I’m Not Obese…… The Continuing Saga!

When I submitted my original column “I’m Not Obese…..”, I thought that I would be through with it, at least until “The Runner” and I, in the year 2014, ran the Great Race on my eighty fifth birthday.

But I did not reckon with Sid “it’s a slow week, send me a column” Riley, Mangling Editor of the Jackson County Times. Sid subtitled the piece “The Saga of Homer Hirt”. I have never known a saga that was confined to one short rendition. Homer’s (no kin) Iliad and his Odyssey were sagas, and they continued on and on…..and on. So, because of this precedent, I feel that I must continue “The Saga”, with a tip of my hat to the original Homer.

The Times article hit the newsstands on Wednesday. I attended the Covenant Hospice’s Garden Gala the following Saturday. I had purchased two tickets, but went alone. As I checked in the Saga began. “Where is she?” the lady that took my tickets asked, looking out into the parking lot. “I’m alone” I said, rather tersely. I went through the portal into the garden. I checked out the auction items. Folks approached me, commenting on the article and then saying: “I’ve figured out who ‘The Runner” is”, and would give me the name of someone that fit the description. I picked up a couple of prospects that way, but no phone numbers.

My doctor had read my piece and complimented me on the fact that I had lost weight and that my blood pressure was down and that I was obviously doing all right in other ways, also. He suggested an office visit to check out my medications. I thought he was going to suggest Viagra, but he explained that my blood pressure dosage might possibly be reduced.

I got compliments on the way my size 42 blazer fit. Since then I have found that my size 40 sport coat fits even better. It is an old coat, though. This is obvious because it was made in the United States. I am down to 190 pounds, and to encourage my goal of reaching 170 I have had my Navy dress white uniform cleaned and pressed, and I will adorn it with my four service awards and maybe even purchase a sword. I once owned a Navy sword, but I believe I left it somewhere in Norfolk, Virginia, perhaps in a pawn shop.

My walks along U. S. 90 have drawn comments. Some folks are concerned because they think that my gait is unsteady. This is not so; it is just how we sailors walk. Once aboard a ship for any length of time, the “roll” comes naturally, and never leaves you. A ship pitches, rolls and yaws, and you must compensate for the motions. This means that you end up walking as though the leg you step forward with shortens, briefly, an inch, and then the other leg shortens an inch when it follows. That’s the best description I can give of the rolling walk.

Have you ever watched the July 4th program on PBS, where each of the services, in turn, sends out a four person honor guard, carrying not only our National Ensign, but the flag of that service? All walk straight and true except for the Navy folks. They wobble and roll, and the flags wig-wag as though the sailors were waving them at their mothers in the audience. If I were Chief of Naval Operations, I would hire four Marines to carry our flags.

I have also been accused of being a mouth breather when I walk. I am in reality lip-syncing. The best of musicians, with the possible exception of Aretha Franklin, lip-sync. I lip-sync so that I can keep time. I first tried marches, but not many marches have words, just drums and horns, which makes sounds that are difficult to reproduce verbally. I moved on to sea chanteys. “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” is something like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. It never seems to end. “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” worked well for a time. This song describes a lovely young woman covered with tattoos of all the lands and seas of the world. When the lyrics move to describe scenes below her shoulders they get interesting, but I can’t recall all of the verses. It was written, words and music, by Groucho Marx, but appropriated by sailors as one of our own.

I have finally settled on Beach Boy songs. “Rhonda” is good, but a friend of mine by that name who works at the School Board office says that she doesn’t care for it because it goes “Help me, Rhonda, help me get her out of my mind” and she does not like to be second best. “Everybody’s Surfing Now” is also fine, and it does not pertain to the Internet, as younger folk might think. “Sloop John B” tells of a small sailing ship making a port call in Nassau, and I can relate to that, particularly the part that goes “Send for the captain ashore, let me go home”.

But the best, and the one where I can really step out, and walk sometimes an extra half mile, is “California Girls”. I visited San Diego a year ago, and rode along the coast. The words of the song still hold true. The Master of the Universe must have spent an extra couple of minutes during those six days of Creation planting the genes that would eventually give us these fine creatures. To watch one (or more) walk down the sands, clad in a bikini (no thongs, please), smiling the smile made famous by Mona Lisa…………… no wonder my pace is more sprightly, and no surprise that I, too, smile in remembrance of days gone by.

