Let’s call him… Dominic

The Boat, July 1986, shortly before it was sold.

Some events morph into myth in the history of families.  Truths are sometimes cast off, a little bit at a time.  I say this because as I wrestle these stale memories into a (quasi) coherent narrative, I keep coming across all of these gaping holes.  Let this be a lesson to those who wait to tell their stories.  Don’t wait too long to tell them or the juicier and more authentic stuff will fall away and you’ll have to make it up and it will never be as good. 

…

I don’t remember the first time I was aware of Dominic’s presence.  At first he was just a guy with the beard who answered my mom’s ad for a boat for sale.  He didn’t buy it, but one of his friends did. I don’t remember that guy at all.

Dominic and my mother hit it off.  He started coming around more often, after the boat was already gone, making my mother laugh.  He was always nice to me.  He had a sailboat and took us sailing and fishing.  He helped my mother when she desperately needed it.  And I loathed him with a smoldering hatred I had never experienced before.  What kind of man starts a relationship with freshly widowed woman and her two young, wounded children?  A kind and patient one?  Or was he manipulative and masochistic?  Looking back, I really don’t believe it was the latter.  Though I regarded him through rage-colored lenses pretty much the whole time I knew him, in hindsight he wasn’t such a monster. Dominic stayed around a while, at least a year as I recall.  And then - poof- he was gone.  I think I was happy about it.  But maybe I’d gotten used to him.  You’d think I’d remember.

Life went on.  Over the years the big boat in our side yard became a distant memory, slipping ever further into the past.  We didn’t talk about it much - what was there to say?  My mother started dating another man, not a sailor, and life shifted in a new direction.   I entertained the occasional thought of tracking down the boat but for some reason never did much about it.  I suppose the advent of the internet may have been what finally propelled me to take actual steps to try and find the boat…Google makes most excuses moot when it comes to research.  Two decades had passed before I took my first real steps in a search for answers.