Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  With each passing day, I'm reminded that I won't be around forever. I don't know when my time will come, hopefully not too soon, but one day it will come and aside from any money that I'll hopefully be able to pass down to my kids, I'd like to pass down some memories. Sometimes when certain of my children are here, we discuss things from our past, but I don't think I've ever really mentioned much about the time that Jan and I spent at Key West Florida. When I graduated from Radarman "A" school in July of 1972, I was assigned to work aboard an old WWII radar escort ship called the Kretchmer. It was home ported in Key West. Unfortunately I had to wait to catch up to the ship, as it was in the North Atlantic. I spent a few weeks at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, mainly cleaning barracks and doing a few stints on burial detail. That was kind of fun. The burial detail that is. At least it got me out of the barracks.  I caught up to the ship in South...

  I was planning on doing a blog post about taxes. I have a picture of all the papers and files and envelopes scattered all over the table, with a calculator and yellow legal pad, but I thought- how entertaining would that be? No doubt it would be a nice challenge to see how I could make it interesting, and maybe before the month is out, I'll do a post on that, just not today. I was looking through some photographs the other day, and ran across this one. It's a picture of my wife Jan. She's standing on the White Street Pier down in Key West, back around 1973 or so. It looks like she's using a fiberglass rod with a Zebco 33 reel. Not exactly made for saltwater, which is what we were surrounded by. Even the golf course pond was saltwater. I caught a twelve pound tarpon in it on a live shrimp. I was fishing with my division petty officer, who was considered a golf pro, so they let us fish in it. Jan and I spent many an evening fishing off the pier. I don't believe ...