(Yes, as a break from the glum seriousness of war, nuclear Iran, international terrorism and Planned Parenthood operating a chop shop for baby parts, it’s time for another adventure in Luna City, the small town in Texas where eccentricity does not just run in the streets – it stampedes through them in herds)
Sgt. Mom
A Diversion – The Tales of Luna City
The Daughter Unit and I were watching Northern Exposure
History Weekend – The Galveston Hurricane, 1900
To further the current work in progress (which will feature the heroine being in Galveston during the hurricane of 1900), I am re-reading Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm
That 1900 storm still stands as the single deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States, with a death toll equal of all later storms combined; at least 6,000 in Galveston alone a quarter of the population at the time and along the Texas coast. The storm surge went for miles inland, and may have carried away another 2,000, whose bodies were never found and never reported missing, as there was no one left to do so. Galveston Island a coastal sand-bar, little more than eight feet above sea level at its highest point was a busy and strategic port. At the turn of the last century, it was the largest city in Texas; a center of commerce, transportation hub and port of entry for immigrants coming into the Southwest by sea. Galveston was connected to the mainland across a normally placid lagoon by three railway trestles. Although the rival port city of Indianola, farther west along the Gulf Coast had been wiped out by a pair of hurricanes fifteen and twenty-five years before, generally the citizens of Galveston were complacent, comfortable in the belief that any storm and they had easily weathered many of them was readily survivable. And after all this was a new century, one marked by unparalleled technologic and scientific advances! So a sea-wall proposed by certain concerned citizens was never built; indeed, Isaac Cline had written an article for the local newspaper in 1891, arguing that such a wall was not necessary; it was impossible for a storm of sufficient destructive intensity to strike Galveston. And he, of course, was an expert.
Aiming to Misbehave
There’s things going on that I can’t really write about these days. This is a bit painful, much as I have become accustomed over the last twelve or thirteen years to blogging about things that concern me; things both personal and political and which I have always tossed out there in the ether for consideration. It’s a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ writing a note, sealing it in a bottle and throwing it into the vast ocean of the blogosphere, whereupon someone may discover it, uncork the bottle, read it and say to themselves “My, that is interesting!” Or relevant, insightful, et cetera. Which I can’t do any more as regards the family; in the wake of Dad’s death, Mom came to feel that certain of my musings and posts were an invasion of family privacy, and directly asked me not to blog about them so I have not, in deference to her wishes. She is as well as can be expected, though … and the current situation is something that Pip and Sander are handling, as they are geographically the closest.
Greek Idylls – Part 4
(And the last of my reminiscence of living in Athens from 1983 to 1985)
This is the conversation I had many times, on my days off while we were in Athens, when we would be sightseeing here and there, or taking the city bus downtown to the Zappion Gardens, and encounter a friendly and overwhelmingly curious local citizen who spoke English:
“Ahhh, you are American!? How long are you visiting Greece?”
“Yes. I’m not visiting, I’m assigned here; I’m in the Air Force.”
“Ahh, then your husband is at the Elleniko base! You live in where? Glyphada? Sourmena?”
“Umm. I am in the Air Force, and I live in Ano Glyphada.”
“But your husband, he is in the Air Force, too?” (They usually got a little puzzled at this point.)
“He is no longer my husband, or in the Air Force.” I would say, and they would usually change the subject at that point and ask about what I liked best about Greece. All but the dear elderly gentleman with his grandson, feeding the ducks at the Zappion Garden duck pond, who exclaimed, “But, Kyria, you must marry again at once! Your little daughter needs brothers!”
Of all the places I lived or traveled in, Greeks got down to the most intensely personal stuff on shorter acquaintance than anyone, even small-town Southern Americans. I think it is because even the big city, most were just a short time removed from a village where everyone knew everything there was to know about everyone else, back to any number of generations. Home, with a capitol H was a whitewashed stone and tile-roofed little village out in the islands, or in the mountains, to which you went in the summer, for Easter and over long holiday weekends; one merely lived in the city.