birthed because of the vaccine.

All of us certainly have the right to believe what we believe, but not to the extent it endangers others. We should not play games with that.

Especially for those who received the Moderna vaccinations, we wanted you to know we are glad we did and the post effects of the shot are mild.

Yesterday, i was going to write about my feelings as i waited for my wife. She had an early doctor’s appointment. i mean way early cause it was at 6:00 am. Although she groused about having to get up (she always grouses if she can’t sleep grunches of hours and has to arise before 8:00), she was actually happy as the last time she had an 8:00 appointment with this particular medical jail, it was over an eight-hour ordeal. Anyway (every time i write or say “anyway,” i think of my mother who used it to dismiss the subject at hand and move on to another), i was waiting for her and one of our go to eateries, and was going to write about how i enjoyed this particular place.

Maybe later.

You see, this morning, we didn’t go out for breakfast. i started my morning routine, early, even for me because i went to bed much earlier than usual. Why? Because i was tired. Don’t know why. But i listen to my body and at my age, my body is a non-stop gossip.

So i get up tp go through my morning routine and plan to add a couple of things. Productive or perhaps just fiddlin’ around? Depends on how you look at it, i guess.

Regardless, i went to my little cabin in the woods, which i don’t really have, but the garage serves that purpose in my life.

i noted the sun is rising later. It was dark throughout the house. i walked to the breezeway for the paper and stuff out of the long-lived refrigerator, which they don’t make no more as pointed out by one Danielle Boggs, but i guess the new ones are prettier in the kitchen, and it was dark, but as i emerged from the garage and walked to the driveway to retrieve my paper, which had been delivered by some old man in a late model car when he tossed it out the passenger side window and some ungodly hour long before i made it out and that always hacks me off because our newspaper, now printed in LA ’cause the local publishers valued money over community identity and now the sports scores are not included because the games ended after the deadline ’cause the papers have to printed before sent to down here and perhaps that is really why i favored afternoon papers in my newspaper days as the Nashville Banner and the Watertown (NY) Daily Times always had the complete scores in their editions. But that is another matter, and…

Anyhow, as i walked toward the plastic bagged newspaper, which is never tri-folded and delivered by a “paperboy” on his bicycle, one-speed, mind you, with a basket on the handlebars where the tri-folded papers were carried…oops…

Anyhow, i saw first light, real, no-kidding first light. Like on the bridge of a ship for the morning watch (0400-0800 but not really cause it was truncated due to the morning mess). You see (and man, did i see a lot of them), first light occurs about 45 minutes before dawn. It is truly first light. Like a band of lighter dark on the eastern horizon, gradually turning black to gray, brightening the sky, all of it before that old man sun does his rolling around the heavens all day.

It is a quiet time of day. Peaceful. Doves like it and announce it but they do not disturb the quiet. This morning, there was a different call, a plea, but repetitive. Not dove, not coyote, not owl. i imagined a big bird, or perhaps something like a fox. The sound didn’t disturb my quiet, which feels like i hear it. It is not a passive thing. This quiet feels like it covers the earth with its friend first light. There are no honks or sirens or screeches of brakes or slamming of doors or chatter of neighbors or televisions, radios or whatever blaring stuff, noise mostly.

It is just me on a driveway in Southwest corner suburbia watching first light in the quiet framing Mount Miguel into focus to the east, fading the stars into the depths of the heavens.

Most mornings, i just stand there rapt with first light, marveling at how i got here, where i came from.

i take a sip of my coffee from my last ship’s mug.

I am at peace.

And that, i think, is all i can hope for.

i went on my semi-power walk this morning, succumbing to my doctor’s advice not to run. “Too old,” he said. Probably right, but i did an old man’s jog for a tenth of a mile wishing i was running like i used to on the Coronado Beach from the Amphibious School, crossing Orange Avenue, on the beach to the air station’s security fence, turning around, and back, a distance just about six miles. Ran it every work day with Dave Carey for about six months until he retired (an education in itself, my friend: Dave was a POW; his thoughts about everything were always enlightening, still are). Then i ran pretty much by myself for three years. A lovely run. Note: for Dave, except for that part where they don’t have that stuff in Acapulco.

But i was wishing, walking, not running. So i think. i also have succumbed to listening to my music, what i’ve transferred to my song library, shuffling to get an assortment. Listening, walking, and thinking. Before it was just running, enjoying the world as it was, no interference, no earbuds.

i was thinking about how i was fiddlin’ around with writing something philosophical (ha, ha) about growing old and the meaning of life and all of the craziness that is roiling around this old earth, probably bored from watching repeat stupid on its surface.

Then this song came on. i heard it shortly after it came out when i played the demo during the “JJ the DJ, the Weekend Warrior,” top 40 music show on Saturday and Sunday afternoons out of WCOR AM in Lebanon, Tennessee, the bright spot on your dial (or something like that). i later bought the album in the Sasebo Navy exchange in early 1970 because i wanted to marry Susan Taylor, the lead singer who was also that beautiful woman on the album cover.

Anyhow, i was walking, stopped thinking, just listening. When the song ended, i thought there wasn’t any real need for me to wax philosophical anyway. i mean folks i know would either laugh or get up on some straw principle and beat me up.

So then i thought why not just put the links of songs on this site that have meant a special something for me during a rather gadabout life.

