Hilton Head Island: Hits; coffee; an old friend

I thank Carlos for a link to an amusing site that shows the number one hit song in the US on your date of birth, assuming you are not much older than I, which amazingly a few of you are.  It only goes back to 1941.

On my birthday the song was ‘Piano Concerto in B Flat’, a big band version of Tchaikovsky.  I never would have expected that.

On Carol’s it was ‘Twilight Time’ by The Platters.  I do remember that.

If you want to find your own:

https://www.birthdayjams.com/

I am smiling this morning, not just becaue of the above view from where I am sitting by our bedroom windows in which I take constant pleasure, but in a quote from astronaut, Jessica Meir, about a tank on a new space station toilet that recycles urine into potable water:  “Today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee.”  And for a comment made about Monday’s journal post.  In the likely event you have not read it, I repeat it here.

Dabbler wrote: "I’d rather be around skeptics. Skeptics hardly ever kill those who disagree with them."

I've read and enjoyed your blog for some time now but never felt the urge to comment. If you don't mind, I'd like to have that put on a mug, with attribution of course.

‘A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind’ already graces coffee cups.  

With this addition I will haunt breakfast tables long after I am dead.

Can a poem be a friend?  I think so and from time to time I come across one that I have liked for a long time and sometimes quoted in my writing.  That happened last evening when in the SEASHELL ANTHOLOGY OF GREAT POETRY I came across ‘Western Wind’ which I remembered quoting in one of my books when writing about a storm at sea.  I thought it was STORM PASSAGE.  I was two books off.  It was in THE OCEAN WAITS when CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE and I were  in a gale being blown backwards up the Red Sea. 

 After forcing down another dinner of uncooked freeze-dried food, I settled in to wait out the miserable night. I was wet, and colder than I had been at sea for several years. I recalled hearing over the radio a week or so earlier of 50º temperatures in the Persian Gulf. Somehow I had never thought of cold as being a problem in the Red Sea, although I have lived close enough to deserts to know that they cool off at night. My arms and shoulders and neck were stiff from steering all afternoon. It was, of course, far too wet to take out the radio. I watched the running lights of the ships a few miles away and thought of an old sailor's poem:

 

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

Oh, that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again.

 

I didn't want a west wind, but the love and bed would have been most welcome.