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O’Dark Thirty

Was it ” Mr. wakey wakey” on his rounds for watchstanders? No. 

There were no vibrations of a ship, always alive. Reaching out, I don’t find wooden ceiling planks. I’m not aboard Psyche; I’d feel the movement of water through the hull.

 I know when and where I’m not. It’s not Navy, and it’s not Maine. It’s still O’dark thirty, that’s why I thought back to waking for the mid-watch. Everyone’s favorite, midnight till four AM. There’s a crack of light from the hall outside; I’m home. The blackout curtains my wife insists on creating a bedroom so deep in darkness that its disorienting.

The trouble waking isn’t new. It’s been a feature of my life on and off since college. An assignment in American Literature to read Slaughterhouse Five initiated it. Like Billy Pilgrim, I seem to float between critical points in life. The waking uncertainty went away in grad school. But it had resurfaced with the curtains.

It’s not so much that I’d fear waking in those two times or places. It’s the uncertainty of where else my soul might range that scares me.

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Entangle

I was attempting to separate a tangled mess of audio cables. After a shoot last week, an intern had been in a hurry to head off for a fun weekend. This Monday, the boss, me, had the pleasant duty of taking the entangled mess and turning it into neatly coiled audio cables – ready to be used at the next remote shoot, Friday.

I knew one intern who wouldn’t be getting a satisfactory performance review. Well, as the Cap’n would have said: “You’ve been there, You’ve done that. Don’t do it again.” So I guess there will be the lecture on the Seven P’s – Prior, Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Then I remembered my experience with a mess of tangled lines.

Years before, while getting the 34-foot ketch Psyche ready for summer sailing, I had opened the chain locker where I had hurriedly stowed an assortment of running rigging the previous fall without properly coiling it. I didn’t remember leaving it such a mess. But there the pile sat, filthy, tangled, and a seeming Gordion’s Knot of line. Knowing what the Cap’n’s reaction would be, and being able to price out the replacement cost of whatever I could not salvage, I spent an entire day on the wharf unknotting and carefully coiling. Like a three-year-old, I hoped that my sins of omission and commission would go undiscovered. Unlike a three-year-old, I realized that a good captain doesn’t trust a green hand without verifying the work done and undone. Sometime that afternoon, before the Cap’n returned, I figured out that he knew, and this was his way of teaching me a lesson. 

Sure enough, when he returned, he had a big smile plastered on his face. He merely pointed the stem of his pipe at the neatly coiled running rigging, smiled at me, and said: “good job, Wes.”

Thinking about that memory, I took the one cable I had properly coiled and laid it neatly on the tangled cables. I took a piece of notepaper from the pad and wrote a quick note. ” Hey Bob, don’t forget to add a quarter turn counter-clockwise to each loop as you coil the audio cables. It keeps them from tangling.”

I’d see soon enough If my intern took the hint and earned praise. Or, if he needed a dramatic reading of the Seven P’s before a poor performance review.

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Megalith

I was not too fond of megaliths. As a cultural anthropologist, I was interested in more contemporary monuments. Specifically the Friday evening party I would attend. Tomorrow I might have a hangover of megalithic proportions.
But for now, I knew it might be on the final. Pay attention, Lou!

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Awaken

In terms that are current to our times, many of my peers were “woke.” Like now, you could be “woke” to one group and un-cool to another that considered themselves to be “woke.” Being that it’s a mental state of cultural and political awareness, you can harbor pockets of very un-woken thought and behavior. Then, as well as now, the most transcendentally aware of the “woken” ones will deny this. Perfection is a hard act. But denial is a human trait that is hard to eradicate.

Back then – the 1960s through ’70’s -being politically and socially “woke” in one sense did not necessarily mean that you were enlightened in others. Probably the best-known example of this for Beats, Folkies, and Hippies I knew was un-woke behavior towards women. It didn’t seem to sink in that being active in the Civil Rights movement while treating your spouse as a domestic slave was hypocrisy. Even when that person self-emancipated and left you, the behavior continued. “Hey, sweetie, get us some more beer!”

Then, as now, it was easier to declare that anyone not as apparently “woke” as you couldn’t have valuable perspectives. As a species, we seem to reinvent the cure to universal ills generationally. Just too easy, I say.

It may be as Ecclesiastes states that: 

What has been will be again,

 what has been done will be done again;

 there is nothing new under the sun.

