Memorial Day 2014

When I am home on Memorial Day, I set my flag at half-mast.
At noon, I am standing at parade rest with the halyard in my hands.
When the air is right, I can hear the saluting cannon at Training Center Yorktown begin their twenty-one gun salute.
At the sound of the 21st cannon shot at 12:20 I come to attention, give a hand salute, and two-block the National Ensign.

I love the fact that the echo of the cannon shots travel to me over the very ground upon which General George Washington accepted British General Cornwallis' sword in surrender and won this country's freedom.

Thank you to those who gave all

"I would love you if I could"

"I would love you if I could"

never held a sadder conversation in my life

she walks into a room like nobody's business

fine black suits her well and she knows it

laugh lines her squinting eyes only when she looks at me

stops me dead

powerful curves pack perfectly into a black cocktail dress

many powers she holds in her fingertips

granted to the few who know her well

oh the way she moves her hips

Can only imagine the conversations/what she feels
when she lays her soft gentle shoulder against the bedsheet late at night

touch her hunger belly
plunge her most intimate feminine depth
feel the fire inside
muss her hair all up

Mother's Day 2014

My mother was the first born of Pauline Lukas and George Flury in Columbia Station, Ohio, just outside the bluecollar West end of Cleveland. She was born in the loft of a dirt floor garage on the rural acreage her parents had just purchased. My grandpa later built a house with his own hands on the property where they eventually raised nine children.

I asked my grandmother once why she turned out to be a farmer's wife when I knew she had been raised in the city of Lakewood. Gramma told me, "I *never* wanted to live on a farm ... it was your grandpa who had some kind of dream and took us all out there. One year, he brought home a cow, handed the reins to me, and said 'Take care of this'."

So. My mom grew up on a rural farm miles from civilization during the depths of the Great Depression. I have her graduation picture from Columbia High School Class of 1948. She was beautiful, and smart, too ... she was a lifelong member of Mensa who always had stacks of library books with torn pieces of newspaper marking her place along with Life, Saturday Review, and Time magazines scattered all over the living room when I was growing up. She gave me toy computers twice at Christmases in my youth ... how she found computer kits you built and ran with rubber bands and marbles in the 1960s still astonishes me to this day.

She also had the lifelong habit of saving chewed pieces of Wrigley's Spearmint gum on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. I thought this was a really odd habit when I was growing up. Until I realized as an adult later that when she was a kid growing up in 1933 ... 1935 ... 1937 ... she *never knew* when she would have another penny to buy a new stick of chewing gum.

One year in the early '80s while I was in my twenties, I was living at home with mom, in college on the G.I. Bill. I took her out to John Ascuaga's Nugget Casino for a Mother's Day dinner. We had to put our names on a waiting list of about twenty minutes. Mom went to play her nickle slot machines, I stopped at a blackjack table and threw a $5 chip on the felt. When they called our names I had parlayed that into $180. We had a very nice dinner.

Before I could return to the Coast Guard in 1985, I had to settle my mother's estate. When I packed up her household goods from our three bedroom ranch house in Reno I found an empty big, red, tinfoil-wrapped heart-shaped chocolate box I had given her some previous Mother's Day, my Fourth Grade report cards of straight A's when a Science teacher finally lit a fire under my ass in school, and two pieces of chewed Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum on the windowsill over her kitchen sink.

Mona Marie Louise Flury
Born August 27, 1930
Died December 10, 1985

SEA STORIES

SEA STORIES

Sailors have been telling stories ever since men have gone to sea. And men have always gone to sea

When I was a snot-nosed teenager fresh from bootcamp I would stagger across the messdeck rolling across the waves after the evening meal had been cleaned up, past the old salts holding court. These sometimes gray-haired but always fat-bellied men of the ocean were surrounded by an adoring audience of fresh cheeked sycophants listening with apt attention, open mouthed, hoping to absorb some of the saltiness of these rowdy balladeers by osmosis.

Their stories, what little I heard in my passing as I hoped to avoid being singled out for abuse and laughter at my greenness, were packed with outrageous yarns. Heroic struggles against the raging seas ... buxom wenches conquered overnight in obscure ports-of-call ... wardrooms full of command ineptitude ... and, always, the central figure of which was whatever fat-bellied bristly speaker held the floor. "What a load of bilge water!" I would think to myself lurching past, banging off the bulkheads, "What bunch of lies! What a string of fools listening to bigger fools."

I can't quite recall when, over my years at sea, that I became a gray-haired fat-bellied old salty fool holding court myself.

Apprentices aboard ships keep their own mouths shut, keep their head down and try to blend in without standing out. Any attempt to launch into a story of your own meagre sea time, or even the mere telling of how one rogue wave climbed over the gunwale that very morning at 0530 to soak you to your boondockers while scraping greasy dregs out of the breakfast pans over the side, was met with derisive hoots. "Boot! Shut the fuck up!" Your job was to know your place and do the grimiest, filthiest, most humilitating bidding imaginable. There were Men at work here. You, you pitiful seaworm, would never make it.

In this environment, riding surplus World War Two Navy ships handed down to the Coast Guard of the 1970s, learning my trade, I quickly realized what these blowhards were actually doing was passing down exactly the lore and lurid history I needed to absorb. They were holding court alright - they had paid full retail price for the yarn, real blood sweat and tears, and here they were giving it away to anyone who respected the telling - passing along free what you needed to become a real sailor.

Down in seaman's berthing in the worst riding damp dark bowel of the ship there lurked a crowded motley gang of thugs, hoodlams, petty thieves, riff-raff that would hurt you if you did not watch your step. The Wardroom absolutely and the Petty Officers pretty much never concerned themselves with what went on down in that hole. But if you held your tongue and did what you were told to do with at least adequate energy and a sense of humor, you might, in a few weeks or months at sea, notice that senior seaman who kept to himself mostly and nobody fucked with.

He was the Seaman the Boatswain would hollar for out on deck when things got sloppy. He was the Seaman that always got called to go out on the boats when the sun was splashing diamonds across the wavecrests while you stayed on deck in filthy dungarees scraping slimey seacritters off buoys with a long-handled trowel. He never had to scrub shitters on cleanups. If you did not become one of the gangsters took your time and did not assume too much, he might show you how to tie a monkey's fist on a ropeyarn Sunday down in the Bosun's Hole. If the Senior Seaman accepted your friendship you were golden.

Might have been my first ship, maybe my second, where I first heard the prototypical sailor's yarn. I have certainly heard it repeated at sea a hundred times since. Some old crusty fuck with gnarled knuckles wizened eyes lifer stripes and most definitely a short-timer would get a wistful far off look and declare to anyone within earshot, "When I retire, I swear I am gonna take an oar, hoist it aloft on me shoulder, and walk straight for the mountains. And the first lubber what asks me, 'Hey mate, what is that thing yer carryin'?' I swears I am going to plant that oar right in the ground and that is where I am goin' to make my stand." A full ten years after I ever did first hear that story spun I discovered while reading Homer from 850 B.C. that sailor's lament is a full 3,000 years old. And some old sailor told it to Homer.

There are certain conventions to be followed in telling a sea story well. Prodigeous amounts of alcohol work well in kicking one off. In a ship full of men far from home for months at a time the conquest of a fair maiden gets every sailor's attention every time. Academy Officers who know even less than the lowliest scullery maid issuing dumbass orders are always fair game, even far better if you have one on the X.O. (the Skipper is OFF-limits unless heroic) But without doubt the most common convention that draws the crew near and pulls their ear ...

"Now listen up. This one here is a No shitter ...."