Odd Little Stories
The year was 1968.
I was 26 years old and finally becoming myself. M had just finished his master's degree, and my heart's desire was to own a sailboat. We bought the cheapest, smallest one we could find: a Sea Snark. It was made of Styrofoam, for Pete's sake, 11 feet long with just 45 square feet of sail.
It had several advantages. We could store it on the patio, carry it around the building ourselves, and strap it to the roof of our station wagon. Best of all, it couldn't sink.
There was one drawback. If we ever came ashore on rocks, the Styrofoam hull could break apart. So I bought the recommended kit and fiberglassed the hull myself, spreading drop cloths across the living room floor of our townhouse. The fiberglass cloth adhered to the boat with a very smelly two-part resin that took a couple of days to harden. When it was finished, that hull could not be penetrated.
I studied the instruction manual and learned all the proper nautical terms. I already knew bow from stern, but I didn't know port from starboard. I learned about the rudder and tiller, and the daggerboard, the vertical blade that extends into the water and helps keep a sailboat from sliding sideways. It was easy to launch because the daggerboard could be raised in shallow water or removed altogether.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, Dear Heart, you can look it up, or don't worry about it. The point is that I knew all the correct names for every part of that ridiculously tiny boat.
A sailboat has to "tack," zigzagging into the wind rather than simply being pushed along from behind. Our little boat drifted a lot. Even with all four of us aboard, it rode high in the water, and the wind pushed it around. Being so light, it also followed every current. We must have been hilarious to watch.
The reservoir where we sailed was above a dam.
One afternoon, while Ode, my older daughter, was in school, Yde, my younger daughter, and her little friend (I'll call her Felicity because she had an unusual, melodious name) went sailing with me.
Klunkety-klunk! Off we went.
I confidently launched us across the reservoir, the two little girls snug in their life vests. The wind was blowing harder than I was used to, and it was blowing downstream toward the dam.
At first, I thought I was doing fine.
Then I noticed we were drifting faster and faster toward the dam.
It would have been bad enough if Yde and I had gone over it, but what kept running through my mind was Felicity's parents. How could I explain losing someone else's child?
I was suddenly very glad I knew all those sailing terms.
I steered toward the far shore, where the current was weaker. Then I worked the boat upstream with a series of short tacks, back and forth, back and forth, carrying us well beyond where we had parked the car. Finally, when we were safely above the danger, we crossed the reservoir in one long run.
And all the way back, the three of us sang:
"Boop boop diddums and a wunnem, SHOO...
Swim, said the mama fishy, swim if you can,
And they swam and they swam all over the dam.
Boop boop diddums and a wunnem, SHOO..."
The two four-year-old girls never knew how close we'd come to disaster.
And that was exactly as it should be.
Cousin Ulysses
My father considered any discussion of ancestors “mere ancestor worship,” disparagingly unchristian. His mother was related to Adlai Stevenson, the brainy, divorced presidential candidate who ran against Eisenhower, and the actor McClain Stevenson, who played the top officer in the years-running television show MASH.
My mother’s father came from relatives of Alfred Hitchcock, the horror fiction writer, and Ulysses S. Grant. When my dad handed my mother a $50 for clothing or groceries, she’d look at and say mockingly, “Oh look! It’s a picture of Cousin Ulysses.” Grant wasn’t well-thought-of as a president. Like Adlai Stevenson running against the overwhelmingly popular General Eisenhower, “Cousin Ulysses” had in Abe Lincoln a tough act to follow!
Grant wrote a book after he was president, and I checked it out of the library. The book went on at length about the soldiers who had fought and died in the Spanish-American war and the “Civil War” – as if any war could be civil. I think he wrote the book in part, for the same reason I’m writing this website: to create an authentic historical record. Although I didn’t recognize any of the soldiers’ names, I appreciated Grant’s effort to make sure they weren’t forgotten.
Blessings, Sky