Grasping at memories

After all that, and Dominic didn’t remember his name.  Damn.  Yet another stumbling block I had not anticipated.  Several months passed after that initial email.  I placed a classified ad in Soundings, the publication my mother had originally placed the “unfinished boat for sale” ad in.  It was a long shot, and nothing came of it.  I sent out emails to family asking if they remembered anything at all about that time.  I got some nice feedback about my dad’s ambition, but nothing to go on.  My older cousin, who today looks so much like my father my mother mentions it every time she sees him, emailed this memory: 

I helped your dad from time to time.  He was trying to teach me how to weld. One cool day  - I was like 12 - I spent the day there with him and the boat.  He gave me a beer (and a “Don’t tell your mother”) and brought me home on his motorcycle.  Doesn’t get much cooler than that - but that was what your dad was.  Cool.

That boat was to be completed and then put in the water for a big trip.  I wanted that to happen and was very sad that it did not.  I have a strong feeling that it was sold for scrap as it was only a shell of steel at the time and would have cost big bucks to put it together.

Ouch.  That one hurt.  But at that point I was pretty sure that wasn’t true.  Dominic had indicated that Ed had started to work on it and had made progress, the last time he knew.  I had been checking in with Dominic once in a while over the months, hoping to jog his memory and fearing that his personal issues  would soon dwarf any desire to help me.  But he kept writing me back.  “Should a couple more neurons come back to life, you’ll be the first gal I call,” he wrote. “I very much admire your tenacity and maybe someday you’ll share more on the drive to this knowledge.”  He signed all his emails, “Fairwinds, Dominic”

During this time I spend lots of time wracking my brain, trying to remember little details about the 0-10 years of my life in relation to that steel behemoth in the yard.  I nursed some frustrations about the fact that no one else had thought about this, had thought that we might one day want to know what happened to the boat.  Would my father have been angry that we let it all slide?   There’s a fruitless question for you.  So I gathered up my small, fragmented memories of playing underneath the boat - the steel fragments were cookies hot from my imaginary oven; the overturned metal box in the yard that I think was going to be an actual oven on board (?) served as a carriage that I would sit upon, after placing a sawhorse in front of it to flesh out the fantasy.  My favorite memory is of one Spring when my dad took me into the echoey belly of the boat to show me a Robin’s nest that was built on one of the inner beams- three sky blue eggs on a rusty shelf.  In those days of slightly more relaxed child safety rules, I remember climbing the ladder to the deck of the boat, which had to be at least 20 feet off the ground, and surveying the neighborhood amongst the pine boughs.  Maybe my mom didn’t know I was up there, pretending to be at sea.