The Noon-day Sun

Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the Noon-day Sun ... or so someone said. Last Quarter men maybe respect fewer boundaries, still. I took off this week to go down to our home on a bay in a backwater town in Virginia. I was recovering from Special Victims' Day and the virus that my grand-daughter's cohort bestowed upon me when we left to the South and still bronchial now that I'm back.

The plan was to repair the bulkhead that Hurricane Sandy and the Good Lord had left in a state of disarray. Oh, the bulkhead, itself, hadn't been breached ... it was still holding the soil and sand back from being reclaimed by the greatest Goddess of them all, the Sea. I call, in this case, the Atlantic Ocean "the Sea" following a tradition that I suspect arises from a fear of recognizing that all the seas and maybe all the inland seas and lakes and rivers are part and parcel of one enormous conglomerate multi tentacled Goddess who spreads her parts over and around "all" -- too big to imagine and always waiting to reclaim what is rightly hers and hers alone. The Psalmist said: To God is the Earth and all that it contains.  From the little child building her or his sandcastles near Her to the maybe 3 Billion trusting Souls who imagine they can live in proximity to her, all eventually get their wake-up call ... I had a friend who years ago wrote something he called, as I now recall.

                                                    Our History in the Sea:
                                                      Marinated Humanity

 Now, I'm many things but not ... at least not "officially" ... a tradesman carpenter. Oh, my Father made certain that I could plumb and cut wood, almost at the same time. He trained me in saying nothing about the fact that his table saw was not quite electrically grounded, giving the user an occasional reminder of its power and preparing me to think it was silly to bother to run up and down stairs to shut off electricity at "the box" just because one was changing a receptacle that carried as much danger, I suspect, as a young woman with a cardiac patient on a hot Summer night. "Just watch what yer doin'," he would say, "just watch out."

Bullocks! Older Folk (maybe it's just Older Men ... retired Pater Familias types) feel they can fix anything. Give 'em a power saw, some hammers, sundry other tools, the right kind of nails, a lumber yard and enough extension cords or batteries to reach the job and they're off like oversized "Bob the Builders" ready to fix the World. They think it through mostly in their heads ... some calculations. 'Hell, the only difference between a hack and a carpenter is that the carpenter knows how to fix his mistakes' ... oh! and is 30 years younger and has a couple of indentured sons to carry on the tradition.

Anyhow. Humility is a good thing -- even if typically the last guest to arrive at a party. I got through about a third of the job ... enough to work with some smaller storms and left the other two thirds for next month ... when my back and knees and elbows and feet heal from all the little wounds accumulated in a couple of days of crawling and sawing and hammering on my little 70 foot long sea-wall.

Blessed are you God, King of the Universe, who bestowed upon me a partner who says "enough." One of the many names different religious folk have bestowed upon the Divininity is "Shaddai" which is taken by most commentaries-exegetists to mean "He who said enough" to the Universe ... she'Amar dai l'Olam ... "enough!" to the world that He created. Creating, to these folk, not only involves a plan but a vision about when, to quote the partners of fools such as I, "Enough is enough."  

Any case, I allocated today back home in Philadelphia to write a paper for presenting later this week to a bunch of theoretical types coming to listen to an old man wearing a different kind of tool belt.