Second Question

Here is what happens when I tell people my father didn’t finish the boat: their faces fall. Their shoulders slump. Then they begin reassuring me—as if I needed it, as if I carried the weight of shame, the family burden of failure.

I can’t wait to give them the punch line—the why of my father’s not finishing—because here is what happens: a look of shocked surprise, a momentary flash of grief, then a big smile, and, more often than not, tears in the eyes.

I feel no shame whatsoever when I say my father didn’t finish the boat; in fact, I don’t think I could be more proud of him if he had finished it. His ‘failure’ was a hands-down, slam-dunk success in fathering. He made the impossible choice: providing for his family rather than pursuing his dream, demonstrating his love for us in giving up his one and only boat. He clipped his own wings so we could fly.

That’s a level of sacrificial love we all know, rarely see, and that brings tears to eyes. The difference between success and failure—however one defines these two terms—has been the second most frequent question, spawning meditative, philosophical discussions, rational analyses, and heated debates.

One father, contemplating the impending college educations of his two children, suggested that it was a resounding success if my father’s boatbuilding could finance a college education. He wished he had a boat in his backyard to sell off!

Interesting to think that pursuing one’s dreams can launch others’ dreams…

So was my father’s boatbuilding venture a success or a failure?

Guess it depends on who you talk to.

Guess you know what I think.

Question

“Did your father finish the boat?”

That’s the number one question I’ve been asked in talking with people about Poems from the Boatyard. Just as I begin telling the story, and before I’m even halfway through, listeners invariably interrupt—with some urgency—to ask, “Did your father finish the boat?”

Of all the questions that could be asked, why this one? Why the urgency?

The question is revealing, and it has become another one of the heartbeats in the developing story surrounding Poems from the Boatyard. As pressing today as it was 50 years ago, when family and neighbors were wondering if my dad would finish the boat, the question conceals another.

People generally assume that my father’s boat was a dream, and they are right. Even though we lived on an island, and in a fishing village known for its oyster harvest, the assumption is that my father didn’t need a boat, and that is correct. Another assumption—again accurate—is that it was a pleasure boat. These are the questions of an affluent society.

But my father was building when the world was still ‘modern.’ Inheritors of the Industrial Revolution, survivors of the Great Depression, and World War II, this was the no-nonsense generation. There was little acceptance of dreams and visions, let alone luxuries. Waste was the unpardonable sin. My father was caught in the act of flagrant violation of the herd mentality. The neighborhood was alternately aghast, amused, or nervous.

In the context of the times, a boat in the neighborhood signaled hopes and dreams, potential disappointment, probable waste, and a possible success. Each scenario was destabilizing in its own way. This was a generation that understood viscerally disappointment and dashed dreams. Make it do or do without. The neighbors didn’t want disappointment rubbed in their faces one more time if my father failed. They didn’t want to be challenged to tackle their own dreams if he succeeded. One dared not talk of hopes and dreams yet. We were not yet the Affluent Society.

But those dreams don’t go away, do they? They may go underground, and surface in a question, and the question reveals a longing. Now we are the Affluent Society, but how starved our souls are of dreams! We are in a famine of dreams, awash in pleasure-seeking and luxury, but still afraid to hope too much. We could lose everything in a heartbeat, and we know it.

So maybe everyone is asking for some hope. If you ask me, everyone wants to know if my father finished the boat because everyone loves a winner. And if he accomplished his dream, there is hope that I can finish mine, and you can finish yours. Maybe his success would have spurred others on—to whatever dream they were/are not undertaking for fear of failure. To whatever dream they were/are in the middle of and afraid of not finishing. Whatever dream they were/are contemplating but afraid of what others might think or say. They need to know someone else made it. They need someone to tell them it’s worth it.

May I be the first to say Go for it!!! And my father might have added By God!

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 Choice

My father never finished anything he started, my brother always said, worrying that, like our father, he would never finish anything either. It is a psychological scar he still bears from childhood.

For example, a second bathroom never got finished in the new house, just like a second bathroom never got finished in our old house. The toilet was functional, which saved considerable conflict in a family already sufficiently conflicted. But we could have used a second shower: now we were nine, including three teenagers and a grandmother, and this represented serious bathroom conflict.

I don't remember that my father didn't finish things. He had to sell that boat for the money. Life gave him a choice one day: he could have the house or he could have the boat. To help him make the choice, it took away his job. He almost lost the house, he almost lost his mind, and he did lose the boat. Then life left him alone for a while.

"When is it going to be finished?"

There were no poplars in our new yard. Just familiar maples, and some varieties we had never seen before: a cherry tree, a tulip tree, and a Japanese maple. By now we were used to foreigners, so foreign trees didn't bother us. Life took on a reassuring rhythm. Heino came to visit us, and I hoped he had forgotten about the war.

The new house needed plenty of work, and plenty of money, as did the boat. We were growing into impressionable adolescents, and my father's commitment to his boat, his perseverance (we didn't know about obsessions yet), infected and inspired us. We began to study his boat plans with him. That first winter he heated up the carriage house and strung lights up to put fiberglass on the hull. When the fiberglass went on, we began to think about possibly even sailing in this boat, and hoped it could happen before we went off to college.


