Authentic Nautical Accessories, and Custom Furnishings
I know I’m young. but I know what I like. Red cushions, red towels, they are so exquisite, so soft against my fur. My bothers Marcus and Max are so lacking in fine taste. They’ll lie down on any old thing.
I know all about the finer things in life. Waiter? Is it time for dinner yet?
November is that time of year when I tend to settle in for the winter.
It’s an old habit going back to my days on the road. I wouldn’t hit the road, thumbs out, guitar, and pack all rigged after October. When November arrived, it would have to be some thing big to dig me out of the Single-room-occupancy hole I had selected for winter. Just to be clear, the world was a vastly different place then. Most cities I traveled to had a stock of less-than-optimal apartments, rooms, and studios. Someone like me could afford one on the sort of low-wage resources available.Â
I tended to prefer life in the working-class slum of Boston’s backside of Beacon Hill. We were only blocks from our “betters” on the front side of the Hill. But those of us who lived in the less elite neighborhood shopped at the same Star Market as those from the well-to-do front side. There was a sort of retail democracy. Mrs. Downy from Mount Vernon St on the front side compared sweet potatoes with Mrs. Kadabowski from Joy St. on the backside. We all had coffee and donuts at the Tarry and Taste on Charles Street. And we used the same all-night pharmacy, and emergency room at the Mass General Hospital. The Charles St coffeehouses were friendly refuges for all. And most of what you needed was within walking distance: the world in an oyster.
Its main failings were the sort of wet, frozen dankness that came off the harbor and the nearby Charles River. We dreaded the slippery obsidian-like skin of ice that formed on the Brick sidewalks. But worse the creaky steam heat in the apartment houses never quite took the chill off.
Just thinking of this makes me feel young. There’s a mean-spiritedness in the world that encourages many of us to sniff at youth. We were foolish, the crank says. We didn’t know what the hell we were about, and we wasted opportunity. Sure we did. But we learned, loved, and grew by experience. Understand, old timer, giving up on youth just because there are some creaks in the bones, is the true beginning of age. There is more than one peak in life.
For me, I believe in the old saying that just because you age, you do not have to grow old.
Damn! I hate genie stories. First of all, they all assume that genies have integrity issues. The genie is always trying to trick you into some idiotic mistake of syntax or grammar that sends you off on some spooktacular journey.
I think that most of the bad feelings are an apparent effort to transfer or project our own ethical and moral issues onto another creature. Consider, if you will, the impoverished existence of your typical genie. There they are, stuck inside a bottle for generations on end. Then some doofus does the old rub-a-dub, and they must be profusely grateful, full of charisma, and joyful to grant your tawdry wishes- and we know all about you, Chuck, Charlie, and Josey- and be grateful.
So if by some chance you do chance upon a poor genie’s undersized abode, be considerate of their lack of amenities. Consider wishing they might have Netflix, decent internet speeds, and DoorDash. For once stop thinking about yourself!
 Here is my Halloween offering.
As many of you know, I make some of my living as a maritime carver – quarter boards, transom banners, billet heads, eagles, and portraits of boats.
But I was surprised when I was contacted about doing a strange portrait. Most portraits show the boat in profile, sailing on a breeze. This gentleman wanted the ship on the rocks, with the sails in tatters. He handed me a profile photo of the schooner for the design and a sketch of the reef. I recognized the Widows and the Pinnacles from living in coastal Maine and remarked that not too many dared thread the path through the needles; he gave me a cold smile and said nothing.
Afterward, I didn’t think about the carving. So it wasn’t till November second that I learned about the wreck. I keep one final tie to my time in Maine: my subscription to the Portland Press Herald keeps me current on happenings in my old haunts. I learned that a schooner had foundered on Halloween trying to thread the Needles. The skipper missed his timing by minutes and brought about the crew’s loss of life. The news photo was disturbingly close to what I had carved.
Being an anthropologist, I read widely into the literature of witchcraft and sorcery among several cultures. I recognized the sort of ritual used. In some traditions, it calls for a ghostwriter – a craftsman capable of rendering the tragedy. The resemblance must be very close to be effective. It can’t photocopied or photographed. Added efficacy comes from the curse written on the back. The rendering and curse create the event.
I now have a new patron, and he’s already contacted me with several requests. Which ones should I choose to carve?
I don’t know about you, but I believe people can change. I remember well when my father, a sometimes ogre when I was young, morphed into a mentor. Much of the good and valuable had been there all along but overshadowed by what we would now term PTSD. The ongoing pull of two sinkings by torpedos, stressful wartime voyages, and other things never disappeared. Beaming sunshine never totally replaced the dark, but a new relationship built on the best of the old and new elements developed.