SCRAPS OF TIME…….....

By Homer Hirt
Several months ago I happened across a quote “Make use of scraps of time”. I promptly printed out several pages of this message that I thought quite uplifting, cut them apart and made a nuisance of myself by passing them out to members of the Sneads Methodist Church. Some folks questioned me, and some looked at me as though I had lost my mind, a thought that runs through their brains more and more as I age..
Then yesterday during my daily walk along U. S. 90 I began thinking about time itself. I know that seconds make minutes, minutes make hours and hours make up our days. I won’t belabor the concept of how many seconds there are in a day, but we do know that there are twenty four hours, and with a little left over. The leftovers bunch up and soon we have to have a Leap Year, and we give February an extra day every four years. Remember the old rhyme “Thirty days hath September…….all the rest I can’t remember”. This messes up calendars and used to confuse our old date/time wind-up watches. I recall once writing up a field engineering report for the thirtieth day of February. This did not impress my boss very much.
Of course, one tradition for Leap Year is that a woman can propose marriage to a man during this time without embarrassment. My late wife Theresa proposed to me three times one Leap Year, and I finally accepted. Then she wanted me to get down on one knee and propose on my own! I told her not to push her luck. There was still time for our President to have his own war, and send for me.
So we have irregular months, containing anything from twenty eight days to thirty one days. Our Congress, many years ago, decided that Daylight Savings would help us win World War II. I don’t know that it did, but it left a nation victorious and confused.
Several years ago my daughter, Ashlee the Nutritionist, was being moved from Pensacola to Daytona Beach by her company. She had a large Rottweiler and she knew that it would be some time before she could find a home that would accept the dog, so I agreed to keep her in our pool yard. Sasha picked up the habit of stationing herself on our patio at about 5:15 AM, looking through the family room and the hall into my bedroom. If I did not stir, she would bark once, and after a few minutes, again. This would continue until I got up. Sometimes the neighbors got up, also. Then the time changed. I had no trouble setting my clocks ahead or back, but I never figured out how to reset a 110 pound dog.
Shipboard duty gave me a new sense of the importance of time. The Navy had to have its ships working together, so messages were timed and dated according to “Zulu” time. This is the time that it is on the Prime Meridian, or Greenwich Mean Time, in England. On the individual ships, however, we went by local time, but did not pay any attention to AM and PM, just began with 0001 and ran it through 2400. Even our clocks showed 24 hours. It took a while for a new man not to count up on his fingers to determine what time it really was.
A holdover from sailing days was the bell system, whereupon the ship’s bell was tolled every thirty minutes, up to eight bells, when it started all over. In olden times one man was stationed to turn the “glass”, upside down every time the sand ran down, approximately every thirty minutes. I would think that wet days would cause the sand to run more slowly. Even then it was probably more accurate than clocks, which were non existent on ships because all of them were pendulum timepieces.
Of course the commanding officer had to get into the act. A Dutch tugboat skipper wrote that the captain of a ship was the best argument for the existence of a Supreme Being that he knew. He reasoned that the captain did not think he was God, but he was certain that he sat at His right hand, and assisted in controlling the Universe. On all Navy ships at noon the Officer of the Deck sends a messenger to the Captain. The messenger salutes and says” Sir, the Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports that it is 1200, and the chronometers have been wound”. To which the Captain replies” “Very well, make it so”. In other words, it isn’t noon until the Captain says it is.
That’s close enough to controlling the Universe for me!

WHAT I WISH I HAD WRITTEN!

I am often chided about my sea stories and my pride in the United States Navy. My fellow coffee drinkers in Chattahoochee refer to me as “The Admiral”, although I am far from that. My fifteen year old grandson, taken with my mementos and books, told me one day that “you are only two steps in rank from admiral”. It is really three steps, but those steps could well be the three greatest steps ever known to anyone. I have written articles about the sea and the ships, but I could never put it down as succinctly and as accurately as these few lines do.

I did not compose them.

I only wish I had.
I WAS A SAILOR ONCE………..

I liked standing on the bridge wing at sunrise with salt spray in my face and clean ocean winds whipping in from the four quarters of the globe.

