I stayed in Point Judith last night. Taking Bob’s advice, I pulled anchor and headed to Newport, about ten nautical miles northwest. Taking advantage of a light breeze, I motor-sailed, flying the jib on a starboard tack. After securing the boat to a rental mooring, I called for a motor launch and headed to shore. The place was teeming with tourists. Whirly jigs, flags, discreet flashing lights (after all, this was Newport!), and hawkers in costumes added to a festive climate of capitalism at its best. I watched kids getting what they wanted from parents aiming to please, young couples walking arm in arm, retirees nestled together on any number of benches thoughtfully placed along the sidewalk. Amidst all this flurry of families on vacation and people enjoying each other, I had a stab of loneliness that I hadn’t felt since the day Lori died. What the hell am I doing here?
I felt old. I was old. Maybe too old. How does one escape their life? Go sailing. Alone. At eighty-four years old? I walked over to an empty bench that looked out over the harbor. I have had these stabs before when I was on the road looking for business. I tried flying first class; buying attention was what it was. It didn’t work. I can see why escort services are so popular, though I never used one. Here I was in vacationers’ paradise with people all around and I didn’t feel a part of any of it. I was less lonely sailing with me, myself, and I. I looked out over the harbor. It took a while for me to recognize That Good Night amidst hundreds of boats. My spirits gladdened. She might be fiberglass, cloth, and wood, but she was where I rested my soul. I had an urge to get back, but resisted it in favor of taking a good long walk. What a great privilege it is to take a walk. Ultimate freedom. That’s what a walk is. Go where you want, at whatever speed, to anywhere or nowhere at all.
I missed Lori, feeling her warmth next to me. Hugging. Cuddling. There’s this song from a show that Lori and I went to years back called “The Golden Apple.” A musical based on the Iliad and the Odyssey, if you can believe it. We used to sing it duet style, like Ulysses and Penelope did in the show:
It’s the going home together when your work is thru,
Someone asks you “howde” do and how’d it go today?
It’s the knowing someone’s there when you climb up the stair,
Who always seems to know all the things you’re going to say.
Feeling wanted. Loved. If you’ve got that, you’ve got the world. Emma kept that feeling and that kept Emma alive. Her thoughts of Damon were not vague. For her, Damon was right there, everyday. Her thoughts of him gave her an aura. Every day she was on that lip-smacking voyage with her lover. And wore those earrings every June to memorialize the journey of body and mind. Emma spoke of nothing else, as if the rest of her life meant nothing. I wonder if she ever married Damon or had his children.
I wondered, too, that if I had a brain rewired like Emma’s what it would be that played on my tape loop. All I could come up with is one terrible storm I had sailed through, or more accurately, how I felt pulling into a safe harbor. And I was alone through all of that. What the hell does that say about my life? I have to rethink this whole nostalgia-laden memory thing of my sailing alone while my family stayed shore side. Hell, I never even took my kids. Was sailing back then an escape from my real life —which actually wasn’t all that bad? Before sailing, before kids, I was simply a machinist working on lathes and millers, precision machining steel to make prototypes for tool makers or some inventor. They were wonderful days. The smell of a machine shop sticks in my mind. Whenever I smell fat burning, I think of standing in front of a lathe watching lazy streams of smoke coming from lubricated steel. Can’t imagine my endless tape loop being the daily grind of running a machine shop.
When I bought the machine shop from an old Dane named Gersten Myers, I had pictured myself working with a team of machinists, opening the shop at eight, closing at five. It didn’t work out that way. As the owner, it was up to me to drum up enough business to keep things going. Of course during the war years—Korea and then Vietnam—business came to me. But after the war, competition was like weeds in a flower garden. I was away most of the time. Alone except for meetings with potential clients. I’d hit the road Sunday night, returning on Thursday with a bunch of orders, repeating that whirlwind week after week just to stay ahead of the curve. Not like Ivan and Doris and their beloved candy store.
I don’t miss Sunset, but I do miss having people around who knew my name, although I must admit that it boiled down to a precious few. Some of the Sunset’s more vacuous clients assigned names to people rather than try to remember them. For instance, in the eyes of Samuel Guttman, I was his son Isaac. I played along. I wasn’t the only one lonely. We all were. The anticipation of visiting day helped to ameliorate loneliness. But when the day ended, loneliness came back with a vengeance.
I caught myself wallowing in self-pity, the precursor of depression. Why not just enjoy all the folderol around me instead of looking backward? Past is something we can’t change so why live in it? I got up off that bench and joined the crowd. I smiled at people and they smiled back. My step quickened when I caught sight of an ice cream shop. A double dip of cherry vanilla and I was on my way, licking the glorious dripping of cream, dabbing a blob from my nose, as happy as a kid at a carnival. On the way back to the boat, I stopped in a toy store and bought a stuffed bear about the size of a small dog. The nose-studded teenaged clerk asked, “Is this, like, for one of your grandkids?”
I replied, “Actually, it’s for me. I don’t think that you can ever be too old to have a stuffie.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” she said. “Have a nice day.”