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Zephyr

<p class="has-drop-cap" value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">My workbench is always a mess when I am in the middle of a carving project. But this one was different. It was a small job that I was doing as a favor for Spinney. It only required a few gouges and a knife to finish what the original carver had set out years ago. For about fifty years, the unfinished transom carving had perched in the paint shop's rafters at Spinney's boatyard. Only the last two letters remained uncarved when I removed the half-century of dust. My workbench is always a mess when I am in the middle of a carving project. But this one was different. It was a small job that I was doing as a favor for Spinney. It only required a few gouges and a knife to finish what the original carver had set out years ago. For about fifty years, the unfinished transom carving had perched in the paint shop’s rafters at Spinney’s boatyard. Only the last two letters remained uncarved when I removed the half-century of dust. 

“You know, Spinney. You were a pretty good carver. Maybe you should have kept it up?” ” No offense Wes, but it doesn’t pay enough.” I laughed. If it paid enough, I wouldn’t be helping to haul boats, apply bottom paint, and varnish at a boatyard. “So why after fifty years, are we finishing the carving up?” ” It’s a surprise for a little girl.” He told me. 

 I finished Y and the R, did a bit of clean up sanding, primed the board with thinned marine varnish, and left it to dry. Daily I added another coat of varnish, being careful to leave the incised lettering clean and crisp. After nine coats, it was ready for painting the lettering and the gold leaf. The morning after finishing the gold leaf, it disappeared. I heard nothing more about it for almost a month. Then one day, Spinney invited me to a small relaunching ceremony. 

The little sloop had sat awash in a local cove for years. The summer visitor who had owned it had left it for a fast powerboat. In an act of sheer waste, he had abandoned the sloop. It had sat there gradually deteriorating and getting stripped of all hardware and rigging. Spinney hated waste and was uncommonly capable of seeing hidden value. Spinney was also cheap. He paid pennies for the right to salvage the sloop. We hauled it to the boatyard and gradually restored it. As summer arrived, we finished the rigging and sails.

Even though it was Sunday, the entire crew showed up for the relaunch. Nobody likes an unresolved mystery, and Spinney always held his cards close to his chest. So we knew little that he didn’t want us to know about his business. The sloop fell into that category, and we wanted to know.

The new owners were an older woman, nearly Spinney’s age, and what must be her granddaughter. We overheard snatches of a conversation between the woman and Spinney: ” Maynard, do you think she’s old enough?”, “You and I were at the same age, Nora. And I’ll give her lessons.” the young woman, about thirteen, was already getting ready to undo the mooring line and raise the mainsail. She seemed to know what she was about and wasn’t waiting for lessons. “Uncle Maynard, let’s hurry up. I want to go sailing.” Ah, uncle Maynard, Spinney’s grandniece, and that’d make the older woman Spinney’s long-absent sister Nora who the whole town knew had split from the family for reasons unknown.

” Uncle Maynard, do I start working at the boatyard tomorrow?” With a broad smile, Spinney replied: “Absolutely. You’ll start at the bottom, Wes will teach you how to scrape, sand, and paint boat bottoms.” With this said, Spinney stepped onto the sloop and shoved off the dock.

Zephyr shook out her mainsail and was on the breeze. And I had gained an apprentice.

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Stay Just a Little Bit Longer

It was a very in-between time. I was mostly on my own, spending time in the Village, but still traveling uptown to my friends in the Bronx and Riverside. I was still very much in love with Danielle, Danny, but she had her sights firmly set on Harvard while mine was set on, well I don’t know what. I was between visions of the world and would be for several more years. In the meantime, I was experiencing a life my academically inclined friends would never comprehend. In college, they would read “On the Road” by Kerouac. I would live on the road and tell you where Jack cut out the good parts. But that was still in my future.

Tonight I was on my way to my last date with Danny. We both agreed that it was time to end it. Reluctantly on my part, firm and resolute on hers. Harvard was only part of it. Her parents dreaded the though to me as a possible son in law. Danny, could not see a future in which I behaved like a responsible adult. And I couldn’t see a future in which I acted like the responsible adult they expected. So the end.

As a group, we were going to a dance. Looking back to that time, it’s interesting to see all my friends emerging from adolescence into adulthood. Clint had a job at Xerox. Michelle was continuing her study of dance, and Danny was looking forward to the fall semester at Harvard. Young adults in the offing.

I have few memories of the dance itself. Things resolved into focus when the band began to play the song “Stay.” That song made whole my feelings about the night, the relationship, and my hopes for a future I was cut off from. One part of me wanted to drag time backward to have again what we all had had together, but of course, I couldn’t.

None of us could “stay.” We were all little eighteen-year-old rocketships bound to see the universe.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWRtyAgt-u4

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Blather

Lefkowitz moved from something similar to a Bach fugue to an interlude that morphed into a 12 bar blues. Mitch provided some impromptu lyrics, and Sue did some neat things with her soprano voice. I had a bad cold and sore throat, so I just sipped my extra-large tea with honey. After Lefkowitz finished up, Mitch picked out one of his tunes for us. Sue followed up with one of her favorite Scottish ballads. 

It was a quiet Monday night in the Village. Monday and Tuesday tended to be slow, and on Wednesday, things picked up heading into the weekend. Monday was a good time to experiment with friends. Several other groups at the Rienzi were doing likewise. Over in a corner, a clutch of poets was critiquing a colleague’s latest work, and near the door a pair of sketch artists were drawing the scene in the Cafe Rienzi’s music room.

A clearing of the throat announced a stranger at our table. He snubbed the men at the table while shuffling in a chair between Lefkowitz and Sue. Portly, bearded, and looking like a down at the heels professor of lit, he began to take issue with Sue’s diction and accent on her version of “The Bonnie Earl of Moray.” He was in full blather about how the McEwan version was the one she should emulate. Sue sat there smiling slightly, apparently not knowing if this was the intro to a come-on or just another deranged Village tourist who couldn’t find his tour bus and was now stuck in the inmates’ asylum. On he went, and when we all assumed he must come to a pause, on he continued.

Mitch picked up a discarded New York Times and began finishing the prior reader’s crossword puzzle. Lefkowitz started to miming “yada, yada, yada, yada,” while pretending to be before a class delivering a lecture.

Mitch looked up at me and loudly asked, ” Wes, what’s a 12 letter word for an idiot who endlessly natters on about uninteresting topics?” This one I knew. When he isn’t playing coffeehouses, Mitch is a grad student in sociolinguistics. Mitch is my primary source for obscure words that might sound insulting, and this was his word of the day for me on Friday. I pretended to think deeply about this while everyone at the table watched. “Why, that would have to be Blatherskite!” I croaked.

Mitch looked pleased with me, but looked over to our unwanted companion and said, ” It is derived from the 17th century Scots Bleatherskate, but of course, sir being all-knowing on things Scots, you knew that.”

Sue began laughing, Lefkowitz picked up his harmonica and began playing the Bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Loman as a blues. I choked, and Mitch slapped me hard on the back. Our unwanted guest had the wits to take his chair to the corner and bother the poets.

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Roll

I was standing watching the waves roll in at Rockport. Last night had been stormy, and the waves were long rollers sweeping in from the Atlantic. From where I stood, there was no land between Europe and me. That much water is both exciting and daunting.
For me, fall starts with the shift of prevailing winds out of the soft southwesterly of summer into more unsettled patterns.
It’s a season of change. For the landlocked, the features they notice most are the cooler evenings and leaves turning. But I’d maintain that the grey waters, persistent lines of rolling waves, and the wet spume are better markers.
Now is the best time to walk the tide line. Following the storm, tides bring in kelp, driftwood, sea glass, and old wreckage bits. All are on display. The worn bits of sea glass provide proof that given time, the sea will wear everything down.
Find a warm berth in some shoreside cafe, get a mug of coffee, and watch the inevitable.