Maybe my father chose to build a boat because it would take years to finish and that way no one could ever say, "See?" Perhaps he deliberately chose to tackle something he couldn't finish, lest in the finishing he betray his own father. Because his own father didn't finish raising him, but died suddenly when my father was twelve. Maybe that's why my father tried to build a boat. He had no one to tell him it was too big a job for him, like no one told him he couldn't be the man of the family at twelve.

We would ask impatiently, "When is it going to be finished?" and he would respond patiently, "It takes time to build a boat.”

Moving Day

Then the Crosses moved, we moved and the boat came off its struts and moved with us. Now we knew that our father meant business, meant to finish this boat, and something stabilized in me. The boat had languished the last few years under the poplars, while my father and his Estonian friend looked grave and talked about something called a layoff, which I didn't understand but which made my stomach queasy. But by taking the boat with us, my father confirmed that he intended to finish it By God! (as he was fond of saying). My stomach relaxed.

Our new house had what my father called a carriage house. He tore out a horse stall in that carriage house and installed the boat in its place, so he could work on it through the winter. Now we all had our own rooms, the boat had a stable, and there were no weird neighbors next door listening to opera. My father began renovating the new house, and we learned how to tear off wallpaper, strip woodwork and use staple guns. My father thought he could renovate his dream house, build a boat and raise six children. We didn't think this was odd, and no one asked my mother. I guess that's why now I always do too much. My father set a blistering pace, and we all ran after him.

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.

Lew's Ark

Soon the whole neighborhood heard about the boat, and neighbors began coming over to see "Lew 's Ark"--as it was dubbed. We could have sold tickets.

I don't know how many believed my father would actually finish the boat. The general feeling-in the family and in the neighborhood-was not so much that my father was building a boat, but that he wouldn't finish something he started, and why start something so difficult to finish as a boat?

I wanted my father to finish the boat. His character and our reputation were at stake. I knew, as did everyone in the family and the neighborhood, that one shouldn't start projects one couldn't finish. Moral fiber hung in the balance. I wanted visible proof that his moral fiber would not be found wanting, to show the neighborhood, and myself. A boat would do it.

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.

The Scent of Poplars

That's brother Al up on the boat, which served also as our backyard tent, jungle jim and parlor for tea parties.

Notice those poplars to the right in the picture? They, or rather their scent, have brought me right into the heart of many a poem. I'm sure they didn't know it at the time, but many years later, while walking alongside a row of poplars in a cemetery in France, I caught that familiar scent, and was transported back in time to the five poplars standing in a row in our backyard, along a white fence, like folded umbrellas ...

The poplars were foreigners in a neighborhood filled with maples and pines. No one else had poplars in their backyard. The neighbors said they came from Italy. I wondered how it came to be that poplars from Italy stood in our backyard.

The poplars stood like sentinels, guarding the other anomaly: my father building the boat. No one else's father was building a boat in their backyard. Should we be worried or proud? We decided to be proud, although our mother had her doubts, and I was a bit worried.

Last night I had a 'moment.'

You know when you're talking with someone, and they say something that drops into some deep pool of your heart, sending reverberations through your soul? I’m sure there will be some poems to mine from this conversation. Here’s how it went:

I was answering some questions, explaining a bit about the background of Poems from the Boatyard--backstory, in creative lingo. What does the ‘boatyard’ refer to? What's this book about? How long did it take you to write it?

The simple answer is that Poems from the Boatyard is about growing up. But the real story, which I didn't realize until I had to write a short bio (no more than 50 words), was that it was about my father. Oh, he doesn’t appear in too many of the poems, but he’s there—that is to say, his influence, his imprint, his impact on my life.

And as I shared it all with the person asking me about the book, I told her how my father sold the boat to provide for our education. We talked for a while about that quintessential fatherly function: provider. Whether or not a father provides well for his family, which is usually taken to mean financially, remains a benchmark for good or bad fathering in our culture.

We then went on to discuss the marketing of the book, and how it worked, and how pleased I was that I could honor my uncle by using his artwork on the cover.

This dear person commented that I got to honor both my father and his brother with this chapbook, and could earn some much-needed shekels in the process. And then she dropped the stone into the well of my heart: "Your father's still providing, isn't he?"

As I mine my heart to explore that for the poems I'm sure it will bring, let me end with one poem that was written while driving in the car with my father, many years ago. The memory is still sweet, and captures three of my favorite aspects of time with Dad: art, a boat, and the sea. The blogger has erased the formatting, but you can get that in the chapbook...picture a sunset...

ALL THE SWANS

We sink
quietly into each
other’s company, watch
the sunset pour into the sea
a pink the sky cannot contain,
the artist cannot paint. Instead,
she paints the boats, kissing her
baby profusely between strokes.
Gulls squat on the stone bench
where we sip coffee. In the
salt marsh, a light blinks,
summoning infinite
summer bugs.
We ride home in silence, sweating, past all the swans.