THE SPIN OF THE MANDELA

When I blog I try to be the man I mean to be. Sometimes the writing alone is enough to bring me back to the beam but other times one post will follow another and another and there is a hiatus. I don't really mean to blog about politics and I cannot tell myself that what I write is the product of deep thought and painful attention to all detail if it's about politics since we have agreed to accept disagreement. On the other hand there is the old drill of Lewis Carroll and one can find oneself saying,
    
       Leopards have spots
      Therefore all spotted things are leopards.

I suspect, from time to time, that not all things with spots are leopards.

I set out tonight to write about the recent visit of a friend. It got lost somehow in the tangle of words.
Civility is probably not in general usage anymore. It is rapidly becoming one of those dead words that nobody ever heard of and certainly doesn't understand. It seems to have passed out of favor back in the late 60's and early 70's. Fortunately for me, that was when I was raised and so it still means something to me beyond a word from the depths of time. It's totally lost and foreign to the current generation of snowflakes.

Our last visitor is a very interesting man with a fascinating history. He and his family made it out of Hitler's Germany in the late 30's and he spent the war in London and underwent 2 years living in and out of air raid shelters during the Blitz. He always puts me in mind of my very first ship CO on USS Connole. Captain Serge Yonov  who was on one of the last ships out of Riga before it was overrun by the Red Army. He was a Latvian refugee who landed in Danzig and made his way overland to Berlin and ended up after the war in Austria for a time before his remaining family moved to America by good fortune and the Orthodox Church.

He joined the Navy after a stint at the Colorado School of Mines. He was one of the best skippers I ever worked for. He told me that for a short while he was inducted into the Hitler Youth because that's how the State worked back then. Can you imagine that man surviving in this day and age with that hanging over his head?

SERGE YONOV

When men were men and women were strong enough.