nobody's fool

anyone who has known my husband for more than 20 minutes long knows he is no fan of travel. I say that with a caveat: it's the to and fro and not the destination that often finds us ready to change our plans and head to the nearest divorce court home.  if we are driving, whether it's to church or to the peach state, he drums the steering wheel, tries to pass on the two lanes just where i know he shouldn't, fumes at drivers around him though the only person who'll hear him is me. flying can be worse, what with automated check-ins and tarmac delays, tiny aisles and arguing toddlers punching our seats from behind. (there, now, honey, don't blame me for the fact that you forgot your iPad!)

i'm thinking if only we could sail to where we're going, a thousand arguments over the past 32 years might never have happened.

sail. that's what i said. if we could close the back door and head to the dock, step on board and sail ...  away. 

well, that would be my husband's solution. i'd be busy searching google for the nearest five star hotel with a boat landing, spa and freshly-pressed sheets to break up the trip.

the skipper, as we call him, got his first boat some 15 years ago, and now we (he) mans boat #6. this last one we (i) named Fortune's Fool, because the skipper certainly has spent more than one fortune on his beauties boats and their many accoutrements. (i have used this information when i want to buy myself high-priced boots or cameras — i don't have a sailboat, i whine, and not once has he ever said go get one.) and no, i didn't really mean anything by choosing a name connecting my husband's prized possession to the world's most famous star-crossed lovers. really.

when i married him just 11 days shy of 31 years ago, the only boat this skipper had ever been on was my father's Boston Whaler, and in my memory only once... (my daddy loved that boat, and when he sold it, my mother threatened to lie down in the driveway to keep the buyer from pulling it away. so when the skipper said he wanted to buy that first day sailer, i knew what i was up against.)

i should have planned our wedding date better. he has spent at least one of our wedding anniversaries at the annapolis boat show, though i'm not complaining. really.

well, sort of. i thought that first boat would be the end of it, that he'd get the water out of his bones and take up golf. he sold that boat, buying a new one (slightly soaked) before the old one had even left the yard. and he kept on selling and buying until he had to hire a crane operator to put the last boat in the water. whether it was the skipper's naivete or the boats' fault, i was never sure. he kept saying he was buying bigger and better boats for me.

this, from a man who grew up landlocked. he didn't particularly like the beach, though he has come to understand my need to talk to the ocean from time to time. yet he drives an hour one way down country roads to get to his beauty, and only always when i am along rarely does he try to pass the slow poke. he is that happy to be going.

i don't go sailing often enough for him. he brings his little cooler into the kitchen on a saturday morning and i count how many hours i can nap chapters i can read in the hours he'll be gone.

i like sailing. once we are on the water and i have a cool beverage and friends to laugh with and cute cocktail napkins with sailboats on them to serve with my provisions ... i really do. it's the prep and the hauling to and fro and the sweating in the cabin on a very hot summer day that just spoils my outfit, face and hair. it feels like camping to me, which leads me to camp, the memory of which still haunts me, so more often than not, i've stayed at home.

but two weeks ago, i woke on a saturday to a stiff breeze and 60 degrees and it was just too pretty to nap read. 

'i'm not going to take you if it takes two hours to provision!' the captain barked. 

was stopping for a sub sandwich to put in an itty-bitty cooler too much trouble?

apparently not. i even took my new sailboat camera, hoping to take some pictures for myself him to show his sailing buddies. and as we sailed in the crisp wind, the skipper started telling me about the new mistresses boats he had his eye on. seaworthy. as in the atlantic.

oh dear.

the skipper has a big birthday coming up in just over 40 days. when i asked him what he wanted to do, i knew it would involve sailing. so we packed up our grips and headed to the airport (it was too early for anybody to be on the road, though as usual he couldn't get his card to work in the automatic check-in) so he didn't really grumble about it too much.

skipper jr was in tow, and the three of us met up with the pea and her prince not without major angst from the skipper trying to find the rental car place and a parking place along a crowded street on the aft deck of a restaurant in Portland, Maine, where all you could see anywhere was two- and three-masted schooners, sailing, sailing. we could feel the tension lifting just a bit.

