My Captain

My father always had a sailboat.  He knew about hoists and turnbuckles, jib sheets, and rudders. He knew how to come about, how to go before the wind, and how to tack on a close haul. He knew how to jibe without knocking anyone out of the boat. He understood buoys and lighthouses, channel markers and currents, and how to read charts. He taught me starboard was on the right and port was on the left because, “We just left port.” 

He put me on the bow in shallow water to call out rocks, and he measured the depths in fathoms. He knew how to dock and moor a boat. He knew how to scull in a dinghy so small, you had to sit back-to-back if there were two of you. He taught me how to row and how to paddle. He let me hold the tiller with his hand close by. He taught me how to hoist the mainsail when it was time to embark and how to lower the boom when it was time to go home. He could navigate between rocky islands and beach a boat on the sand.

He took us through Woods Hole in a pea soup fog and all the way to Martha’s Vineyard. Our little vessel surfed wing on wing up and down gigantic ocean swells that heaved like mountains breathing.

He could read the water like a map. When the waves rippled with ridges as tight as corduroy, he knew to head straight into the wind because it spelled a gust so strong it could slap the sail to the water in an instant. He was a steady captain, and when he was at the helm, I knew no harm would befall me. 

When he died, I felt at sea. We sold his sailboat and emptied out his workshop in the basement. He was born during the depression, so everything was saved. He went to work as an engineer during WWII, so everything was raw material for fixing what was broken. There were peanut butter jars full of flat head screws, and jelly jars of roofing nails. All labeled and sorted from every other kind of nail, screw, grommet, or fastener in pickle jars soup cans, and Sucrets tins. There were jib saws, table saws, and bow saws. There were batteries and jumper cables, oil cans and oil pans, grease guns and tubes of grease. There were ropes, chains, pulleys, drills, chisels, screw drivers and hammers, pinchers, pliers, wrenches and axe handles, just in case your axe handle broke, and your axe head could still be sharpened.

I went to college in the 1970’s with a revamped toaster from the 1940’s. When I got straight A’s he bought me new tires for the bicycle he’d bought me in fourth grade, my first 26 inch turquoise Schwinn with balloon tires, coaster brakes, and one speed. He babied his 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado into the mid 90’s, its engine still throaty as a cabin cruiser. When all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again, they could always call my father. 

At his funeral I realized that the most important people in his life were not important people. The congregation held no Nobel laureates, but couples my father had served sauerbraten or hush puppies from the head of our dining room table, couples who’d played bridge at card tables crowded into our skinny living room, a cut glass bowl of peanuts on their right elbow, a matching ashtray on their left, both wedding presents.

Mr. Beck worked with my father. He was 6’5”. My father was 5’6”. Mrs. Beck was close to six feet. My mother barely five. Munching canapés and crackers in the kitchen, where people always end up before dinner parties, they reminded me of the giants and the midgets I’d seen chatting behind the tent at the Altamont fair.

Mr. Wanty was our neighbor. He’d sit opposite his wife Clara, holding his cards in his left hand, picking at them with his right, nothing more than a shrunken pincher, a congenital birth defect. Sometimes my parents were invited to parties, and my brother and I would beg for the Wanty’s mischievous son, Doug, to be our babysitter. We played Hide and Seek amongst the boxes of sewing scraps, suitcases, sleeping bags, window fans, summer suits, winter coats, and family photos all piled in closets where Doug could never find us. 

Mr. Kittle also worked with my dad. His wife had polio as a child and hung her cane on the side of the card table. The Palmers were second generation Italians. I marveled from across the dinner table that their skin was always tan. The first time my dad said the Pospisel’s were going sailing with us, I thought he said Mr. and Mrs. Popsicle.

One summer we went camping with the Bollingers. Mr. Bollinger drove his motor oat and my father sailed his sailboat to a small island in the middle of Lake George. It rained all night, and with the morning light, the Bollinger’s boat was almost sunk at the dock. But my father tinkered, bailed, and got the boat up and running. On our way home, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d walked on water.      

I was not my father’s natural child. At age thirty-five he and my mother sought me through adoption. I was the cherub he pulled through the snow in a bright red sled. I was the little monkey he teased at the breakfast table, telling me if I drank all my milk, I would see another monkey at the bottom of the glass.

