Oiling Our Hinges

I did something important yesterday.
I took my boat to a marina and put it up for sale.

A few years ago, when I was a mere seventy-something years old,
Sture asked whether I had been serious when I said I wanted to build a boat.
If so, he said, he thought he knew of a space to build it.

My most important reason for wanting to build a boat had to do,
not so much with the fact that it was a boat, but that I was beginning
to think of myself as getting old; too old to do new things.

I was old, and getting older. The evidence was obvious.
When I walked, I made sounds like a door needing oil on it hinges.
I could no longer go as long between oil and filter changes:
the doctor explained that my moving parts were suffering from fatigue.
My right eyeball sprang a leak that required multiple repairs.

But I built the boat!
I even went to a diesel engine workshop.
I learned to do things I had never done before.
Boats, I learned, are not really built: they are sanded into shape.
I drove to Lexington, Kentucky to buy a triple-axle trailer,
and rebuilt it to fit the boat. But all those things are details.

What was important was that I reaffirmed
that I ought not allow myself to settle gently into old age;
that I ought not to go gently into that good night,
but that, when that good night does come,
that my fall ought to be onto something I was doing at the time.

And now it is time to put the boat aside,
not so much because we are moving to a desert (we are),
but because it is time to do something else.

Mari is retiring from teaching.
We are--both of us--looking at everything and wondering
what ought to be left behind, and what we ought to bring along
to the next thing we do; to the next place in our lives.
At first, it seemed scary, but now it has become fun.
It is time to do something new.

We have been oiling our hinges.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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