Kinda got outa sync.
I've been writing in the mornings all week. Internet connections and bad computer ju-ju and such. Then leaving Deb's and runnin' across the State and talking to old friends 'till after midnight. It all just adds up.
See, this blog has mostly been written by a tired guy with tangled hair, burnt skin and images of the day still echoing in his head. Still gettin' the bugs out of his teeth and letting the sound of the V-twin subside. A guy who hadn't planned or "slept on it" or reflected. A guy writing from his gut. And blank you, Norman Mailer. (Never liked the fat, obnoxious sucker anyway.)
This blog, and its words, came from the saddle.
Well...
He's baaaack...
Good, bad or indifferent -- I'm sitting alone in a hotel room in Tallahassee, FL, stumblin' 'round the keyboard with fingers that will not yet fully uncurl and feeling
right about that. Oh, I don't regret the posts of the last week -- think that was how it was supposed to be for where I was and what was experienced. But this blog is about the journey and the 'scoot and what that means and, more importantly, what that produces.
I mean, let's face it children, I'm in no danger of ever becoming Evelyn Waugh, of whom another writer (was it Wodehouse?) remarked, that he every so often read Waugh "...just to see what pretty new things the Language had got up to.". I'm just a hack rambler and my stuff is best when it comes out raw, unfiltered -- straight from the road.
Friday I went to the ocean.
It was time. Time to peel it onto A1A, to stop at the place where I used to sit, with Richard Rice and Jack and all the others and talk to the young man now occupying that place -- in a modern, glassed-in, fiberglass "Lifeguard Station", not the old wooden shack we had -- about the beach and how it has changed and its shape and the reefs and how many fins they see and all of it. Time to gaze out upon her horizon and try to judge her mood, what she was thinking, what her currents were, what she had in store. It was time to run further down the island to the House of Refuge, built in the 1830's and still defiantly there, the last of the last of the old Coast Guard rescue stations on that whole coast. She is lovingly maintained (by a County and people who really get it) and beautiful as ever, that little wood frame building. Standing, like a miniature queen herself, on her little ten foot bluff of coral cliff, staring at the might and majesty of that big ocean. And she doesn't blink. For though the brave men who manned her no longer row out into the surf in those frail wooden boats, to rob the Queen of a few survivors left from the wreckage she cast upon the reefs, the House, though a museum now, is still there. Listening closely, I heard her say: "Look at me, I'm still here. And by being here I still rob you. I rob you like I did all those years ago, when those boys came out in the eye and hugged to my lee as the eye wall passed and you washed over the whole island. I rob you of me.".
Sometimes I think that when I'm done I should have someone lay my dust by her so that if and when the ocean does take her, I'll go to the deep with her, huggin' tight to her lee side, safe and at peace.
Old men talk too much.
I said my goodbyes to the ocean and went back to my sister's house. Packing bags, checking the 'scoot and starting the process of saying goodbye to them. And then it was Saturday and I hugged three generations of my family and got on the 'scoot and promptly threw it into neutral and got back off and hugged my little sister one more time and we promised, meaning it, that we wouldn't let this much time go by again and I hugged her one more time after that because I love her and because I'm an old man now and there are no guarantees.
Rollin' onto the road, I saw their waves in the mirrors and raised my arm once -- then, twisting the throttle, there was only me and the wind and the engine and the hum of the tires on that concrete goddess that holds my soul.
Florida has a hole in its middle. A big hole. And, like every hole in this State, it's full of water. Okeechobee it's called. Damn big lake. Hell, maybe that's what Okeechobee means in Seminole.
Ran out the Palm City road to the old Martin Highway. Out past Indiantown, where we had to change our spikes when we ran there, because they had a grass track 'cause those Seminole boys ran barefoot and fleet and proud the way Indians should. Down through that tunnel of trees, almost like a single canopy rain forest, that leads to the waters. Runnin' past the town now, into citrus and cattle country. Rollin' fast and hard, bright sky, dry roads, light wind. Headin' to the Gulf coast and an appointment 40 years overdue.
I hit Slattery in the face, hard.
Hit him with a hard, straight left, just like the old man, in his day a top contender in professional boxing, had taught me to. Hit him so hard that he saw stars and his eyes teared. And in that single act, I learned some of the great lessons of life. I learned of remorse. I learned of friendship. I learned that doing violence was often more painful than recieving it. I learned that not even the prettiest girl in the eighth grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school was worth hurting a friend. That was over fifty years ago and I still remember it, and the anguish I felt, with absolute clarity. I try to hold that memory close, because over the years I have forgotten it once or twice and have had to re-learn those lessons with great pain and at even greater cost.
Never hurt the people you love.
Being human, frail and weak, makes that impossible. But, oh, one must try -- always.
I first met the boy who would become Timothy Patrick Slattery, LtCDR (Ret.), USN, sometime around Kindergarten. Two little boys in our white shirts, maroon ties with "OLPH" embroidered in gold upon them. Our cocoa brown belts, cocoa brown slacks, cocoa brown socks and cocoa brown shoes. Trundled off to the good Sisters of St. Dominic, OP -- the honest to God penguins -- to get an education. And a damn fine one, too. At a real Grammar, not Elementary, School -- Kindergarten through eighth -- and one sailed through the New York State Regent's Examinations and the prep school exams like they weren't there. Because those Nuns were unforgiving and deadly with those long thin wooden pointers and metal edged wooden rulers and meaner than a one eyed snake, but they were also smarter than hell and damn fine teachers. For all the bad that has been written of them, much of it true, I wish to God we had more of them in today's classrooms, unfettered by the current educational insanity, instead of the Alinskyised, self-centered, party-line spouting semi-literates we have inflicting lies and monotheistic neo-socialist pap upon the poor defenseless children of the day.
