Ping!

The sound of chapbook pages turning is heard in the land…Poems from the Boatyard is shipping and my Facebook, Twitter, and email boxes are pinging!

I’m delighted to learn that many of you are receiving your chapbooks, and others can expect to receive theirs within the week.

Just in the nick of time for me: today I leave for Europe, and reeaaallly wanted to know this was happening before travel & spotty internet connections would interfere with timely communications. I can now breathe a sigh of relief, kick back for another tiny celebration, and enjoy all your wonderful comments and reactions, and click on "Like" a lot!

What a journey. And now that this phase is over, it seems to have gone so quickly, with all those hoops to jump through, amazed that it was all happening. But tonight I flop on the couch, flip the pages of the little darling, and celebrate again.

So, travel news…I leave for Europe, returning the first week of August. I will be switching over to my travel blog, and you can follow those adventures if you like, or take the time off to read the poems. If anyone 'gets' kicking back for the summer, it's me. I’ll pick up again here in August, when further boatyard explorations are on the agenda!

And just in case you don’t have enough to read, thought I’d add these links, for those who are enjoying learning about the chapbook, and for those who just relish a good bit of writing:

For more on the lowly chapbook, click here. And here for a bit of loveliness from the Georgia Review.

And speaking of reviews, I’m now on Amazon’s Author Central . Stop by, chat about the book, leave a review, and watch the premier Poems from the Boatyard video! (Kitsch at its finest.)

Or just go to Amazon, and create your own review. Please: no less than 5 stars, thank you very much!

That oughta keep y'all busy till August!

Thanks so much for taking this journey with me. It really has only just begun, but isn’t it good to stop along the way and savor the moment?

Have a great July! See you in August!

Waiting

Let’s come back to earth for a post or two as the magical publishing date has arrived...May 27...but alas, a recent word from the publisher is, “Looks like we have a 2-3 week delay from the printer.” Dang!

Thanks to all of you who are awaiting the book as impatiently as I am—does an author’s heart good to know she’s not a total narcissist. Talk about earnestly desiring…but we’ll leave that subject for a bit and return to another FAQ surrounding Poems from the Boatyard:

“How big was the boat?”

This second-most-frequently-asked question is interesting because it is most often asked with an air of entrapment, as if I would answer something like a rowboat, canoe, or small dinghy. As if I was pulling their leg, and they caught themselves in the act of believing that my father was actually building a real boat. As if the size of the boat would determines the heft of the project, the goal, the dream, the lunacy, or the depth of the loss. Small dreams, small loss--big dreams, big loss?

“Big” as an answer wasn’t cutting it. My inquirers are no dummies; they know everything is big to a kid. I needed a number.

I know it was over 20’, but how much over? By now, you’ve probably seen some of the photos, so you have an idea of the scale of the boat, but I checked with the sibs to see who remembered. After a flurry of emails and guesses, Pete mentioned that we still had the blueprints. We could just look at those. Blueprints?! Really?!

Another round of emails--"He has it"--"No, he has it"--"No, I'm sure it's at their house"--and then Paul offered up this tidbit: “Somewhere in my archives I have a set of the 'Mechanics Illustrated' construction drawings for the Tahiti Ketch. Back in the day it was my favorite style sailboat. There was a nice one in Oyster Bay harbor during the late fifties, and then we got to see one up close & personal when Frank Bladykis [one of our neighbors] built his magnificent boat in the sixties. He picked that design because "you could walk around deck like a gentleman." Dad's boat was a flush deck cutter sailboat called "Discovery," which also may have been from Mechanics Illustrated. I'll look for it.”

"Discovery”--ironic name for the boatyard full of discoveries this chapbook as shaken out: the world of publishing, book reviews and social media marketing, childhood memories of course, but different ones, some I'd never heard before, as perspectives are different in a large family; photos emerge that make us laugh and recall gentler days; nautical terminology (anyone know what a ketch is?!); the importance of the father; creativity, imagination, and the indispensable and completely human activity called 'desire.'

The search is on among the sibs to find the blueprints, a search of archelogical proportions in our cavernous homes, and soon we will verify the actual size and make of the boat. Inquiring minds want to know, some of them even outside our family...

In the meantime, let's look up ketch--and while we're at it flush deck cutter.

All things come to those who wait--dreams, chapbooks, blueprints.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend! Do get out on a sailboat or prowl a boatyard or marina if you can!

Finishing

My brother finished his bathroom, and his upstairs master bedroom. It took him a long time, but he did it, and we all congratulated him because it was a work of art. The specter of an unfinished boat drove him, no doubt. When I first saw that bedroom, I was struck by the fact that it looked like a boat.

We don't always get things right in our family, but we get them done—by God! My father breathed moral fiber into us, like wind in a sail, like the wind in these poplars I'm walking beside, whose scent I inhale and say: Thanks, Dad. At least you tried to build a boat.
 

