My Life Between the Dimensions

  There you have it, from former Nazi turned American aerospace engineer and architect.  The scientist' scientist and one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, acknowledges the existence of the soul.   I am grateful to God for thinking enough of me to place my soul in this body and live this existence.  And, I might add, for my years of that existence--the memories, the lessons, the relationships, and the intelligence, to consider all the possibilities for it. Perhaps the most marvelous gift was being able to come to the understanding though the living of life, is that He gave me this life and left the living of it to me. I could spend it anyway that I wished. I could deny Him because it was popular, trendy, perceived as the mark of a superior mind …or come to the understanding that He gave me a heart with my body as well as a brain, and they were designed to work together and that they were an integral and cohesive part of my soul as well. I did not ...

2019, THOUGHTS ON PARTY POLITICS AND THE WALL   Because I rarely if ever allow politics to be my reason for existing on any social media, I limit my thoughts on the cesspool that it has become to but a few times a year.   I began 2018 with a few opinions and I follow suit in 2019.  But since even many in my extended family and circle of friends do not get the weekly Keith Ragan insight into every subject politically relevant to the headlines of the week, I go on record with some thoughts and feelings on this subject of discourse now.  As always, you are entitled to yours, and I will defend to my death your entitlement to them.  Because that’s always been at the core of what this great country stands for. The number of people I have known in my life that I would testify for, as to sound character and reasonable intelligence, seem to diminish in number when politics are the subject of conversation.  The blithering regurgitation of the party speak of the ...

      Dad, Me and Brother Ken circa 1949 I was 4, maybe 5. "I wish I had some money to spend." Dad looked at me and gave his little grin. "If you close your eyes and pray real hard for God to give you some, He will. When I tell you to open them, if your prayer was good enough, since you are a little boy, God will answer." We were in Jackson, Tennessee standing by the curb and corner of a street about 5 feet away from the corner drain. I remember Dad had a friend with him, probably some family member. It would have been impossible to have squeezed my eyes any tighter and prayed any harder. "Open your eyes". As my head was already bowed, I did so, and to my delight, there in the gutter was a dollar bill. This was about 1950 and a dollar bill was a lot of money. A year later we were in our little house on Meacham Lane in McCracken County, Kentucky. We were in our tiny living room and I was standing next to a small, dark magazine rack under the picture...

  The Kitchen Table The little house on Meacham Lane was probably no more than about 700-800 square feet, a tiny kitchen with a metal bordered and Formica topped table and four chairs you could see in almost every kitchen of all the houses on the gravel road.  There was a living room with a small black and white T.V,  couch, chair and curio cabinet, and a single bathroom down a short hall  leading back from those two rooms.  Two small bedrooms of course, one for Mother and Dad, and one for Ken and I, were located across the hall from each other with the bathroom in between. Early on Ken and I shared a bed until better times financially led to bunk beds. Most mornings in the summer  I listened for the sounds in the kitchen before throwing off the sheet, a sheet that previously had been sprinkled with water by Mother to ward off the heat and now bone dry, I contemplated beginning the day.  If I heard the rattle of pans and Mother’s footsteps crisscrossin...

      COMMERCIAL FISHING IN THE KEY S A nice catch from the Florida Keys, rinsed and ready for market. When my wife Sandy and I moved to South Dade County, Florida in late fall of 1980 to accept another promotion with SEARS, we came with two young sons, Scott and Matthew, aged seven and four respectively, and a lot of excitement and expectations of what we would experience. Early spring of the next year our family grew larger with the birth of our third son, Kent. We relocated from one of the most Northern stores in Sears Southern Territory, Bowling Green, KY, to one of the largest and most deeply situated in the South of the territory, Cutler Ridge, Florida. Other than Key West, the most Southern of all the Sears stores, about 35 miles South of Miami. It did not take long to realize that our raise for the promotion could not cover the difference in our cost of living, and left no room for extravagances. Things were tight, really tight, for the first few years. The boys...

In the Darkness In the darkness, in the still, I go where others cannot go. I have been there before and the journeys are not sought.  I return less now, but the portent of it lingers, always in that quiet time. I am glad you cannot go.  I watch you sleep.  It calms me, and resets my mind to time and place. There are other battles, of flesh and spirit, ahead.  I cannot win any but spiritual victory, esoteric and primitive.  But that, at least, is something. No, it is everything. Everything.  And before I take my chances of foreboding journeys again in the darkness, I refocus on the paths I must follow now and try to leave those others, those in the darkness of another life, behind me. Your soft breathing lures me again to slumber.   And I summon my warrior heart. The battles are fierce in the darkness. Keith Wayne Ragan Copyright 11/30/23  

     Back to School at Sears 1980's   The year was 1980. I had not been in South Florida long.  I was working on my second checklist (salaried) job in the Cutler Ridge SEARS store, one of many in the Miami Zone, only a few miles North of Homestead, Florida and Key Largo.  It was a long way from my West Kentucky roots. Cutler was classified as a company “A” store, one of the largest in terms of assortment, square footage, and volume, and the culture both in the workplace and general population was a substantial departure from the laidback lifestyle and rural environment of West Kentucky.  Spanish, from a large population of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants, was spoken as often as English.  Demographics for the marketplace also included a substantial mix of a Black and also South American customer base, along with a slim majority of White native Floridians  and the snowbird retirees of all ethnic backgrounds living their dream of spending thei...