2:27AM

2:27 AM.

I’m not up late, I’ve slept. 7PM to 2AM gives me 7 hours’ sleep, an hour more than I need. Normal hours for me. I think Lee gets disgusted when I fail to attend his plays at night. He doesn’t believe the excuse that I lose all connection with the conscious world at a time when most people are just getting started. But it works for me. Carla has a night shift at the hospital, so she’s not here anyway.

Sleeping through the early evening allows me to avoid the frenzy that so many eagerly dive into. That way I get several hours of quiet time before the first rumblings of service and delivery trucks demand attention. The 3AM freight train noisily snorts up the rails through town, a comforting kind of white noise in the distance, the engineer in sync with my own hours. By the time his last graffiti splashed car approaches the North end of the city, a pervasive quiet rolls back in, carrying its own identity. It isn’t so much the absence of clutter as it is a brief connection with an alternate reality. Like floating in space, an astronaut with no tether, a sleep deprivation chamber that covers everything, a giant cone of silence.

I own it all, the other daytime players are down. Humans, dogs, frogs, bees, birds… deep in a REM coma. It’s as if a crop duster sprayed a cloud of KO gas, an incapacitating agent, over the land. At least briefly, I’m immune. Only the plants and trees silently flex their muscles.

The dogs and I harness each other up, taking a long walk around the loop. A curving asphalt trail leads us to the rear of the Cold Cow Ice Cream store. Dumpsters vomit out what their stomachs can’t hold, spotlighted under security lights that appropriately paint the area jaundice yellow. Holding my breath in protest, we hurry past, breaking into a trot as the dark woods extend their arms to welcome us back into the natural world.

Home again, an early breakfast of pineapple with sausage, washed down by a brew of scalding black Columbian, jump starts my daylight hours, a transition of sorts.

Sunrise

 

Our bedroom, deck and patio face East, so they catch the first light of dawn. 

The weather here in Northeast Florida over the last few weeks has been exceptional, as nice as any I remember. That statement requires way more than a grain of salt, however, more like an entire salt lick. My memory is like a dirty windshield, cleaned by wipers every time I blink.

Playful breezes cool skin that’s been fired- up by a slight pinch from unfiltered sunshine.

Days like these remind me to mentally stand and applaud. As with everything, we get the other side as well. I need to remember these days when the next hurricane rattles our doors and angry gangs of black clouds rumble overhead. During those weather tantrums, I give the dogs large marrow bones, rubbed, baked and cooled to room temperature as a distraction so they don’t cling to me and shiver. I drink vodka, turn the volume on my stereo up to “Wow”, throw a one finger salute skyward and dare the electricity to go out.

That’s when we appreciate the candles and batteries, the slowly thawing steaks, a reliable propane stove, and memories of days like today.

Amaryllis

I wished for her a thousand fresh flowers.

Claiming ownership over a sea of chromatic brilliance, we strolled along a shoreline, 

thick with Amaryllis.

In a broad sweep, I gifted her the wild hoards of color.

"these are for you"

hmh

More Alike than Different...

We are all more alike than different. 

Don’t we all want to raise our families in a safe environment with enough to eat and a decent place to live? Isn’t the opportunity to work hard and improve our situation the basis of hope?

Are the words on our most famous statue still relevant? Do we still mean it?
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In this country, we are all immigrants. Only the indigenous people have the right to say: “Enough. No more!”

Does the dream end for others because we got ours? Who are we to decide that?

I’ve lived in a beach town for 30 years, an immigrant here. The complaints of “too much growth, too many people” have been a constant. Others want the sand, surf and warm weather too. Who can blame them? Do we now blockade the roads? Build walls? Call them animals?

We are all more alike than different.

When we reach out with an offer of help and understanding, when we see ourselves in the eyes of others, when we work together, we are all stronger for it. I benefit when you benefit.

But what of the others? they asked.

The answer came back: There are no others

PKS Reunion

I’m guessing 1988 or so. Judy, Sue, Kenny, and me. Mom and Dad were still alive then, although Dad seemed uncharacteristically frail and quiet at this reunion. All of us had been visiting them in Pine Knoll Shores, NC, a small town on the outer banks, where they lived. That whole area was land that Dad had managed to get the Roosevelt family to donate while he completed the legal work to get it incorporated into a town and then serve two terms as its first Mayor.