I liked the sounds of the Navy - the piercing trill of the boatswain’s pipe, the syncopated clangor of the ship’s bell on the quarterdeck and the strong language and laughter of sailors at work.
I liked Navy vessels - plodding fleet auxiliaries and amphibs, sleek submarines and steady, solid aircraft carriers.

I liked the proud names of Navy ships: Midway, Lexington, Saratoga, Coral Sea, Antietam, Valley Forge — memorials of great battles won and tribulations overcome.

I liked the lean angular names of Navy “tin-cans” and escorts— Fletcher, Saufley, Samuel B. Roberts, Burke – mementos of heroes who went before us.

And the others—San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles, St. Paul, Chicago, Oklahoma City, named for our cities.

I liked the tempo of a Navy band.

I liked liberty call and the spicy scent of a foreign port.

I even liked the never-ending paperwork and the all hands working parties, as my ship filled herself with the multitude of supplies, and then cut ties to the land and moved to carry out her mission anywhere on the globe where there was water enough to float her.

I liked the sailors: officers and enlisted men from all parts of the land: farms of the Midwest, small towns of New England and the South, from the cities and the mountains and the prairies, from all walks of life. I trusted and depended on them as they trusted and depended on me – for professional competence, for comradeship, for strength and courage.

In a word, they were shipmates, then and forever.

I liked the surge of adventure in my heart, when the word was passed: “Now here this: now set the special sea and anchor detail – all hands to quarters for leaving port” and I liked the infectious thrill of sighting home again, with the waving hands of welcome from family and friends waiting pierside.
The work was hard and dangerous; the going rough at times; the parting from loved ones painful; but the companionship of robust Navy laughter, the “all for one and one for all” philosophy of the sea was ever present.

I liked the serenity of the sea after a day of hard ship’s work, as flying fish flitted across the wave tops and sunset gave way to night.

I liked the feel of the Navy in darkness – the masthead and range lights, the red and green navigation lights and the stern light, the pulsating phosphorescence of radar repeaters – they cut through the dusk and joined with the mirror of stars overhead. And I liked drifting off to sleep, lulled by the myriad noises, large and small, that told me my ship was alive and well, and that my shipmates on watch would keep me safe.

I liked quiet mid-watches with the aroma of strong coffee – the lifeblood of the Navy – permeating everywhere.

I liked hectic watches when the exacting minuet of haze-gray shapes racing at flank speed kept all hands on the razor’s edge of alertness.

I liked the sudden electricity of “General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands man your battle stations”, followed by the hurried clamor of running feet on ladders and the resounding thump of watertight doors as the ship transformed herself in a few brief seconds from a peaceful workplace to a weapon of war – ready for anything.

And I liked the sight of space-age equipment manned by youngsters clad in dungarees and wearing soundpowered phones that their grandfathers would still recognize.

I liked the traditions of the Navy and the men and women who made them. I liked the proud names of Navy heroes: Bainbridge, Halsey, Nimitz, Perry, Farragut, John Paul Jones and Arleigh Burke.

A sailor could find much in the Navy: comrades-in-arms, pride in self and country, mastery of the seaman’s trade. An adolescent could find adulthood.

In years to come, when we sailors are home from the sea, we still remember with fondness and respect the ocean in all its moods – the impossible shimmering mirror calm and the storm-tossed green water surging over the bow.

And then there will come again a faint whiff of stack gas, a faint echo of engine and rudder orders, a vision of the bright bunting of signal flags snapping at the yardarm, a refrain of hearty laughter in the wardroom and the chiefs’ quarters and on the mess decks.

Gone ashore for good, we grow humble about our Navy days, when the seas were a part of us and a new port-of-call was ever over the horizon.

Remembering this, we stand taller and say “I WAS A SAILOR ONCE”.

(Note: this has been around for some time, now making the circuit via E Mail from one sailor to another. I received it from a retired Seal; I passed it on to a Navy pilot.

I wrote an article about Arleigh Burke, who personified these feelings to me. Burke was a destroyer man, as was I. He commanded a Destroyer Division in World War II, and was the chief-of-staff for Admiral Marc Michner. He went on to be Chief of Naval Operations for an unprecedented three terms. When he was buried at Annapolis, his tombstone gave the usual “born” and “died” dates, his name and rank and then there followed the single word “Sailor”. This was a most fitting description.)