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By Homer Hirt
“Heavenly shades of night are falling….
It’s Twilight Time….
Out of the mists your voice is calling….
It’s Twilight Time….
If there was ever a twilight time in my life, this is the day! …
I am now entering, as of six o’clock this morning, my ninetieth year…if all holds well.
I was first introduced into the light of day almost a century ago. Of course, this is an assumption. That’s when my mother said my birth occurred, and she was backed up by one doctor and a couple of nurses and a floor sweeper who happened by and stopped to gawk as I popped out.
It was not a bad time to be born.
I fulfilled the words of that great song “Dixie’s Land”. Daniel Emmett wrote it, and it goes “In Dixie’s Land where I was born in, early on one frosty mornin’” and if six AM on the fourteenth of December doesn’t meet THAT criteria, I don’t know what will.
I also pleased Homer, Sr., who secretly wished, I suspect, for a son who could sell Fords, but only after he spent a goodly time learning how to detail them, and how to smile and close a deal with a penurious farmer.
I’m not sure what my mother, Miz Rossie, wanted, except for some peace and quiet and a good nap, and maybe a bowl of pileau when she awoke. Pileau satisfies hunger well, if it is seasoned right, with plenty of black pepper and grease. Pogo spelled it “perloo”, but he was a possum from the Okefenokee Swamp up in Jawja, near Homerville, but closer to Fort Mudge. But that is another story, and a very good one.
“When purple colored curtains
Mark the end of day
I hear you again at Twilight Time”.
I am counting on making it through the day, and I will try to look for “purple colored curtains” that will mark it’s end. I hope that it will not be my end.
So what have I done with my days on my way to my nonagenarian years?
To tell the truth, I did not do much, except to avoid drafts and women bent on immediate matrimony. Eventual matrimony works out pretty well, but it should not be a surprise, even if the curtains are colored purple.
I did go to high school in Hoochieville and was successful enough there, I suppose. We walked across the auditorium stage in alphabetical order, and I was in the proper position and got the correct diploma.
College was something else.
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I was given….and I mean given….my only “D” grade. I received it in Physics, and the professor offered it to me under the condition that I never take another course from him. This really stood me in good stead when I joined the Navy and struggled with navigation and engineering and where to sit at dinner time when I became an officer.
“Deepening shadows gather splendor
As day is done
Fingers of night will soon surrender
The setting sun”
And this is a serious note in the story of my life.
I truly enjoyed my time at sea, particularly when I served in a “small boy”….the nickname given to our destroyers and destroyer escorts.
Here in my near-dotage I truly despise having to go out on a cool, damp, drizzly day, but when we could cast off all lines from a pier in Norfolk or Newport and move into the channel as mists gathered, and as a light rain fell, and wind kicked up so that there was a light chop on the waters, and the officer-of-the-deck signals “ahead one-third” I felt at home with all of the young officers from the past and a kinship with those that will follow me in the Sea Services.
And truly “deepening shadows gather splendor”…when we would go past landfall and see the colors that our oceans offer us: the Northern Lights as we would near the Arctic….the lowering clouds as the ship would approach a storm….the phosphorescence of our wake in the tropics and the brilliant green flash as the Western sun dipped below the far horizon…we understood these words.
“I count the moments
Till you’re here with me
Together at last at Twilight Time”
And I often think how fine it would be to…once again… step onto the weather deck of one of my ships and feel it surging beneath my feet and hear the commands that would take us out to the world.
And I would want my old shipmates with me…..the ones that garnered praises for skills at sea as we served our country proudly.
And, at the same time, I would like for my other friends, my family members, those who at times would get a glimpse of goals that I saw as important, to be there, also….somehow….
‘Together, at last
At Twilight Time”.
(Note to readers: “Twilight Time” was a love song from the sixties, and it was best done by a group, probably forgotten today in this time of poor music and bad lyrics, yclept The Platters. Scout around a bit and Google or whatever, and listen to them……and let romance and love move back into your life.)
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