Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (5 page)

The matters of
my departure from Beaufort and my ultimate destination were decisions yet to be made. I knew this in my heart to be true, even though I admitted it to no one and had set out from Annapolis amid great fanfare, with news to all that I was “bound for Nassau.” Telling people you are sailing to Nassau—especially people who would never attempt such a trip themselves but are sure to be impressed that you would—is easy to do. It evokes an air of adventure, derring-do, sophistication, and romance. James Bond seduced beautiful women, danced at Junkanoo, and foiled diabolical plans for nuclear blackmail in Nassau. Telling people that you are sailing to Nassau when you are as yet in a harbor a thousand miles away is much like telling people that you are writing a bestselling novel or running for president. It is a thing much easier imagined than realized.

Actually sailing to Nassau, I would come to understand, is hard to do—not just in terms of time and distance but, for me, psychologically. The wind and the waves are not the only forces that must be overcome or even the most worrisome. The whole idea evoked in me assorted feelings of anticipation and dread, elation and dejection, self-satisfaction and self-doubt, resolution and regret.

Many people—perhaps you among them—have made voyages in comfort and safety to the Bahamas from the northeastern part of the United States in small boats sailing out of sight of land, without expecting a medal from the Seven Seas Cruising Association for their efforts. I know this. I don’t mean to make a moon shot out of a mud puddle by my somewhat overwrought narrative. I do wish, though, to come clean and admit something: despite any pretentions to the contrary in the letters you now hold in your hands, I am not, nor have I ever been, a Salty Dog.

True Salty Dogs—those self-sufficient Lords of the Deep who write books on navigation and the finer points of sail trim and boat mechanics—have long been a source of intimidation and annoyance to me. As best I can tell, there is not a poet among them. They are math-science folk and engineering types all. For them a clogged fuel line, battery overload, or electrical malfunction is a thing of rapture, and they set about solving the problem with the kind of Yankee ingenuity and determination “that built this country, by jiminy.” For me, however, these malfunctions are all signs from a benevolent God that man was meant to sail across oceans by the light of oil lamps, not motor across them with enough spare amps to power a refrigerator and a satellite weather station.

Yet the Salty Dogs are the men women long for, who, given only an axe and a pack of matches, could build them a shopping mall. Give me an axe and a pack of matches, and I’ll build a woman a campfire around which to sing her a love song, neither of which will serve its intended purpose once it starts raining.

For starters, I am afraid of the ocean, although on this point any true sailor would readily concur. I have imagined an unmarked grave for myself beneath the waves many times, often out of a macabre boredom on long watches, but more often for the purpose of planning ways to avoid it. I am almost never sick at sea, thank God, but because my loved ones sometimes are, I have chosen to sail some of the rougher, longer passages alone. When I do, I often suffer bouts of loneliness and melancholy, although this comes with the benefit of encouraging sleep on long passages, perchance to dream of those whom I love and miss.

Once I settle into a voyage that takes me away from work and family, I continually question my judgment in having begun it and the wisdom, not to mention the expense, of continuing it. There has not been an extended voyage in memory in which I did not firmly resolve at some point to sell or give away the infernal boat at the nearest port and fade into a sensible life of gardening and bridge.

Yet despite my disconsolate temperament, ever have I heard the still, small voice that says “go.” I cannot tell you why. I do not know. But I do understand what the message means. It is not an invitation or a compulsion to “go have fun.” I know whose voice that would be: the same fifty-three-year-old lawyer who often tells me to go for that extra slice of birthday cake, or to settle into a DVD-induced haze on a couch in a dark, cozy room instead of riding a bike or picking up a book or writing this memoir to you.

People for whom sailing is a way to have fun, rather than a way of life, don’t long for the horizon. What they seek can be found in a weekend club race or a day trip that ends back at the marina. People do not sail out of sight of land and endure the monotony of an unchanging sea for days on end, punctuated occasionally by the heart-thumping anxiety of storms and the uncertain contours of a distant landfall, far from aid, because it is fun. (Though to be fair, in many moments it is precisely that.) They sail because they know that the journey is its own reward, that it leads someplace beyond a mere geographical destination, and because they hear the call of Thoreau’s different drummer to go wherever that might be.