If I had strong feelings upon the matter -- which, obviously, I don't.
But one result of their teaching is that the errors one sees in this blog are usually on purpose. They taught me the rules. Well. They also taught me how to break them for effect.
And "Modules"? News flash: "Modules" are something we flew to the moon. How's your concept of 'em working out for you, Bunkie?
Tim's dad and mine, both WW II vets (those guys who later built and flew those "Modules" to the moon), bought modest but nice houses in a slightly upscale post war subdivision. It was a neighborhood of hard working, modestly successful people who had just finished the minor task of saving the entire world. Ike was new in the White House, they had survived both the Great Depression and a monstrous war, came home got themselves educations and good jobs and if one really looked at America, the streets
were paved with gold. I have read too much of Washington and Adams and Jefferson to say, with absolute certainty, that our parents were the "Greatest Generation", but if they weren't, they were a damn close second. But they did have one flaw -- and, in the end, maybe a fatal flaw for America, the land they loved and preserved and grew at so great a cost to themselves -- they spoiled their children.
We wanted for nothing.
Not rich by American standards, to about 98% of the rest of the world we grew up in unimaginable wealth and comfort. And with hopes beyond thought. America was as clear and golden as the maple leaves on a crisp fall day.
So it was in that cradle of decent, loving people, safety and comfort, that I met Slats. Barely past being toddlers, we grew and fought and played ball and discovered the world. Boys fought in those days. Had a fistfight, then laughed and played a game of baseball together. Secure in our world, our lives and each other.
We are two months apart in age. We lived on the same block, had the same friends, went to the same schools (OLPH and, later, Seaton Hall), in the same class. Played in our very first band together (a polka band and very bad). Miss-used our first cuss words together because we had never heard our parents use them and didn't really know what they meant. He is one of the few people left on the planet who, like me, knows that Father Rampmier could say weekday Mass and eat breakfast in twenty minutes flat.
Important, seminal stuff.
But as time went on, our family traveled more and I began to tell the litany of places and schools and homes, like the beads on Sister Mary Agony's rosary, that would continue throughout my life. Our last real year together was '60-'61, our first (and my only) year at the Hall. Oh we'd see each other when my family was in from Florida or Pax River or wherever the airplanes had dragged us, but that was the final year of Harps and Slats.
And then, High School was over and Tim went off to Marist College and I went on the road (what else?) with the Jesters and then to the Army. And, no, he didn't know O'Reilley at Marist. Tim was Editor of the school paper his senior year -- OReilley was a Freshman and had not yet made the staff (in conversation I found Tim monumentally disinterested in that fact). But thanks for asking.
We had little contact after that. Heard from him when I was at Bragg, a young 2LT in 7th Special Forces Group, when he allowed me the enormous privilege of writing one of the letters of recommendation for his commission as a Naval Officer. I stand by, today, the words I wrote all those years ago. "I have known Mr. Slattery almost our entire lives. I know everything about him and, as a military officer myself, I would not hesitate, and indeed be honored, to serve with him in harm's way anywhere, anytime."
Slats is steady.
Next saw him in '71, right after he was back from Country. Roared up to his place on a 'scoot, on my way to New York. Spent a day with him and his new bride, Nan, Bruce's (our classmate at the Hall) twin. Neither of us knew it would be forty years before we spoke again.
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| Timothy Francis and Timothy Patrick: Harps & Slats |
So I rolled across Florida, through St. Pete and Clearwater, to Slat's house, to keep that appointment 40 years overdue.
It was a good visit with him and that little slip of a girl that is his bride, of 42 years now, and friend. It was a time of children and careers and thoughts on the state of the universe. Easy and stress free, because when people share, so closely, the truly formative years, they know too much of each other for any posturing or artifice (there's none of that in him anyway) to exist. He is a man that has known the anger of that big ocean, as well. Seen it so angry that it buckled the flight deck and cracked a major bulkhead on an a
ircraft carrier, for goodness sake. Gives one perspective on our place in the universe, on how inconsequential we really are. Just plain knocks all the BS outta 'ya.
We talked till after midnight, visited the next day and then it was about 1430 and time to roll.
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| Zipper and her people, Nancy and Tim |
I do not know if I will ever see my friends Tim and Nancy again. I hope to. I hope to be able to show them the West, a place that in all their 21 years of Navy travels they've never really been. Hope to get to swing by as I ensure that I spend more time with my own sister.
But, who knows? No guarantees on this road. If I do not, well, my memory of Slats is as steady as the man himself and will be to my final breath.
Runnin' north on 98, the road was kind to me. I ran that road straight and clean, between storms drenching west Florida and never felt a drop. Ran it north to Tallahassee and the room and the thoughts and the feelings. Ran it north, as it seems I always do now, to the words.
