President Biden with help of his advisors failed. So did his predecessors. Both Democrat and Republican. Spare me the defensive attacks on the other side.

It takes me back to 1975. Leaning on a handrail of the weather deck above the well deck, i watched. The last few days have been déjà vu all over again as Yogi once said. Not watching, but a rarity for me, i have been checking the news, revisiting those moments about ten miles south off the coast of Vung Tau, Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger were wrong with the help of their advisors. So were their predecessors.

As i have written often, in 1975 i watched 35,000, about half of the initial refugees from the Communists taking over their country, coming over the horizon leaving their home of thousands of year out of fear. As i watched, i thought, “i don’t know what we could have done, but we damn sure should have done something different. These people deserve better.”

This is a bit different for me.

Back then, a lot of it was political posturing where ideologues were killing a bunch of people and committing atrocities on combatants, especially those taken prisoner. But the posturing was terrible, cruel, impacting lives of  innocent people.

We really should have done something differently. Those people needed help to remain in the county of their heritage. We didn’t do it. And we lost a lot of lives of our young men and women. i am not smart enough to have an answer but our folks with a plethora of intelligence, understanding of different cultures, should have figured it out and abandoned their political endeavors to do the right thing.

They didn’t.

And here we are again. Only this time, it is a reign of terror for women and anyone who will dissent and in all probability spawn incredible terrorism. i hurt for the women and the innocents who will suffer.

i am sad all of you bigots who are so entrenched in your political beliefs you can’t have concern for humanity.

We should have done something different.

Sad.

i would like to be articulate right now, but the tears make it hard to type on this infernal machine. Can’t think real well either.

You see, i was going through my “memories” on Facebook this morning after breakfast, unusual as i don’t normally bring my computer into breakfast. We had finished Maureen’s French toast and fruit, and i was enjoying my third cup of coffee. The sports pages were a brief read this morning and the comics, as usual, made me chuckle. i decided to check my email and Facebook.

Scrolling down through “memories,” there were a number of photos of my father. That’s when it hit me. i’m sure i would have recognized it sooner or later. Today, eight years ago, he died in the morning. His wife and daughter were by his side. Martha called me as Maureen was driving me to the airport. She had called earlier to tell me the hospice nurse had said it wouldn’t be long. Martha added I needed to get there before he left us. The call en route to the airport told me i was too late. She also told me one of the last things he said was “I wish Jim were here.”

i won’t praise him here. i’ve done enough of that i think. He would tell me that if he could.

My brother-in-law, Daniel Boggs, sent our family an email about three days ago telling the story of Albrect Dürer, his brother Albert, and his famous drawing of “Study of Hands of an Apostle.” It was a lovely story. i replied the drawing blew me away when i first saw it and was the inspiration for my writing a poem as a tribute to my father.

The idea hit me when i was laying on the couch next to Mother’s recliner and his recliner across the room in their Deer Park condo, the place where they had moved in 2002 after 62 years of living, and man, i mean living, on Castle Heights Avenue. We were watching a Braves baseball game. He was holding the remote. i looked at his hands. They were very much like the hands Dürer had drawn (His brother’s hands were the model).

When my father read it, he asked me, “How did you know?”

i don’t know. He inspired me to do a lot of things i didn’t know.

Hands

When most folks meet him,
they notice steel blue eyes and agility;
his gaze, gait and movements
belie the ninety-five years;
but
those folks should look at his hands:
those hands could make Dürer cry
with their history and the tales they tell.

His strength always was supple
beyond what was suggested from his slight build.
His hands are the delivery point of that strength.
His hands are not slight:
His hands are firm and thick and solid –
a handshake of destruction if he so desired, but
he has used them to repair the cars and our hearts;

His hands are marked by years of labor with
tire irons, jacks, wrenches, sledges, micrometers on
carburetors, axles, brake drums, distributors
(long before mechanics hooked up computers,
deciphering the monitor to replace “units”
for more money in an hour than he made in a month
when he started in ’34 before computers and units).

His hands pitched tents,
made the bulldozers run
in war
in the steaming, screaming sweat of
Bouganville, New Guinea, the Philippines.