He hired the first police and fire personnel who all knew him well.

On that visit though, I realized how poor his health had become. A Harvard scholar and career attorney with his own successful Manhattan law firm, dad was a walking encyclopedia, and a limerick boss, but I had never seen any chinks in his armor before. Always a gentleman, strong, self-assured, we knew he had our backs and those of his friends and partners. Dad had never showed personal weakness, compassion, yes, but never weakness. I know he must have been mortified by the uncontrollable shaking in his hands. A good sport through it all, he posed for pictures as Mom directed him and stood up as long as he could.

Mother was his everything, the absolute love of his life. He would do whatever she asked, including having four children which he was a bit on the fence about until we were old enough for him to speak with us as adults. Then it was great.

Soon after this picture was taken, Dad started to sink into a nightmare of dementia and Alzheimer’s, passing away six years later. A cruel ending for a man who was all about the mind. To my knowledge, he had never thrown a ball or watched a football game, much preferring a NY Times crossword puzzle, a history book, or maybe a little Lawrence Welk bubble music with Mom, his little dog snoring in his lap.

All of that was lost to the disease.

Mother continued on after his death, a smart, healthy, artistic lady who had lived, and continued to live, a privileged life, for another 17 years. Much like June Cleaver, she wore dresses and a string of pearls, even when she worked in the garden.

I don’t think about my father very often. He and I mostly had a handshake relationship, unless we were trading bad limericks or agreeing that The Dick Van Dyke Show was worth watching because Mary Tyler Moore was on it. We both appreciated the fact that nobody did justice to Capri pants better than Laura Petrie.

These days, I often see my father in the mirror. When I can’t remember names, it worries me more than it probably should. I occasionally hold my hand straight out in front of me to assure myself that there is no sign of a quiver.

Carla and I frequently sit on the couch together and watch a show, my little dog snoring in my lap.

We record some of our favorites, but no Lawrence Welk reruns though, some things are best left in the past.

School Days...

Ruth isn’t among the students at top of her college classes, she is the top of her class. This from a girl who never even graduated High School.

Carla home-schooled our daughters, loosely following a state approved curriculum. Actually what they did is called “unschooling”. Ruth did go to public school occasionally though, in and out as she pleased. She even joined the Winter Guard team in High school to be with other girls, twirling flags at football games. But when that ended, she decided that she couldn’t take one more boy dressed in camo gear, driving a flatbed truck with monster tires and a dog cage for hounds in the back. Too much Bubbaville going on, and way too much “sit down and shut up” time in public schools.

She did get her GED though, one of the highest scores in Florida on the reading and writing parts. That was all I wanted Carla to concentrate on with both girls. I figured they could learn anything they wanted from that point on. 

We lived in the woods of Virginia with no TV until Ruth was around 9, so the library was a much used resource.

Now at age 36, Ruth’s experience in sponsoring a wonderful Syrian family over the last two years has prompted her to pursue a degree in Sociology, with an eye on her Masters. She tells me that she sits in the first row, front and center, and waves her hand in the air obnoxiously whenever the professor asks for someone to answer the latest homework question. One professor announced “Will whoever got an A++ on the paper I just returned, please stand up and read it to the rest of the class? Show us how it’s done.” Ruth was the only student above a “C” grade.

She loves it, is excited by the material, and is going to college at the right time in her life and for the right reasons. In my family, education and good grades were everything, but I was a disappointment to my father. Apparently that “good grades” thing skipped a generation.

I wish my Dad was still around so I could sit her down next to him and say: “Tell him, Ruth”.

This is a picture of Ruth with a professor who teaches “Social Problems and Injustice” on a day when the two of them just happened to wear the same style hat.

Continuum

Soaking in the present, each moment a glorious gift,like a lover’s kiss.

 Snapshots in time float on a river of metamorphosis, flowing toward the next waterfall of inevitable change.

A continuum.