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.