His hands have nicks and scratches
turned into scars with
the passage of time:
a map of history, the human kind.

Veins and arteries stand out
on the back of his hands,
pumping life itself into his hands
and beyond;
the tales of grease and oil and grime,
cleaned by gasoline and goop and lava soap
are etched in his hands;

they are hands of labor,
hands of hard times,
hands of hope,
hands of kindness, caring, and love:
oh love, love, love, crazy love.

His hands speak of him with pride.
His hands belong
to the smartest man I know
who has lived life to the maximum,
but in balance, in control, in understanding,
gaining respect and love
far beyond those who claim smartness
for the money they earned
while he and his hands own smartness
like a well-kept plot of land
because he always has understood
what was really important
in the long run:
smarter than any man I know
with hands that tell the story
so well.

It felt like January in the Southwest corner.

It was the beginning of August, August 6th to be correct, and it felt like January, at least some days in January out here. i was wishing i had worn my trousers instead of shorts and brought a light rain jacket or a wind shirt instead of the short-sleeved golf shirt.

Oh, it wasn’t that bad. But it was cool with a stiff breeze off the Pacific. There was some occasional mist, very, very light mist. And the FMG — Have i written those initials long enough for most of you to recognize they stand for Friday Morning Golf? — bunch, including me, are curmudgeons, true curmudgeons like those two old guys, Statler and Waldorf, in the balcony in the Sesame Street Muppets. And we are proud of it. Brag about it. We even use the term (close your eyes if you are politically correct sensitive) “asshole” as a compliment.

So i’m claiming it was cold.

After all, San Diego is a seaport town. Usually, the Southwest corner is tourist bliss: perfectly warm with a gentle breeze and sun, lots of sun. But these past few days, she has been a seaport town. The mist…er, marine layer moved in. The entire ridge of Point Loma was ensnared by fog. The gentle breeze was a two-club wind.

i love it.

And it brings to mind the other seaport towns i’ve loved. Newport, Rhode Island. Athens, Greece. Esquimalt, British Columbia. Sasebo, Japan. Fremantle, Australia. Rota, Spain. i’m sure there are others. Oh, there are a lot of seaports, many with incredible ambience, like Key West and Mayport, Florida;  Monte Carlo; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; St. Thomas,  Virgin Islands; Nha Trang, Vietnam, and many more. But they don’t have that feel of a seaport town where there is a grit, the sea blowing onto land with a taste of actually being out there on a ship.

Yeh. i love seaport towns.

Then, on the thirteenth green, the par three  green that is backed by the Pacific, out on the horizon looms a ghost ship silhouetted in the light gray mist. It was like the past coming back to greet me. The Anchorage seemed to have risen from her watery grave off of Hawaii, where Navy aircraft squadrons sunk her decommissioned soul in a training exercise in 2010 and was coming for me to board her. Alas, it was not my Anchorage. It could have been the new one, USS Anchorage (LPD 23), or one of those new landing ship docks like my Anchorage, only bigger and mightier and computerized.

Standing on that green in the cool wind of a seaport town in August, the specter of that old, steam propelled beautiful ship of the past came to me.

i knew this one one of the reasons the Southwest corner will remain my home: a seaport town that can take me back to another world, another time that was mine.

crow

the morning light sprayed
streams from over Mount Miguel;
all was quiet
except
at the top of the middle juniper
bordering our neighbor’s yard
a crow i wished was a raven
because of Poe,
cawed, thrusting his head up
as if he were praying
to the heavens
but
was listening for a reply,
which came from somewhere,
perhaps a nearby tree;
the conversation continued,
caws back and forth
until after the sun had cleared
the mount to the east
and
the sky, those heavens
to which the crow prayed
had morphed into
a canopy of
the deepest pure blue
without a blemish of cloud
the crow or any creature
had ever seen,
which may have been
to whom the crow prayed.

