The Notebooks

I went out and bought two or three of these notebooks - probably just before my 59th birthday.

I used to write in “journals” off and on for years - somewhere out there in the barn/workshop there’s a box full of those hard-bound-book type things. Some fancy, some plain. I guess they appealed to a part of me that thought writing stuff down needed to look serious. Most of them aren’t even 1/4 full.

Around eight years ago I fell in with a group of local musicians - some were songwriters, some singers and players. I have always loved music - there was a grand piano in our living room when I was a kid. My two older sisters got piano lessons that they did not like - I did not get the lessons but my mother used to say that I made musical-sounding things on that piano.

I bought my first guitar at 13 - I was enthralled with the 60’s Folk scene.

Anyway - the notebooks. I have been earning a living doing carpentry for about forty years now. At this point I don’t have to think real hard to get the work done. I also work alone often and the internal dialogue just runs on and on. When I got a computer I naturally started keeping little online notebooks. Falling back into music via the friends that I had found, I began to channel my internal dialogues into paper notes during the day. Scribblings that I was hoping were song-like ideas. I began to amass pockets full of scrap paper. I wrote on the backs of receipts, my appointment books - that kind of thing. So that day came when I went to Office Depot in Rio Grande and bought a couple of black & white composition books - and one orange one on a whim. I intended to proceed in an orderly fashion and work in one until it was filled up before starting in the next one. That probably didn’t last very long. Being lazy by nature I would eventually just grab whichever one was nearby and so at this point the chronology of the scribblings is totally out of whack. 

I think I also liked the idea that buying those notebooks seemed to indicate the serious intent that I had bent myself to. So I bought more before any were filled up. 

I page back through them from time to time - I see the same ideas presented and re-presented. It has led me to think that there are a half-dozen or so issues that concern most of us. I’m often surprised to see how long ago an idea that I think of as recent was initially written down.

There might be five or six currently working - I think there are two that are filled. The orange one is faded to a pale ochre.

I managed to lose track of one a couple of years ago. Actually, I didn’t lose track of it - I lost it.

I dropped it in the driveway of The Mad Batter Bar & Restaurant during one of the SS Cape May conferences. I didn’t even miss it. One night last year I was at The Batter to hear Dan Barry play. His bass player Dominic Mancini came up to me and handed me the notebook that he’d found back then. I didn’t recognize it at first when he handed me that notebook - then I saw the black “3” on the cover. Apparently I had numbered them once before the scheme got out of whack. As I said, I see the same themes coming up over and over, but sometimes in between all the negligible scrawls there are a few keepers.

Learning

(MQ Murphy image)

So - I guess I was wondering whether performing songs would help me with songwriting. I think it has. There is a component to the good song - singability. I was just listening to a few songs on the International Songwriting Competition website. There was at least one that I started humming along with about halfway through. The songs were on a page of past winners in the various categories - I was listening to the 'folk' and 'singer-songwriter' categories, of course, though I also listened to a jazz vocal composition from a woman in Ireland.

I've been 'playing out' a lot this year - usually two to three nights a week at the Pilot House and I've also been hosting an Open Mic at The Mad Batter on Sunday nights. Playing more often has improved my guitar playing and given me opportunities to try different approaches to phrasing with my songs.

One thing that I'm not sure I know how to do yet is 'work' on songs. I keep my notebooks with me almost all the time and write things down in them just about every day. It seems that I'm usually waiting for some idea to reach a critical mass where it sort of finishes itself - the results are . . . mixed.

I've got a few tunes that I guess I consider finished, but they feel to me as though I was forcing them to conclusions just to have something finished. That's accurate, because I pushed some of them along in the time between being accepted to perform at Singer-Songwriter Cape May and the date of the actual performances. Just a side note here - I'm remembering that my friend George Mesterhazy was there at the real 'first' performance at the Pilot House - it put me much more at ease to have him sitting at a front table. His comments afterward were so encouraging.

I should also say that I've got a few that I consider finished and pretty good. I get good reactions to 'Driver Has No Money' and 'Country Song'. I've been asked who did the 'original version' of Driver and several people have asked me if it was available on CD. A guy who was an editor at Time Magazine and currently writes a blog for Huffington Post complimented a performance of 'Country Song' and offered to forward it to a producer friend in Nashville. At this point I want just one quiet morning or evening to record basic versions of the better songs for official copyright submission.

Essential equipment.

Six weeks ago today I got careless while using the table saw for a project. For reasons not clear to me right now I ended up putting my left index finger into the saw blade.
The first thought in my mind was 'oh, no - guitar fingers!' . . .

