It sure was hard saying good-bye to Uncle Dock and to Bompie. But we did, and we flew over that wide, wide ocean, and it was amazing to realize we’d sailed all the way across it.
I’m home, and Sophie is staying here for the week. We went down to the oceanside yesterday and walked along the beach and stared out at the water and we couldn’t stop talking about our trip. We went all the way back to when we’d first seen The Wanderer and all the things we’d fixed on her, and we remembered going to Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard and Grand Manan, and then that long, scary stretch across to Ireland.
I said, “You know when you said you went clamming on Block Island with Bompie when you were little?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“If you don’t want to remember this, that’s okay, but I was wondering, maybe that was your other Bompie, your first Bompie—”
She stopped right in her tracks. “My first Bompie?”
“Yeah, maybe that’s who took you clamming, and maybe you were with your parents, too—your first parents—”
“My first parents?”
“That sounded like a really nice time,” I said. “That would be a good thing to remember, wouldn’t it? That little kid you told me about—that little kid wouldn’t mind remembering things like that, would she?”
“That little kid is bigger now,” she said.
I’ve been thinking about the little kid. I think that one day the little kid got lucky and she landed in a place where it was okay if she couldn’t remember all the time, and because it was okay not to remember, she started to remember. And along with the painful things came the good things to remember and maybe she felt as if she’d found some things she’d lost.
Uncle Stew phoned to say he’d found a job with a company that charts the ocean bottom. “You should see the equipment they have!” he said. “It’ll be cool to see what’s down there at the bottom of the ocean.”
At first Sophie was really intrigued by that and was asking a million questions about what kind of equipment and what sort of stuff it could find, but later she said she wasn’t so sure she wanted to know what all was on the bottom of the ocean.
And my dad has enrolled in art classes at night. “Does that mean you get to do what you want to do?” Sophie asked him.
My dad said, “Well, during the day I’ll still crunch numbers, but at night—at night I’ll be Moses the Artist.”
Uncle Dock phoned to say that The Wanderer was fixed and that he thought Bompie might be well enough by next month to take a little sail with him.
Sophie said, “Don’t let him fall overboard. Don’t let him fall in that water.”
I said, “Maybe you could sail over to Spain.”
Uncle Dock said, “Yep, you just never know where we might end up.”
Next week, Sierra-Oscar-Papa-Hotel-India-Echo and Bravo-Romeo-India-Alpha-November and I are going to meet up at Sophie’s to check out the Ohio River. Sophie says a raft on the river will seem real calm after that ocean. Brian’s busy making out lists of what we will need in order to build the raft, and we’ve already decided to paint the raft blue and name it The Blue Bopper Wanderer.
“We’ll find that bridge Bompie jumped off of,” I said.
“And the place where Bompie and the car turned over in the river,” Brian said.
“And where Bompie got baptized and bit the pastor,” Sophie said.
I guess this dog-log is over, though.
Bravo-Yankee-Echo–Bravo-Yankee-Echo.