we'd made a reservation to sail on a three-masted schooner in boothbay harbor, maine, at 5 o'clock — an hour from our current port o' call — and we were late. we zoomed ahead of the kids, the skipper weaving in and out of traffic again, me wishing i'd brought a life vest in the car to keep my delicate skin from bruising as we cruised.soften the impact of the to and fro.

i texted the pea: where are you? knowing the skipper would be crushed if we missed the sail because of their dawdling. 'we are going as quick as we can' she wrote back, and though she didn't say 'dad needs to chill' i know she was thinking it.

we reached the boat with 10 minutes to spare. the kids and i sat, me promising our few days in maine would bring us a new man, now that he was on the water. i'd seen it happen just last year.  i sensed they didn't believe me.

then we set sail (with a captain and first mate), and as the boat yawned, the skipper smiled. he talked. he chatted it up with the captain. he leaned on the rails. he laughed more than a few times, put his arm around me even, watching the water, the sails stretch, giving way to his love of this thing that only he can really understand.

the kids were amazed, that the secret to calming their father's stormy demeanor was as simple as water, canvas, wood and wind.

on our second day, we climbed aboard another boat, this one motor-powered, and headed into the vast atlantic toward a tiny island off the maine coast. the skipper stood on the bow in his yellow slicker, watching the swells and looking for all the world like a lobsterman scouting out his traps. and he was smiling, once again.

later and back on land, the skipper eyed a burgee flying with the colors of our seaside respite. that would look nice aboard the Fortune's Fool he said more than once.

taking the hint thinking ahead for once about his Christmas list, skipper jr inquired at the front desk as to where he could acquire said flag for his dad, but there was none to be had. a day later, i asked the same thing, and of course so had the skipper. i found myself wondering how we might have one made as a surprise.

it was spitting rain at checkout, winds skating over the bay at close to 20 knots. time to go home. but as the skipper headed into the the cottage for one last walk-through, i saw him toting the burgee. the innkeepers had somehow found an extra, so they handed it off for the promise of a good review on travelocity.

our week was, to use a boating term, quite yar — as katharine hepburn said in the philadelphia story. (My, she was yar...easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot. ) and so was the skipper.

if you don't count the money we spent or squeaky floors of our cabin, or the fact that in the wee hours of our last morning, someone quite large and ungainly in the adjoining cabin took a tub bath, and we heard every slap squeak against the fiberglass tub wall. and the groan when they tried to stand up.

it's a rainy day, but guess where the skipper is? off to pat the fortune's fool, to mend her lines and set the halyard flying. 

i'm hoping for a few more days of yar before the dry rot begins. and i'm searching my new iPhone maps to see if there indeed might be a way to sail wherever we are headed next.


writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

good flying weather, part II

when my mother talked about her wedding day, she would say this: we were married on Flag Day. and that made it easy for me to remember. one of my favorite things to do as a child was to open the secretary drawer in the living room and pull out their wedding album, scouring the pictures for glimpses of the parents i knew. my favorite photo has always been the one when they are leaving the church (i wish i could show you that here) — arm in arm, my mother in her ballet-length crinoline — arm in arm with the skinny boy who would be my dad — looking a little stiff and more than a bit pale in his white dinner jacket. (the next day, he graduated from medical school and moved further away from his family with a girl he'd met only six months before.)

but my mother is smiling a hollywood smile as she steps off the porch of the church that one day i would attend. beaming, she is, a real beauty like she has never been happier in her life. i suspect she knew just what she was ahead.

today is flag day. of course that we wave the flag to honor all who have served under it — including my father, who joined the navy a year after that wedding and would deposit his wife (and new son) with my grandparents before he set sail around the world as the 'doc' on a destroyer. for us, it also means that on flag day, my brother and sister and i get to celebrate the fact that because a skinny boy from gates county, n.c., and a city girl from florida with good-looking legs, happened to meet each other at a dance, we got to be.

their union has lasted for 59 years today. (though i haven't yet called them, i suspect neither has walked out the door.) next year we are planning a throwdown with the FAM, but as they pass yet another year betrothed, i just want to fly that flag a little higher, wave it a little more crazily because i mean 59 years? with one person and nary an argument? twice as many years (and then some) than they ever were apart. i haven't even lived that long but i know it's not such an easy thing to do now is it? just sayin'.