The call to go is a yearning to peer behind the curtain that encircles and confines our world to the close, the familiar, and the safe. It is a call to strip life bare of its clutter and distractions and to reencounter the primal interest in the unknown that first led us to explore the other end of the crib. Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped exploring. Some of us did not. Some of us cannot.

One day this voice telling me to “go” will perhaps be diagnosed as a form of mental illness that I have suffered unawares, but for now it serves me well as an excuse to go sailing. It was, after all, no less a madman than Mark Twain who gave us these words:

I have gotten
somewhat ahead of myself in the story of this voyage. Before the moment of decision at Beaufort in the fall of 2009, there was another longing, and another unfinished voyage awaiting the order to set sail.

Gary Chapman has written a wonderful book,
The Five Love Languages
, in which he makes the case that each of us is hardwired to recognize and appreciate love in one or more well-defined ways. I have been, since my earliest memory, a person with a need for love in the languages that Chapman describes as “words of affirmation” and “physical touch,” in that order. In less clinical terms, that means that I am rather insecure and need lots of attaboys and hugs. Despite this, I have had an unfailing instinct for cultivating relationships certain never to meet those needs.

Sooner or later, we all have to come face to face with the people we truly are, and so did I—albeit rather late in the game and amid the financial and emotional wreckage of a bruising divorce. What I learned in the process was invaluable to me in trying to repair my life. Little did I know that the Rolling Stones had figured all this out before, if only I’d been listening.

Yes, it’s true. You can’t always get what you want. We all need to accept that, and grown-ups generally do. But you darn well better get what you need, or you may find that your needs are being met in unhealthy ways in other parts of your life. That certainly happened to me, and with disastrous and painful consequences.

But as surely as winter leads to spring, pain is followed by healing and growth. I came to realize several truths, not all of them in step with the pop psychology of the day, as I set out on a quest to find love and happiness. I was looking for “the one.”

First, I considered and rejected the current self-help orthodoxy that holds that it is unhealthy to need anything or anyone outside ourselves in order to feel emotionally whole. Only after we achieve a sublime indifference to the affections of others, this theory goes, will true love alight (or not) like a butterfly on our shoulders while we’re busy finding fulfillment in pottery or poetry, meditation or mountain climbing, whale-saving or what-have-you. I generally didn’t agree with this school of thought, mostly because the dull fellow it describes doesn’t sound like someone I would ever want to be. (I also wasn’t happy with the whole butterfly thing. If I’m choosing metaphors in the animal kingdom for an on-time arrival with my heart’s desire, I’m going with a chicken hawk, not a butterfly.) And as for being perfectly content to be alone, I had always thought the Paul Simon song “I Am a Rock,” was a lament, not a model of emotional wellness.

I much preferred the wisdom of Barbra Streisand that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” followed by no lesser light than Dean Martin, who told us that “you’re nobody till somebody loves you.” (Dino was exaggerating, admittedly, but we all still got the point.) The pop psychologists would have a field day with the codependency suggested by those lines, but I bet their songs would sell fewer records.

Hoagy Carmichael wasn’t fooling anyone when he wrote “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and that really wasn’t his plan. We are made for community, both romantically and socially, and we know it. In case I have offended anyone’s musical tastes, there’s always Loggins and Messina, with their advice in “Danny’s Song” that “if you find she helps your mind, better take her home…” There you have it: the Gospel according to Casey Kasem.

In truth, almost no one agreed with me in these ideas—least of all the women. After three years of separation and divorce, I found myself adrift in bachelorhood, no closer to shore than when I’d started, and beginning to feel the effects of the sun. I had perused hundreds of online dating profiles and begun to notice a pattern in what (usually divorced) women now in their forties and fifties are seeking in a man. It is more of a side salad than an entrée.