I played the straight man, curled up on his lap, as he read me the paper. “Mr. Schultz of 1632 Union St. reports his schnauzer, Fritz, has been missing since last Tuesday.  Anyone with information as to the dog’s whereabouts should call Dickens 6-8045. Mr. Schultz fears little Fritzy has been eaten by a monster he noticed in his backyard.  It had four purple horns and smelled like a dead rattle snake…”

The story got more and more preposterous until I realized he was making it all up.

At age six we played flying angel.  My father stretched out on the living room carpet on his back. With my hands in his and his feet on my belly, I flew until giggles toppled me from the sky.  At sixteen I practiced cheerleading jumps in front of our picture window.  At night, with the curtains opened, it became a huge mirror against the darkness. My father sat on the couch, watching my acrobatics along with re-runs of Bonanza.

When the Vietnam War appeared on our television set, my father and I argued at the dinner table. When I went off to college and started living with my boyfriend, he called it shacking up. But by the time I married that boyfriend and brought home three grandchildren, it was smooth sailing again, my father’s hand on the tiller while my toddler daughter put pink barrettes in his balding comb over.   

Finally, there came the day when my mother called, “There’s nothing more they can do for your dad in the hospital. I’d like to bring him home. Will you help me?”

We set up a hospital bed in the same dining room where my father had served his friends and neighbors pork chops and apple sauce.  Now they were coming to say good-bye as he struggled for breath.

Looking at him, pale and diminished, I remembered the day he pulled the halyard, the rope that raises the mainsail, before he’d clipped it to the sail, and the end got stuck at the tippity top of the mast.

“Annie Girl,” he used my pet name, “Do you think you could shinny up and bring down the halyard?”

My little biceps bulged as I climbed the million miles of aluminum towards the heavens. Looking down, my father seemed small. I couldn’t believe he’d made a mistake and was asking me for help. When we docked the sailboat in a bay beside an old Adirondak farmhouse, there was a Free Kittens sign over a basket in the front yard. “Go on,” he said. “You can bring one home.”

The day before he died was an ordinary day, as ordinary as any day before death comes to call. I was vacuuming the living room. My mother was washing dishes. My father called from the dining room. “Annie, who’s behind my chair?” We’d moved his ten-ton recliner from the living room next to his hospital bed, so he could sit up and look out the window.

I walked into the room. “There’s no one behind you Dad.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“In the kitchen.”

I went back to the living room to vacuum.

Again, he called, “Annie Girl who’s behind me?”

I returned and proclaimed the space still vacant. 

The next afternoon his spirit slipped away, and my soul went as white and numb as the lifeless shell remaining in the same naugahide chair he’d sat in since I was four.

The morning of his memorial, I rose from my seat on cue and walked to the pulpit. It was the lonely public moment to speak a few words of eulogy. As I looked out at the ocean of grieving companions, I spotted the Becks, towering above the rest. There was Mr. Wanty, his thumb and forefinger holding the program of my father’s farewell.  Mrs. Kittle rested her cane on the cushioned pew. I saw the brave Bollingers who’d shared our small island in a storm.  There were the Palmers, the Pospisels, the Lordis, the Rockwells, the Mac Laurens, all fellow sailors. I don’t remember what I said that day, but as I opened my mouth to pay my father homage, I realized he’d trained me all his life for this moment. This moment when his hand would leave the tiller forever, and I would navigate solo the rest of my life.

I sat back down then rose again as the congregation sang my Dad’s favorite hymns: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Silent tears streamed my cheeks as I recalled how my dad had chosen me like a kitten in a basket and treasured me as his own. Words can lie, but actions speak the truth. He’d chosen friends of every size and shape, the crippled, the lame, the outsider. In his basement, in his closets, there was no such thing as junk, only raw materials. Everything saved to meet whatever collapse or calamity appeared on the horizon.

Just follow the chart no matter the weather, no matter the waves, and never give up.

That day he called me, called me three times, perhaps there was someone behind my father’s chair, an angel, come to ferry him to his final harbor, my father, my captain!     

Cover photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash.