Summer Wind
The Old Lady is gone.
Ten years I’ve watched her come and go from this dilapidated Carver Motor “Yacht”. Stepping jauntily back then. Lately, moving slow.
Her daily routine a display of decline: pausing to rest every hundred or so feet, then resuming, covering the same ground, at least a mile’s trek to Mollie Stone’s for her deli food, a laborious journey there and back…the trip taking a hell of a lot longer in recent times…
When I moved my boat into the slip across from her, just over a year ago, I’d see her now and then climbing off her boat. I’d think, she’s gonna slip and fall. Any day now. Slip and break her hip. That or worse.
It’s gonna happen.
Any day now.
Thank God it didn’t happen. Not on my watch. I don’t have a watch. She’s not my responsibility. No more than Old Salt is my responsibility.
Old Salt. I didn’t sign up to feed wheat thins to the little prick. He just showed up one day.
I keep feeding him wheat thins.
Just as I kept watching the Old Lady.
Is proximity a criterion of responsibility? I don’t care if it is. I’m in no shape to make commitments. But the Old Lady never fell.
Instead, she was given notice. Invited to give up her liveaboard status. Which is the same as saying, “we’d like you to leave.”
Raul the Harbormaster was right to “invite” her to leave. She was in no shape lately. Not for living on a boat. The simple and routine act of entering her home, of stepping from the dock stair to the boat’s rail…occupying the chasm for an awful instant…was a dangerous and risky maneuver. Each time was like tossing a coin…until one day, inevitably, her sad number comes up and down she goes.
She was a disaster waiting to happen.
This marina had become a obstacle course of hazards for the Old Lady.
Now she’s gone
Her boat’s an abandoned shell.
The tarp was removed before she left. Her daughter appeared to clear out some of her things. Leaving the place a mess. No, more like leaving it squalid…
The Old Lady deserved better treatment.
Her daughter, an anchor-out who’s boyfriend fell overboard and drowned not long ago, came around from time to time to look in on the Old Lady. After Raul invited her to leave the Daughter showed up to collect her things.
The Daughter I found to be extremely unpleasant. The strange and terrible offspring of a sweet and quiet but otherwise pleasant little Old Lady.
The Daughter had what you might call a Fierce Demeanor.
As I mentioned, this last winter the Daughter tarped the Old Lady’s boat. Then untarped it after it shredded and began to flap in the summer wind.
I’ll entertain a personal assessment of their relationship that may contain an element of truth:
The Old Lady was a stone around her Daughter’s neck. The Daughter was a cross the Old Lady had to bare. Each side of the equation a morass of resentments and shame.
Man! I kind of like that. But I should stick with the facts.
The Old Lady’s 83rd birthday prompted a visit from her Daughter.
I watched her march down the dock to her Mother’s boat. I didn’t observe her bring a present. A cursory visit followed. I watched her march away. Yet another chore.
But as least she showed up.
I don’t think they liked each other very much.
Another Empty boat for a neighbor
A little bit lonelier down here without the Old Lady to observe climbing on and off her boat.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I miss the Old Lady.
I barely knew her. We exchanged maybe twenty words in ten years.
I don’t even know her name for Christ’s sake. Wait a minute. Let me think. Her name was Mary.
But it’s not like I really knew her.
So how can I miss her?
It’s more a feeling of being left behind.
The dock feels lonelier without the Old Lady around.
Almost in a strange way like the feeling I’d get when I broke up with one of my Broads back when I was playing the field.
An Odd and Pleasant Loneliness.
Like being in touch with something warm and ethereal.
Like a Frank Sinatra Song.
2 thoughts on “Summer Wind”
After many a summer dies the swan then come the gulls , followed by the pigeons and last the wharf rats, At 12, In boarding school along the Snoma Coast I watched two brothers surf fishing on the rocks get swept away in the surf, Both we wre wearing wading boots that fillled with wter and pulled them down faster than a lead sinker The headermaster’s son went out in a motor boat. He save done and got a Carnegh Medal for Heroism’; the otherbrother disappeared for four months then bobbed up in a kelp bed and scared the hell out of the kid who spotted him, Don’t turn your back on the ocean. I saw a ship’s baker go over the side of an ammo ship on the way to Vietnam Captain ordered the Navajo VIctory to do a Williamson Turn for two hurs, then, well, we we on a schedule. That night on watch, I asked the cranky second mate, always scraching his crotch, h ow deep it was where Cookie went over, “What is with you Hiippies always asking crazy shit?” he asked, before going int othe chart room then emerging minutes later. “How’s 14 thousand feet sound to you?That night, I dreamed I saw the baker in his white apron sinking deeper and deeper, cluchhing the two suitcases had had glues to his hadns so he couldn’ t ket go when he ran out of air Finally he exploded in a white puff and I woke up screaming, hitting my head on the bulkhead, Next morning in the galley, the Boson asked who was screaming during the night. Both my watch partners covered me, but I still see that baker bursting nto a mass of white confetti, himI guess, Wonder what made him do it? Coud have been all the ammo we were carrying got to him or the radid gram he get that said his wife had died of cirrhosis The sea is a weird blue desert, which is why all the old salts work with their backs to the ocean. Any way, here’s to Cookie and the two brothers from Ukiah.
I’m over fuckin whelmed…write it!