when they'd been married for 50 years, i wrote about them. "they've been through what i've come to understand as several marriages," i wrote, "albeit to the same spouse. the newlywed year, when they were alone and getting to know each other. The next a year later when my father joined the navy. the third one came when they finally settled in a town where they didn't know a soul and made a life together. the last one, crowded with church and children and grandchildren," and now great-grands, "began when my father retired. It may be the best yet."  now that my own children are grown, i realize they actually had another marriage, then one when i moved out of the house and got married myself, forcing them to get to know each other for the first time since way back when they were turning 25. they built a beach house that year — my father's dream — and maybe yet another marriage began when they reluctantly sold it.

throughout every stage, they have been an example for many, including my daughter, who wrote about them last year here.

vance and bj are not storytellers, as i said when i wrote about them in 2002 — never outwardly shared their secret to a happy marriage with us. "they've simply lived it, hoping we would learn by watching."

i guess we did learn a thing or two. my brother and his wife have been married 33 years, my sister and her husband 32, and my husband and i will mark our own three decades together this year.

"what makes marriage last, after the kids are grown, the parents gone, the paying work behind you?" i asked nine years ago. i wish i knew. i only know it's not nearly as easy as the couple who married at 24 on Flag Day have made it seem.

their days now are filled with doctors appointments, with worry about the health of neighbors, about grandchildren with new jobs and new babies, and i imagine, about how many more years they have to together.

their favorite days are spent when all or some of the FAM can be together — like this past saturday, when they got to meet our newest member. my own grandparents met every single one of their great-grands, so since i don't have a grand yet, i'm expecting them to stick around for a good long while.

what joy it must have been to them, to look into little LG's beautiful blue eyes and know that because of them, she got to be, too.  and that the grand ol' flag first unfurled 59 years ago today has some good flying weather left in it yet.

up and away

a month ago, i was asked a question, and i answered just this way. when i look back at that list, i can see that i didn't do such a bad job on the little things, but on the big, not so much.

one of the little things, actually the first thing that came to my mind was "fly a kite." not rocket science, since it was the third day of the windiest month, and for some reason my first thought was of mrs. norfleet's 3rd grade classroom bulletin board, filled with kites, soaring in the wind.

as i moved through the month, more than once, i thought about the question, what if? what if, as i climb into my car to run to the grocery store or work or church, what if this is the day. what if, as i nod off to sleep, i would not wake up? and then, turns out it wasn't the last day, so i moved into another one, thankful that i had another chance to eat tomato sandwiches. to wear blue. to look for shooting stars.

and then, my friend kay, emailed. she was flying down to see her mother, and on her way back to va., she would be more than happy to pick me up, if i wanted to come for a visit.

well. i did want to visit, but when kay says flying, she means flying. in a plane. with four seats. and she's the pilot.

here's the thing. i don't mind flying, when i am up in the air and looking down at all those beautiful clouds and when i get close to home i can recognize the water tower near my house, the marina where my husband keeps his boat, love when all the world becomes a map. from up there, there is not one damn thing i can do about anything, so i read my book. and i am not sitting right next to the pilot. but during those take-offs and landings, well, that's when i know full well i could meet my end. so i pray a lot.

but that's in a big plane... a BIG plane... kay's is a jet, and she travels in it like i travel in my car. and she is good at it, zipping up and down the east coast, transporting dogs for rescue to their new forever homes.

still. as i accepted her kind invitation — because i really wanted to meet her husband and her dogs and see her in her office with the birds fluttering around outside — i thought: could this be the way? could that question about what would i do if i knew march would be my last month.. was it prophetic? would i go out doing something so not like me? something not on my list?

the morning of the flight, i tried to straighten up my closet. i paid some bills. sat a little longer with the dog. paced. and paced some more. on the way to the airport, i called my children. (i would wait to call my parents when i was safe in va.)  i didn't want to be scared. she wasn't scared to ride in the car with me when she came to visit. i wanted to be a new me. a brave one, the one on the charm my friend lee gave me for Christmas.

and so, i walked out on the tarmac with kay, and i climbed in. my husband took pictures. kay and i gave the thumbs up. i need to show you how to open the door, she said, in case something happens, and we need to get out, then added: on the ground.

yes. i would need to know that.

it'll be a little bumpy, she said as we taxied. i could not find a strap to hold onto. 

