Tag: mermaids

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Mahan and the Mermaid

 If you read the “about my stories” page on my blog, you’d see that I love and appreciate sea stories. These generally have the approach of TINS – this is no shit. In other words, ” I heard this from my buddy, who served aboard the USS Pig Tail when it happened.” Sea stories do not have the classic “they lived happily ever ending.” More likely, they end with everyone heading off to the Blue Anchor for an evening of carousing.

Well, to each his own. But each genre has a perverse “you just know this didn’t happen” take on things. For example, visiting the Unseely Court for fairy tales and mermaids for sea stories. So there is a sort of connection.

Mahan was married to a mermaid. It seemed unlikely that a stunning daughter of the sea would pick Mahan, the Navy’s most unkempt and alcoholic Bosun’s mate. When we first heard about it, we figured it was an alcoholic hallucination. But in fact, that’s what the marriage certificate said. Mahan was seen every month driving to the pet store to get the twenty-pound bags of Miracle Sea to add to her required bath water. On the few occasions that Stella was seen in social company, she was always in long green sheathlike dresses that seemed as though it was actually “her” rather than clothes. Her tiny feet seemed an afterthought and not natural. She always hung on Mahan for support and had a way of flipping her legs about that didn’t seem normal. The other Navy wives and girlfriends thought she was odd, used no cosmetics, and loved the seaweed salad at the harborside sushi restaurant. But Mahaan was smitten, and Stella was smitten with Mahan.

Their families did not get along. Hers objected to her marrying a member of her people’s age-old exploiters. And his family found her background too “fishy” and improbable. Being of old Irish stock, the Mahan family knew about the “special” people of Ireland and wondered aloud why he couldn’t marry a proper Irish Sidhe and not some watery tart.

Stella and Mahan felt confident that the families would reconcile when the children came along. But the grandmothers to be argued endlessly about whether the birth should happen in the hospital or nearby harbor. Mahan, his father, and his father-in-law sensibly left the delivery location to them.

Then they laid a course for the Blue Anchor, bought multiple rounds for the house, and left birthing to the ladies.

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Not So Little Mermaid

So…yes, this isn’t carved, but as this fiberglass concoction hangs, so also hangs a tale of carving. 

I had booths at many boat shows during my stint as a maritime carver. My display of eagles, quarter boards, billet heads, and boat portraits received lots of attention. But, inevitably, not all of it was of a sort I really wanted. Alcohol complicated sales and display. Sloshed beer was a cleanup problem. Show attendees who were inebriated rarely bought. But, frequently caused problems.
At some point, a man would walk up and ask me how much It’d cost to carve a figurehead of his wife. “Like this (putting his hands behind his head). But bustier.”

After the first couple of polite replies, I grew tired of these requests for explicit work. So I developed a method of handling them.
a.) say sure, and the name a flagrantly outrageous price;
b.) then I’d ask for a signed consent form from his wife. Agreeing to this
c.) for the genuinely incorrigible, I’d refer them to a place in Newport where the exact model pictured here was available for about $150 in fiberglass.

I actually printed up a consent form for those who purported to be serious about this but never got one back signed…I wonder why?

This beauty hung in the Oldies Marketplace (Newburyport, MA) for several months among all the fabulous bijoux before it was snapped up. The last time I was there, it had been replaced by one equally well endowed. Thereby proving, I guess, that there was a market for them and probably that I contributed to it.

Please, no mermaid requests without a signed consent form!