Strange Comfort

Brain tumors are a bitch.  They take dreams, and dignity, and fathers.  In my more selfish moments, the losses I mourn most fervently are the experiences I would have had if the boat were completed, if our little family had climbed into that boat and lived lives of sailors and scuba divers, experiencing things most people have to read about in books to even know they’re possible.  My father wasn’t a weekend kind of sailor.  Talking to my aunts and uncles and older cousins who knew my father longer and better than I ever would, they speak of a singular dedication, an obsession, really.  Joshua Slocum was his hero - if I were born a boy, I would have taken his name.  I certainly would have known how to sail, something that I never have learned to do - a fact that has become a source of anxiety and frustration for me.  Even as I write this, I worry that I’m not using the correct terms, that I sound like the kind of sheltered rube that we were going to leave behind in the suburbs while we cruised the Indian Ocean.  It’s easy to romanticize it all.  The point is none of it happened. I made peace with that long ago.  The lessons thrust upon me at a young age may have roughened some of the edges of my personality, but have made me stronger and more aware.  I think it helped me to learn what can be taken away.  It gives me a strange comfort.  Like I’ll be ready.  Bring it on, life. 

So the boat was there for the first ten years of my life.  And then there was no one to finish it.  My mother placed a classified ad for an unfinished 40 foot boat in the sailing magazine Soundings, and one surreal day not long after, men were chainsawing down the large pine tree - my rope-swing tree, in fact - in the front yard.  Couldn’t get the boat out otherwise.   In an absurd twist of my memory,  I can’t remember watching any heavy lifting - how the hell did they get that huge, odd-shaped steel object onto the trailer? - but I do remember painstakingly applying green eye shadow for the occasion.  I recall wondering vaguely if I appeared more grown up.  Later, my mother, sister and I watched wordlessly as the boat rolled slowly, impossibly, down our little street, tree limbs snapping in its wake.  It swung left onto Randolph Street, and we never saw it again.