Most women described themselves as well satisfied and living a full and busy single life. They would pointedly warn that they were not looking for Mr. Right, but should he carelessly stumble across their path, he must be prepared to defer to what they would ominously warn would “always be” their “first priority.” This was usually children, although in some cases it was extended family or a particular passion in life. The invitation to the hapless Lothario was clear: “If you hitch your wagon to my star, our relationship will never be at the center of my galaxy. We will spin in orbit around some other planet.” I didn’t want that, and I didn’t agree with that.

These cheerfully written profiles were like billboards along a highway, intended to entice the weary traveler to take the next exit into someone’s private world, but they read to me more like the warning sign to the Cowardly Lion in the Haunted Forest:
I’D TURN BACK IF I WERE YOU.

Lest I be accused of stealing candy from babies, I hasten to add what a Catholic priest once told me. Couples going through the church’s pre-Cana program to discern their readiness to marry, he said, invariably answer this question incorrectly: What should be your first priority, your relationship with your children or your relationship with your spouse?

The most common answer of prospective mothers and fathers is that their relationship with their children would certainly come first. In a way, this answer makes perfect sense. Children need love and nurturing to develop properly, and for a time during their development, their needs are so great and so constant that they must take precedence over the needs of husband and wife. Husbands and wives gladly make that sacrifice. I did. Very likely you did. There is no contest here.

It is also a fact of life that romantic love can fade and marriages can end, while the bond between a parent and child endures forever. Yet even the Catholic Church recognizes that when children revolve in orbit around their parents’ relationship, they (and their parents) lead healthier lives than when children are made the center of their parents’ universe.

An example from my boyhood better illustrates the point that millions of parents in my generation—and now the many divorced mothers among them—seem to be missing: I lettered in three sports in high school and played varsity lacrosse on a championship team in college, in the 1970s, and yet I cannot recall a single practice and no more than a handful of games that my mother ever attended. In fact, almost no one’s mom or dad was ever at practice, and none of us minded—or noticed. We got there on our bikes or we walked, and if there was an away game, our parents took us only if we couldn’t find a ride with a friend. My mother worked hard, and though I didn’t give it much thought at the time, I’m sure she had better things to do than to spend what blessed free hours she had on a Saturday morning cheering wildly as though I had done something remarkable by catching a pass or running fast on twelve-year-old legs. Playing sports was, for me, all the reward I needed, and as a result I was self-motivated to play with a dedication that took me as far as my abilities allowed. No one ever handed me a juice box or a brownie at halftime, but the team had a bucket and (one) ladle with all the ice water we needed.

Years later, by the time I was coaching my son’s middle school lacrosse team and his sister was participating in soccer and gymnastics, the world had dramatically changed. The players’ parents—nearly all of them—were lined up like opposing armies along the sidelines for hours on end. Parking lots were choked with minivans. Parents were there not just for championship matches but for every game and most practices. The majority were there not just on a few weekends but every weekend. Some families sheepishly escaped during school breaks to go on vacation together, but many stayed home to attend practices as a sign of their “commitment to the team.” Rotund mothers anxiously shouted strategic advice to their tiny daughters on balance beams. Brigades of parents descended on fields at halftime with a veritable banquet of delights. Although the majority of these kids would never play beyond the middle school level, hundreds of dollars were spent on high-end equipment, elite training camps, and private leagues that involved overnight travel, hotels, and a total commitment of the parents’ time.

Something seems very wrong with this picture. But needless to say, I didn’t try hard to win this argument in my own family, and our family was no different than most. I gave up and happily joined the throng. Kids naturally want to do what other kids are doing, and the same is true of parents. There is enormous social pressure not merely to conform to, but to excel at, generational norms of parenting. The baby boomers, my generation, have been the most hovering parents in history. This shows in the way it has shaped our children and our relationships.

Admit it: most kids today don’t show nearly the same level of initiative and independence that you did at the same age. Adolescence, I am told, has been officially extended to age thirty. When husbands and wives make children the center of their lives and their marriage, either they become invested in the children’s never really leaving (hence the phenomenon of lengthening adolescence) or, when the children do leave, the marriage withers like a hollow tree. It may stand, petrified, but only until a strong wind blows.