i prayed... no, don't let this be the day, the way...i really hadn't had a chance to clean out the fridge or my dresser drawers, and i didn't want my friend grace to have to come in and do all that for me...it would just be too embarrassing... and then, we were off, up (and down a few times... yes, it was bumpy.) and as i looked around, i could see the water tower, and in another 15 minutes there was the marina, the tiny speck of a boat down there that we sail from time to time.

i listened as kay talked to the air traffic controllers, a tag team of folks from the small airports between here and there connected by the radio. she turned a lot of nobs, calculated a lot of what might have been algorithms. i was thankful she was the smartest 10th grader i knew all those years ago.

when we were cleared for landing, the controller said: thank you for flying with us today. i hope you've enjoyed flight. "they know me, i fly so much," she said. 

landing was easy. by then i was a pro. we had a great visit. good food. friends. long walks. dogs. even a special visit with my friend mel's 94-year-old grandmother, who just so happens is a client of kay's. (that's a whole nother story.) we even met some cute little lambs. i talked kay into buying meal worms for her bluebirds, and moving their house. (they have since built a nest.)

while i was there, kay's friend left her a message saying there was a rumor on facebook that she had been flying on sunday and had disappeared. she laughed. i wasn't about to.

on monday morning, i woke to thunder at 5:30 a.m. thunder? couldn't be, i thought, then flashes and more thunder. in the dark i calculated where my husband might meet us on the ground, so we would not have to fly. by 7 i was up and dressed, ready to call him. surely we would not fly in this weather.

"oh, it's gonna blow through here by the time we take off," kay said. and thought as she pulled the plane from its hanger it was pouring, she was right. by liftoff, it was clear enough to see the mountains around us. the flight above the clouds was smooth, blissful. but coming back to rdu was more challenging on that monday morning. cloud cover, lots of traffic. we were rerouted a couple of times. i could not see the water tower. kay talked to the controllers, at one point saying: where the hell are we? i found a strap to hold onto. prayed. and then... land-ho! she landed, and it felt like we were skimming. she is that good.

"you were a great passenger," she said as we taxied to the terminal. "the first time i flew with lee (her husband), i was screaming."

what was i to say?

when i met my husband in the terminal, i saw him with new eyes. at home hugged the dog, called my parents (whom i knew had been worrying about me the whole weekend.) let my kids know i was back.

the next week i read about the air traffic controller in dc who fell asleep, causing two jumbo jets to have to land on their own... on their own...how in the world? the whole thing is computerized, but still.

a friend of mine said the other day that she thought i was growing, and she didn't mean growing sideways, but that when she met me over 10 years ago, no way that me would have flown on a tiny plane to visit a friend.

"i never thought you'd do it," my husband said, when i told him about her comment. "do what?"

"fly on that tiny plane." well, when i wrote fly a kite at the first of march i meant a kite. i never once thought: plane. that part was total improv. and i think kay for helping me be a little braver than i was.

today i called my parents, to check in. my dad said: you saw there were two plane crashes this week. (translation: please don't fly again like that, or wait til i won't know about it.) i had seen the news, said prayers for those lost souls, thinking that could have been me. and kay. 

since april has come, i have taken a new look at my march list. like i said, i've done a few things: fed my birds, said yes and, listened, sung too loudly, studied my orchids, filled a vase with hydrangeas, thanked God, worn blue, napped in the sun, added charms to my bracelet, made rolls, driven down a country road (it was too cold to put the windows down), helped a stranger, smelled puppy breath, stared at the sky, believed it's possible, opened the windows, captured the light, forgiven, taught someone, made much ado... i still have a lot on that list yet to do, but i have done so many other things that i never even thought of. I dusted off a children's goodnight book manuscript i wrote 30 years ago and wrote new verses. planted lettuce. hugged my sister (and my brother), played with with my four-year-old great nephew, took my son to lunch. celebrated birthdays and babies- and brides-to-be. not one day did i fly a kite.

mrs. norfleet's april bulletin board, way back in third grade, was covered with umbrellas. and raindrops. today, though the sun pours into my kitchen, i think of girls in yellow rain boots, umbrellas in hand, stomping at puddles. that's what i'm going to do this month. stomp at the puddles, to see how big a ripple i can make.