So, people change, and they deserve the chance to be evaluated in light of those changes. Some come right out with it and apologize. Others show it by behavior, rectifying mistakes. It may be a matter of individual personality or style and how the change shows in character, bearing, and actions.
Of course, the ability to change is there in most of us, but not all take it. What can I say about someone who fails to grasp it when it comes? A favorite quote from Muhammad Ali comes to mind, “A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
Marcus: I know I shouldn’t. But I can’t resist!
I’ve just finished stacking two cords of wood. The picture will give you a fair idea of what this looks like if you’ve never participated in an Annual Festival of Wood. And by the way, two more cords are due next week – so reserve your quarter cord now!
But seriously, I have come to appreciate wood stacking; it’s the perfect way to maintain your core muscle strength, and it gets you outside in the brisk fall air. Set up your radio or phone for some tunes, and you can rock out while you get a free exercise session. It is true that it’s very old school and that your neighbors look at you with undisguised amusement.
But comes January, when the power is out, and the neighbors are freezing and looking for a motel room until the power gets restored, you’ll be toasty warm. In February, when the neighbors are panicking over how they will pay the fossil fuel bill, you will be content, remembering that your wood costs a bare three hundred a cord – not the cool grand plus they have monthly.
So yes, wood stacking in the fall is a favorite physical exercise. And, comes winter, there is a sense of security that comes from a well-stacked wood pile.
Not my Halloween costume. The mask and goggles with hearing protectors are for leaf mulching. This outfit is not nearly as scary as the big respirator, hearing protectors, and mask I use in the shop. But if I put on the gloves, the chainsaw protective chaps, and the weed eater, I’m sure that people would run…but I’m not that sort of guy…
Until the full moon!
I got the Science Fiction bug very early. I started with juveniles. They featured young men, fortunately, or unfortunately, pulled into extraterrestrial adventures and doing well. I’d spend hours reading about our current capacity for space travel and how soon it might be where I could rocket off into adventure. This led to discouraging estimates of how old I’d be before an interplanetary adventure was possible. I stopped making estimates and just enjoyed the stories.Â
By the time I got to college, Sci-Fi had influenced my studies in anthropology. I felt alien societies had to be more diverse than the pure rip-offs of human society I was reading about. And even if you based things on human society, they couldn’t all be based on the stereotypes used by SF writers. Despite huge anatomical, historical, and biological differences, there was too much uniformity.” A kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh. The fundamental things apply as time goes by.” Well, all that kissing and boringly similar kinship structures to a few human stereotypes drove me away.
I retreated into Fantasy literature: terror, swords, dark lords, curses covering entire lands, that sort of stuff. But you can only read so many novels that have based their whole rationale on a fallen Roman or Chinese empire, great evil, and obtuse villains. So then we get the elves, dwarfs, and other Tolkien knock-offs.
It was in grad school that I developed an interest in the alternative worlds. Twists on those also utilized the Sword and Fantasy tropes, but it was all dressed up in different costumes. Editors must have gotten the message through to writers that bland knock-offs of Rome were boring. We got some variety with knock-offs of medieval empires, Norse, and others.
So if NASA or a private firm called me up and said, “Lou! We have a flight to the moon reserved for you!” I might not go. I am involved in reading the seventh installment of the Tadisqian War by Banf. The interdimensional system eaters are invading “Old Earth.” The forces arrayed against evil must rally behind Lord Tanquil to beat them off.
And you want me to go to dull old Luna?
At my age, there are any number of career tracks with sphincter issues due to age discrimination. Around forty-five people seem to wonder if you are too old for a job. I now have the satisfaction of being acquainted with several individuals who have passed the significant milestone. Some twenty or more years prior, their comments about me being over the hill were unwelcome. My condolence cards celebrating their redundancy have not been popular. I took one of my former colleagues to lunch a few months ago. It was interesting.
His career plans are now askew. Being that he considered himself to be safe, he never invested in plan B’s. Many of us older compatriots were eagerly working on “just in case” plan C’s and D’s, having learned bitter lessons about how plan A can go wrong.
I told him that in his prior employment, he may have been a top-of-the-pyramid predator; a raptor stalking the flock. But now he was another newly unemployed with issues. It hurt when they told him that he was not promotable. I mentioned that his job now is to be a staunch supporter of himself as a human being, not as a piece of meat on the job market.
After talking about him for an hour, he asked what I’d been doing. Well, after two years of unemployment, I went to work at an awful place – but it paid full benefits for my family. I started two small businesses as a videographer and as a woodcarver. Eventually, I moved from breaking even to doing well. Currently, work is very low-stress. I have almost no meetings or video conferences, the people I work for appreciate what I do, and I no longer bother with a resume. I want to return to journalism or maybe teach again, but those plans are still developing.
You see, I tell him, you learn to be flexible; in Bob Dylan’s words, “…he who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
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