The anniversary is over. It was a good one. We thought of checking out a new place for dining and did for lunch: Shake and Muddle in downtown Chula Vista, and my croissant benedict sandwich was terrific while Maureen’s “crab and avo,” that’s crab and avocado on sourdough toast with chipotle cream was, in Maureen’s term’s “okay,” and i wonder why that sounds so negative and recognizing Maureen won’t accept “okay” for her repasts probably because she never makes anything that is just “okay,” which i hope says something about me, but i’m never sure about that.

But dinner (supper to the really correct and hip folks from my home) was just right. We passed on experimentation and went to our go-to. The Rose Wine Bar in South Park is one of my favorite places in my history for dining. The ambience is casually wonderful. The clientele are an incredible panoramic mixture of culture, race, politics, philosophies, and you name it, all enjoying the fare with no, no negative vibes. The fare began as appetizers, tapas really, to go along with a rather unique selection of wines. There is a full bar now and the menu has expanded to include entrees, and they know us (see last year’s photo below). i would tell you what we ate, but i can’t pronounce most of them, much less spell them. But boy, was it good. Maureen drank (that’s about four sips, which is a huge amount for this woman with metabolism off the charts) “Don’t Call Me Honey,” which i did off course, although that is not normally a term we use for each other, concocted with rum, prosecco, mint, and honey. i had a very good Greek wine with a name that won’t appear here for the same reason our menu choices are not included.

It was a perfect end to a great day.

Meanwhile major sports was grabbing headlines. The Padres were getting bashed for not trading more. The Dodgers, Yankees and Giants were being lauded for adding great talent (with much money). And Scott Boros did it again to the Dodgers.

In 1998, after the Padres made the World Series for the second time and losing again, they went into the dump mode. But before they did, the owner announced he wanted to retain pitcher Kevin Brown but his limit was an $85 Million dollar contract. The Dodgers offered significantly upward of that. Boras then convinced the Bums that San Diego had topped their offer twice, and Brown ended up being the first player to have a contract exceeding one million ($105 Million). Appropriately (from my biased view), Brown wasn’t worth it.

This month, rumors by the experts abounded about who was going to land the National’s star pitcher, Max Scherzer. As the trade deadline neared, one of Boros’ agents gave Ken Rosenthal a scoop, at least what Ken thought was a scoop. Ken is considered one of the most knowledgeable baseball reporters around, so greatly respected he is the talking head analyst for ESPN. The scoop was the Padres were going to land Scherzer. The Friars had abandoned that chase because the general manager knew he would have to give up too much talent to land the star. Rosenthal blasted his “scoop” across the sports media. He was a genius supposedly. So the Dodgers kicked in a couple of more their star prospects to land Scherzer, essentially bidding against themselves, just as Boros had manipulated them thirteen years earlier.

And the Padre media and fans were ringing their hands. Not me. Oh sure, i would like the Padres to have more consistent starting pitching, but i like the ones they have. i just want them to pitch better, smarter. Same with the other players. You see, i never liked the serf-like conditions before they players had a union, even though it’s a little cockamamie now with the players, the owners, the media all making megabucks off the fans, but i did like rooting for teams where players returned every year. i will offer Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken as examples.

So don’t cry for me, Argentina…er Padre fans.

*    *    *

And then there is the Southeastern Conference adding Texas and Oklahoma to their teams. i think i have a better idea. Why don’t we go old school? Sort of. Oklahoma and Houston could become part of an old/new conference called the Southwest Conference (remember them?). Rice, SMU, Texas A&M, TCU, Baylor, and Arkansas could return to their old group.

Then the SEC could send Missouri back to the Big what used to be Eight and South Carolina back to the ACC. Then they could woo Tulane to return. That would bring the SEC to Vanderbilt, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Ole Miss, LSU, Mississippi State, Tulane, Kentucky, and …oh yeh, them orange folks up on that hill, Tennessee.

And of course, the silly notion of playoffs could go away. The national champion would be mythical based on polls, opinions, or fans banging away at their computers voting for their team. And no one would care.

And maybe, just maybe, we could return to about ten bowl games. And ten regular season games. AND no conference title games. Maybe we could even return to tie games like the game was played before.

Nope:

Too much fan fantacism and too money involved.