Dear One –
I hope you are enjoying a beautiful June day, wherever you are.
Here in southern California the hedges are laden with honeysuckle and jasmine blossoms. The smells are delicious! There are trees in full bloom with lavender flowers and gorgeous bushes and vines overflowing with bright pink morning glories or lush fuchsia bougainvillea. Here the lodgings range from mansions and beachfront luxury homes to apartments to old-style California bungalows. There has often been an overcast of dense clouds, and my son tells me here near the Pacific Ocean this time of year is often characterized by “June gloom.” The overcast of damp air and clouds wasn’t burned off by the sun until about 3 PM the other day.
Tom, baby Colin and I went to the beach where a bay comes into the ocean. There is a breaker made of large black rocks and the area is called “The Wedge”. A score of intrepid surfers, body boarders and other wet-suited figures challenged some large waves that peaked with a hint of indigo as the curl rose over itself right at the very edge of the water, almost. On the beach we joined about twice as many people scattered in the area, some watching the activity of the surfers.
After settling the baby’s car seat and diaper bag, the beach blanket, and our flip-flops in good view of the oceanic dramas enacted in front of us to the lovely sound of the waves meeting the sand, Tom stayed with Colin, who was still sleeping. And I headed for a walk along the edge of salt water and sand as the tide crept or flowed in, sometimes coming across my toes, sometimes surprising me by splashing all the way up to my thighs, drenching my bright green shorts, but gladdening my heart, feeling welcomed and remembered somehow by the big ocean.
Then later we watched a huge pod of dark grey dolphins cavorting in front of us, no doubt lunching on a wealth of bait fish. Sometimes the fins of five or six at a time appeared and one even jumped right out of the water all together, the closest they came to us. They were really show stealers, putting the surfers to shame with their playfulness and wet fellowship.
I thought about how I was at the other side of this huge ocean so recently, and of how many times I had flown over it and spent time on various islands in the middle of the deep. I was musing about time spent on the atolls on the tops of huge undersea volcanoes, swimming in watered colored by the reflections of the sun on bright white iridescent coral sands. I thought about other times on other beaches looking across various bodies of water . . .the Atlantic, too, of course, from Maine to central Florida, skipping down this way but not in this order: Maine; Massachusetts; Rehoboth, Delaware; and Ocean City, Maryland; the Outer Banks of North Carolina at Duck; and the first visit to the Atlantic – Avalon, New Jersey, the summer I was fifteen.
Virginia Beach; St, Mary’s Island, Georgia; Solomon’s Island, Georgia; too and then down to Florida: Jacksonville Beach; St. Augustine; the top of the Gulf of Mexico . . . Pensacola, a name beloved to some friends in the Navy, too . . . now sadly threatened by the gushing deep water oil well disaster . . . Satellite Beach, so dear to our whole family and my home off and on for many years . . . the beaches near Tampa; and of course Longboat Key where my parents have lived since Dad retired more than seventeen years ago . . . and all the way down back on the east coast to Jupiter Beach . . . back up to Sebastian were the huge eastern coastal waterway rivers empty into the Atlantic.
Virginia Beach; St, Mary’s Island, Georgia; Solomon’s Island, Georgia; too and then down to Florida: Jacksonville Beach; St. Augustine; the top of the Gulf of Mexico . . . Pensacola, a name beloved to some friends in the Navy, too . . . now sadly threatened by the gushing deep water oil well disaster . . . Satellite Beach, so dear to our whole family and my home off and on for many years . . . the beaches near Tampa; and of course Longboat Key where my parents have lived since Dad retired more than seventeen years ago . . . and all the way down back on the east coast to Jupiter Beach . . . back up to Sebastian were the huge eastern coastal waterway rivers empty into the Atlantic.
My thoughts turned not only to oceans and beaches and islands, but to the many people I love who are associated with those places. Some are family members, many are friends and quite a few were comrades-in-arms in the old Cold War days. Once a woman and I became friends while teaming on a spiritual renewal weekend in an Emmaus community in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area. I later visited her and her husband along with their new baby daughter when I was already in ministry serving the three rural churches in West Virginia. I was taking my first break, six months into the huge transition from student to brand new pastor. They had moved from the Washington, D.C. area down to Pensacola, Florida.
I had met her husband at a potluck luncheon back on the fall of 1995. We had lunch with family members while teaming during that last fall in Seminary. He was a helicopter rescue pilot, and I had been a non-rated aircrew member with a helicopter rescue squadron in addition to my main duties helping monitor the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when I was first on active duty. I used to fly with the helicopter squadron members when we had space launches and missile tests if a Soviet ship was off the coast of central Florida monitoring them. I know I have mentioned this in other musings. This was in the era of the first five test launches of the Space Shuttle in the early 1980s.
Anyway, when I met my team member’s husband, because the helicopter rescue community is very small, we talked about friends we had in common for a short time, but there were a lot of people at the potluck lunch and I really only spoke with him for a few minutes.
About fourteen months later, when I visited them in Pensacola, my friend and I were sitting in the living room talking in the late evening, settling down to catch up with one another. It must have looked to her husband like we were dug in for the night, so he headed to bed. However, a few minutes later he came out of their bedroom again and had a funny look on his face.
About fourteen months later, when I visited them in Pensacola, my friend and I were sitting in the living room talking in the late evening, settling down to catch up with one another. It must have looked to her husband like we were dug in for the night, so he headed to bed. However, a few minutes later he came out of their bedroom again and had a funny look on his face.
“Didn’t we meet sometime in the Air Force? I feel like we may have dated before.”