So here are the Pozo Seco Singers hitting pretty much all my notes.

Rest easy. The song that shuffled on right after “Time” was Little Johnny Taylor’s version of “Who’s Making Love” with the chorus lyrics of “Who’s making love to your old lady while you are out making love?” i don’t think that will make my philosophical song list…but man, it’s a great song.

Been a while. Things happen. Some good. Some bad. Folks my age remember.

Catching up.

So, in my cloak of bouncing all over the place, this is a conglomeration of thoughts.

The dark has called me away for a while. i know, i know the dark is owned by me. i should control it. For the most part, i do. i tell myself bad to some degree happens to everyone. It’s inevitable. It’s life. Get up. Move on. Don’t let the dark catch you. Sometimes it does, at least sometimes it catches me. i get through it. Lots of experience. It makes it hard to write without whining. And i hate whining, although curmudgeons shine at whining.

Then, there was this other thing called a manuscript. It was mailed this morning to my editor, a princess. i finished the draft yesterday good enough to send to a princess. Oh, i know there will be lots more work: revisions, layouts, photos, etc., but it feels done. It only took about 36 years. Steel Decks and Glass Ceilings: A Memoir i call it.

And so the difficulties and the manuscript are handled, not gone, but handled.

i laid off for a while.

So it’s been a while. Hi.

And Southwest corner weather has been on my mind. Weird weather. Not disaster stuff like north of here where fire and smoke are literally destroying lives as folks have known it, or back home wet, or withering heat, or the northeast where tropical storms or hurricanes are wreaking havoc.

Southwest corner August has been weird. Clouds, humid, cool…er cooler. The marine layer, a denizen here in May and June has stuck around: Cloudy mornings, mist even, sun breaking in for several hours in the day to revert to cloud cover at night. 70’s. Dare i say pleasant? Two weeks ago, it wasn’t cool. It was hot, muggy. Walking a golf course, i had a case of mild heat exhaustion. Would have been scary except i knew and i knew what to do. i mean in Mission Valley, it was in the high 80’s with about 75% humidity. But i am older and it got to me.

So i shouldn’t complain. i remember two-a-days, and golf bargains.

Two-a-days were pre-season practices in mid-August two weeks before school started after Labor Day. Those practices were on the field down Hill Street from Castle Heights, ’59-’61. Heavy cotton jerseys over tee shirts, shoulder pads, cotton football pants with hip pads and knee pads underneath, high-top leather football shoes with rubber cleats and helmets that didn’t quite fit and were echo chambers for good hits. 95-95 we called it: 95 degrees and 95% humidity. And you were a sissy (and i cleaned that up considerably being conscious of the politically correct forces among us) if you drank any water. And to “help” you, you swallowed salt pills by the dozen. Why did we think that was the way to go about it?

Then years, decades later, there were the golf bargains. In the desert. It’s Jim Hileman’s fault with a little bit of help from Mike Kelly. You see in the late ’80’s or early 90’s, they talked me into being the fourth of a foursome to take advantage of golf in the desert, like in the sprawling conglomerate in Coachella Valley of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Falls, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and Indio. In July and August. Great green fees back then in the summer. Essentially your cart fees, which were significantly lower than today’s taxi fares and car rentals, like $20  or less unlike what they charge for carts now. Great deal. Did i mention the weather in July and August hovers around 120, give or take five or ten degrees? Oh yeh, the humidity is somewhere south of 30%, usually way south.

And being brilliant macho men, we would play two rounds daily for three days, with 18 holes on the coming and going days. Then, Marty Linville and i started doing it with a legendary drive over the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains in my RX7 through what then was a small sod farm and horse ranch area called Temecula, which is now a megalopolis of its own, and we drove up and up and down and down with switchbacks and blind curves and never-used pull-out lanes for slower vehicles and the Paradise Valley Cafe where the original owner, Pistol Annie, toted two six-guns on her hips and wore them into the ’60’s before we headed down the continuous switchbacks into that Coachella Valley, and i shall not tell you of the case of beer in the cooler in the back, which dwindled rapidly accompanied by the number of pit stops sometimes in the aforementioned pull-out lanes and other off the road spots until Marty joined our foursome, and it remained brutal for oh, about, 15 years or so, and of course, we still did it, but slower in the desert heat.

And i’m complaining about 85 degrees and 75% humidity?

Which brings me to stillness.

i started to make some comments about religion and my beliefs, but my brother is much better qualified to discuss this kind of stuff if he wishes to do so.

i simply want to tell you about something i’ve experienced. It has come upon me in the last several years. It was not something i tried or even intended to try. It has not been on a yoga mat or when humming or chanting.

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, i wake up early in the morning. Okay, early damn near every morning. i’m not sleepy, just relaxed, considering when i should get up and become productive. Just laying there in the bed trying not to do anything to disturb the sleeping fawn at my side. Then occasionally with no planning on my part, it comes upon me. Don’t know how to describe it exactly. Stillness. Nothingness (Thanks, Jean-Paul Sartre). Peace. Calmness. i think of nothing. It’s almost like floating. Oh yeh, goodness.

i hope everyone who might read this, and actually, anyone i know, experiences this stillness. It makes me okay. It focuses me on caring about people, especially the ones i love. It gives me peace. i would like everyone to feel that.

Thanks for putting up with my ramblings.