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Labor Day

If you are “from away,” you may have driven past a little ritual on route 95 near the Maine and New Hampshire border. At the end of the Labor Day holiday, some local folks hang out banners over the highway’s last stretch into New Hampshire. Some are polite expressions “see you again next year.” some are less polite and express the desire that you permanently exit to New York or Massachusetts. There are mixed feelings about the dependence on tourist dollars. The income is needed, but the desire not to have a way of life and the environment swamped by the annual influx causes some conflicting emotions.
While living along the Maine coast, I always had an ambivalence to the whole thing. First, I was from New York, the ultimate “from away” location, but I was “married in” due to my wife and her family. They’d been there since before the first Census. Nobody was going to call the Capn’s son in law a Summer Complaint. I also worked the same jobs everyone else did and did not have the money and leisure that many visitors had. All this got complicated by the fact that my natural New York accent was fading over the years in New England, and I was picking up and using local English. I was not a native, but I was not a New Yorker anymore, either.
What happened one day at the boatyard where I worked illustrates the issue.
Spinney and the yard crew were especially amused when folks from New York City would take me for a local. Spinney jokingly suggested that one Brooklynite ask me how locals pronounced items. If my looks could have killed, Spinney would have dropped on the spot. But I dutifully rendered the local pronunciation of things in my most inauthentic Maine accent. I felt like a performing dog. Off to one side, the crew struggled to keep straight faces. When done, I tried to explain to them that I was from Manhattan. They laughed so hard they turned red. Afterward, I promised Spinney that I’d get even.
Spinney turned to me and said: “now you know how we all feel when they ask us how lobster is pronounced, or how we say Bar Harbor. We’ve done you a big favor Wes…you don’t ask for “kaufee” anymore first thing in the morning.”
OK, I guess he had a point.

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The Bevel Gauge

Before starting full-time studies at Boston University, I worked various jobs to pay my part-time tuition at the Metropolitan College. Some of that work was as a personal attendant for older people. There was the doctor who thought he was still in practice in Dorchester and the former wool shipping magnate who dragged me to all the finest private clubs in the Boston area, and at last, there was the ship carpenter.
John was the son of a ship carpenter who had worked in the East Boston shipyard of Donald McKay. John’s dad has worked on many of Mckay’s clipper ships. John himself had been a carpenter in several New England shipyards and was proudest of the work he had done during World War II in the South Portland shipyards building Liberty ships for the war effort.

This job did not pay me as well as babysitting the well to do. John’s brother controlled the purse strings and held them tightly closed for his brother’s care. His brother and nephew Paul where all the family John had, and where John was garrulous and generous, the brother was tightlipped and would play games with pay if you didn’t watch. But he paid in cash each week, and that made the tuition bill disappear all that much faster.
John was a motor mouth, but on topics he knew, ship carpentry, his stories were fascinating. He’d been his father’s apprentice late in the old man’s life and had learned old school methods alongside newer ones. His love in later years had been finish carpentry, and once a month or so, John would have the nephew and I dig out the old tool chest that had been his father’s and tell us about each tool and the tricks of how to use them. He maintained that the marine carpenter’s most needed tool was the bevel gauge. The bevel gauge is a long flat metal piece with a slot in the middle. Into the slot fits a bolt and a closure nut on a long brass and hardwood handle. Adjusting the nut and changing the sliding metal piece’s angle allows you to approximate almost any angle you need. Being that there were so many odd angles in marine cabinetwork, John maintained that you could not do without it. ” ninety degrees? Those are hard to find on a boat.”

The nephew, Paul, was a young man in search of a life. His father wanted him in finance with him. But he loved to hear the stories John told about shipyard work and also loved to quiz me about my interest in history and anthropology. His preferred companions were his uncle John and me. We could make an afternoon fly by swapping tales. By four-thirty in the afternoon, I’d leave to go home, feed my cat, and get ready for evening classes.
It was a good year. I had time to study on the job, good companionship, and cash every Friday. It couldn’t last. One day I showed up to find that John had been taken to the hospital. Two weeks later, Paul called to tell me that John had died, and the ceremonies had been family only. Then he told me that his father was planning on selling the tool chest and all the contents. He hoped to “recoup” some of the expenses of the funeral. I thought it was sad that a family heirloom chest of tools dating to the 1840s was going to go to auction, rather than stay in the family.
Paul asked me: ” Dad has no idea of what’s in the chest, and I want something to remember my uncle by. If I took just one tool, which do you think it should be?”
We discussed it. In the chest were a set of well-crafted saws, chisels, and a number of handmade wooden planes. But when we turned all the options over and over, we realized that it had to be John’s well-used bevel gauge, the indispensable tool.
The next semester I began to study full time as an anthropology major at Boston University. I heard nothing further from John’s brother or from his nephew.
Years later, though, I read an article in one of the Boston paper’s Sunday magazines; in the article, there was a photo of John’s nephew in his law office. In a case prominently set on the wall was John’s bevel gauge. The caption read: “My uncle’s bevel gauge is a reminder to me that not everything in life is square or plumb; nor does it need to be.”
Well, it’s true. We are a society that prefers things square, plumb and regular; just so in their place. But life isn’t that neat, and that’s where a sort of mental version of the bevel gauge comes in handy.

Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver

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