My friend looked understandably shocked, and I looked back at him with a confused expression on my face. This was 1997, and they had been married for about five years, as I remember. Because the helicopter rescue community is small as I already mentioned, often those who work in it had to spend more time than many other active duty members on remote assignments away from their families. We started asking each other where we had been where.
It turned out that in spring of 1985 when he was still single and I had been divorced for a while, when I was working with the F-15 pilots who intercepted Soviet bombers exercising off the coasts of Alaska, I had accompanied them for about a month to South Korea. There was a big annual exercise and we were stationed at a base in the southern area and they flew over the Yellow Sea in between South Korea and the east coast of China.
It turned out that in spring of 1985 when he was still single and I had been divorced for a while, when I was working with the F-15 pilots who intercepted Soviet bombers exercising off the coasts of Alaska, I had accompanied them for about a month to South Korea. There was a big annual exercise and we were stationed at a base in the southern area and they flew over the Yellow Sea in between South Korea and the east coast of China.
My pilot friends had made me “Commander-in-Chief” of shopping (CINC SHOPPING) and I had made two round trips up to Osan Air Base, where a good friend, Kent, from earlier days in the Air Force was serving his unaccompanied year, leaving his fiancée behind in Los Angeles. The whole squadron had ordered Prussian blue flight-suit style outfits with a map of Alaska embroidered on the back. On the front of the suits there was also embroidery depicting their flight wings and their tactical call signs. You’d have to know them to understand why this was important to them.
(Later, the first time they all wore them when we were in Japan for a week on the way home to Alaska, they all looked really wonderful in them.)
(Later, the first time they all wore them when we were in Japan for a week on the way home to Alaska, they all looked really wonderful in them.)
Anyway, I was supposed to check and make sure the Korean tailors had all the embroidered names right, etc., and check to see that the suits would be finished by the end of the exercise. Within a few days of beginning our deployment, I flew up from Kwang Ju Air Base, where we were stationed, to Osan Air Base not far from Seoul. With the help of Kent, I found the tailor shop in the maze of the nooks and crannies of the marketplace outside one of the gates of the air base. When I went back to pick them up near the end of our deployment, I also took delivery on a huge amount of wallets, purses, briefcases and other items made out of eel skin. The pilots and their wives had perused catalogs and I was in charge of bringing those eel skin dreams to reality.
O.K. So, the first time I was up there, Kent had given me a tour of his work place, and then had to be on duty until dinner time. We made arrangements to meet at the Officer’s Club for dinner. I was sitting in the lobby of the “O” Club waiting for him when two men in the usual “green bag” flight suits with helicopter rescue badges on them walked into the lobby from the main door of the club. One was a good friend I had flown with in Florida. The other one turned out to be . . . you guessed it . . . the future husband of my friend from the Emmaus team in whose living room I was sitting in eleven years later!
We all laughed when we realized it. After knowing them as a couple for about four years, it turned out I had met and had dinner with him along with my other two friends about six years before the two of them had met.
Sadly, though, I found out two summers ago that my friend, Kent, passed away about three years before that. The things you can find out through internet search engines. You don’t always want to know all of it.
But it’s better to focus on the loving memories and fellowship that goes beyond time and space.
Poignant.
Endearing reminiscences.
But back to the other side of the Pacific so many years after that time. My son was on active duty as a US Marine when he participated in the same type of exercise in South Korea exactly ten years after I was there. And here we were together with his sweet baby boy on the other side of that big drink of an ocean, so often not at all pacific.
And I also couldn’t help thinking about the tensions between South and North Korea over the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel by a North Korean torpedo launched from a submarine in late March. If only all that wasn’t still going on . . . like a broken record, but affecting so many lives in so many negative ways.
And I also couldn’t help thinking about the tensions between South and North Korea over the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel by a North Korean torpedo launched from a submarine in late March. If only all that wasn’t still going on . . . like a broken record, but affecting so many lives in so many negative ways.
Jumping back to a few days ago, on the way to where we parked, we saw two tourists with rented surf boards and no signs of wet suits crossing a street and heading to the beach. Tom talked about how good it was the tourist season wasn’t in full play yet.
We commented on which houses we liked. Tom seems to prefer the Mediterranean style with orange or red-tiled roofs and fanciful arched windows and doorways. I liked some of them, too, but mostly just enjoyed seeing the variety and creativity displayed in the architecture of the houses as well as in the verdant and sometimes fanciful gardens.
Oh, and I don’t think I told you that last Saturday I took a walk with all four of my Southern Californian grandchildren to a nature center on the back bay. The area is the top of the same inlet that Tom and Colin and I watched empty into the Pacific the other day. Colin was in the stroller and Alexis, Drew, and Trevor were troopers walking along with me, or running ahead sometimes. The nature center has wonderful displays and is architecturally very interesting. You can look out of those big binoculars on the roof, or you can continue down the path to the center itself.
Inside, there is a children’s room with puzzles, snakes, spiders, turtles, books, and coloring papers. There are all sorts of nature displays about the flora and the fauns of the tidal marshes and the hillsides covered with tall grass.
We all had a lovely time. On the way home, though, it was getting hot. Tom and Lisa had been out doing errands, and Tom came to pick us up in the car, meeting us a few blocks from their home. We had probably walked about six miles all together and I was filled with joy from the opportunity.
When I started to write this I was thinking I would tell you more about the contrasts I have seen in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan between 1994 and now . . . but I guess we’ll do that next time, OK?
Hope you have a blessed weekend.
As ever – Kathy
Consider the Lilies of the Field
[Jesus said,] “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Matthew 6:25-34
Kathleen Ware Harris © 2012
kwharris777@gmail.com
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