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." --Antoine de Saint Exupéry

My father launched much more than a boat in my life. Imagination, for one thing, and we all know where that can lead: a wilderness even the Paynes wouldn't dream of fencing in. I even listen to opera now, and invite foreigners over on a regular basis. "Everything in moderation,” my father always said, but this is what I heard: eat, drink, and build boats. Plant poplar trees, have six children, and make friends with people from Estonia. Persevere, and when necessary, let go. People are more important than boats.

A Death in the Family

The day the boat left was a grievous day. It was a symbolic shipwreck, the day my father faced the reality that some dreams go unfulfilled. We stood around the backyard and ached while it was towed away. No one said a word. That boat had been with us since before some of my brothers and sister were born. His family couldn't manage anymore without him, nor could his house, but he couldn't manage without his boat. It was perhaps the day he started to drink more; the day part of his soul died.

I wish my father could have finished his boat, and I wish he could have sailed it. But he didn't have to finish it to prove his moral fiber to me, because he did that long before the boat left our yard. The day it left, we understood what he didn’t say: we were worth more than his dream. We would have done anything to help him get it back.

The Man from Estonia

My father also made friends with foreigners: a Dutch man, a Japanese family and a man from Estonia, whose name was Heino. No one else knew anyone with a name like that. One day my father brought his Estonian friend home to visit. We struggled to understand his Estonian accent, and wondered how it came to be that my father brought a man from Estonia to see the boat and eat at our house. No one else's father had a friend from Estonia. No one else knew where Estonia was or why this man wore black turtlenecks all the time. But then we went to his house, and art studio, and his artwork was like nothing we had ever seen before, and we instantly approved. He and my father worked together in New York City, the mother lode of anomalies, so we knew we were flirting with a serious one now. Heino told terrible stories of life in Estonia during World War II, and I worried that those who had once been looking for him in Europe might find him one day at our house. I hoped I wouldn't be home that day, and I hoped they wouldn't arrest my father with him.

The Payne family lived next door, and Mr. Payne often came over to watch my father working on his boat. He would also lend a tool or bit of advice, and chuckle at my father's pluck, like someone who knows he'll never build a boat, but sure admires the guy doing it. My parents befriended the Paynes, which troubled me. For one thing, Mrs. Payne listened to opera. And they had a fence in the middle of their backyard. Behind this fence, they let their property grow wild, another neighborhood anomaly. I worried that their wilderness would sneak over into our backyard when we weren't looking and flirt with our poplars and upside-down boat. Baby anomalies would be born and unpredictable forces unleashed.

I needn't have worried. The Paynes moved away, to be replaced by the Cross family, which cut down the wilderness and added children to itself with the same regularity as did my family. This conveniently lined up playmates for each of us, and we all got along famously. Mr. Cross was a mechanical genius, demonstrated by the fact that he owned a French car, which he could start with a screwdriver. He showed us the engine in the trunk of the car, and the piece of plywood he had built in between the front and back seats. This kept children from falling off the backseat in the days before seatbelts, and we thought this was way cool. We begged him to take us for a ride in it, even though it was an anomaly. He piled us all in and we rolled around that piece of plywood like bowling balls and bowling pins.

Mr. Cross' particular genius with engines, and the fact that he loved airplanes as much as my father, sparked a lasting friendship between them. A kindred spirit had moved into the neighborhood. My father's vision for the boat expanded, fueled by Mr. Cross' technical knowledge, which now invested itself into nautical transportation. My father peppered Mr. Cross with questions, and their heady collaboration produced a great deal of energy, which they funneled into the boat. Ribs went into place, and a hull covered the ribs. Our cat took to sleeping under its shade. Peggy Cross and I danced under that hull¬-tent in the shadow of the poplars and held tea parties on its struts.

How to Build a Boat

The boat began life upside down. "Why?" we asked our father. "Because that's how you build a boat!" When he gave us cryptic answers to simple questions, with his crooked smile, we balked. But this time we weren't sure how to proceed, baffled as we were by the boat. Fortunately, our father's love of teaching rescued us from his love of teasing, and he continued: "First you put these ribs up, then you build the hull over them. This is easier to do upside down. Then when you finish, you cut the ribs away from the struts and turn it right-side up. "-- phenomenon we were not to see until some years later when we moved.

Moral of the story: sometimes the solution is to look at thing upside down.

Coming soon...to a tidal flat bookstore near you...

In post-World War II suburban America, my father decided to build a boat—in our backyard. The boat became a member of our family, the talk of the neighborhood, and a litmus test of moral fiber. Memories of the boat, the characters and events of those days, and the power of place emerged during the years that followed my father’s death in 2001. "Poems from the Boatyard" is the result.

"Poems from the Boatyard", with cover art by Uncle Jack (see UncleJacksAttic.blogspot.com) has been picked up by Finishing Line Press (www.finishinglinepress.com) which will be taking prepublication orders soon. Stay tuned for the next episode, and sign up if you would like to receive notification of this chapbook's entry into the world of poetry!