Carbide-tipped saw blades can deal with much harder materials than flesh and bone - the blade didn't hesitate for a second to alter what I offered it. My injury could have been much worse - looking at the blade path tells me that another 3/8" would have meant that I was carrying the fingertip with me to the ER. As it was, the Doctor put about 12 stitches from the front, over the tip and down the other side to pull it back together. Well numbed, I didn't feel it when he put the stitches right through the fingernail. Funny to look at it now and see those little holes in the nail.

The stitches were taken out 12 days later - the healing process is going well. Somehow my body is pretty good about healing, especially my hands. I had done something similar - worse, actually - about 26 years before when working on another table saw. That accident shredded the tips of the middle and ring fingers on the left hand and they ended up about 1/4" shorter than they had been.
(I started a song a while back about the abuse suffered by the left hand of a right-handed carpenter)
Back then I was more actively pursuing the side career of pottery - it was my major in college and I had made various attempts to make a living by it. I think that working clay with the fingers as they healed had a positive effect on the whole process. It seemed to me that connecting the mind with the fingers in order to create something made the healing a more organic process - a less passive process. Actually, I've never tried to put it into words and so I'm finding it a bit awkward to describe what I thought I was doing . . .

I thought of that today as I went out to an old plastic tub behind the barn and dug out a small fistful of stoneware clay. It is a tub of scrap clay that has been sitting there with the lid blown off, just weathering for twenty years or more. The kind of clay you'd kill for if you were making some pots - it'll be really plastic from sitting so long. I've been thinking for the last few weeks that I should make clay-working part of the healing process for this injury, too. Shape and flesh-wise, the finger looks like it will be fine for guitar playing. The sensation in it is a mess right now - a weird combination of numbness and over-sensitivity. I know I've got six months until the fingernail is back to normal, but just watching the body go through the healing process is pretty amazing.

I was thinking recently, they say Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow - I should have two hundred words for luck.

Sometimes a lifetime just ain't enough

(photo by Patti Goyette)

Samuel Johnson said something about imminent death having the effect of focussing the mind. It can have the same effect on those only peripherally affected by death.

To get right to the point, I write very regularly in a songwriting notebook.

If you were to page through the book you'd see bits of phrase, brief thoughts - usually on a given day nothing more than a couple of lines.

This week, on Monday, I got the news of the death of a friend by his own hand. So - this week there are six pages of scribbles and revisions on the subject of his passing . . .


I didn't ask what method he chose
It wasn't important for me to know
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one staying here
We're the ones moving on

Everywhere I looked this week I saw trucks pulled up side by side
They were talking through the open windows
Talking about the one who died
They found out on Sunday
The carpenter's day of rest
Found him lying on a bed
With a pistol on his chest

I didn't know what method he chose
It wasn't important for me to know
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one staying here
We're the ones moving on

This Thursday won't be a workday
You'll leave the Carhartt's on the floor
You'll put on a jacket and tie
And head on out the door
Stand around down at Spilker's
Til you just can't stand any more

Trying to get it right, well that can take a lifetime
And sometimes a lifetime just ain't enough
It's not the bad weather, the short money or the sore muscles
It's the being alone that can be so . . . tough.

I didn't know what method he chose
If it left a hole, well it didn't show
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one in the box
We're the ones looking on
I only know that gone is gone
I only know that gone is gone
He's the one staying here
We're the ones moving on

.

9/11/11

Ten years ago today I was working less than a mile from home. That bright September morning I was nailing shingles on the roof of a little barn that I’d just built for a customer. I guess I must have gotten a phone call from my wife, telling me what was happening.

There’s coverage of the memorial services on the radio and television this morning. I listened to a little of it - the clock radio was on when I woke up.

Just now I was out in my front yard mowing the lawn. A fire truck from the next town drove by - the firemen were wearing their dress uniforms, not their helmets and coats. A minute later another truck drove by and I thought, “Oh, of course - a memorial service.”

I went back to mowing and something across the road caught my eye. I thought it was a trash bag blown along by traffic - then I saw a uniformed fireman walking along the road and I realized that the object had fallen off the truck. When he picked it up I saw that it was a fireman’s helmet. I stood by the lawn mower and watched as the fireman walked back to the truck that had pulled over just a little way down the road. I didn’t know him, but I realized he looked familiar. I’d probably seen him in the supermarket or the convenience store.
I watched him walk by, waiting for him to look across the road. I knew what I wanted to do - he was past the house and a little ways further down the road when he looked behind him and across the road. When he looked at me I saluted him - he nodded in response. I went back to cutting the lawn and thinking about those hundreds of people who ran into those buildings ten years ago to do their jobs.

Working on Songs

(MQMurphy photo)

Yes, that's right - since I have no plan for how to support myself when I can no longer carry heavy ladders, tools and lumber - I've decided that my salvation will be songwriting. You can help by sending your money in NOW to MQMurphy at P.O. Box 484 Cape May, NJ 08204.

Here's some raw (very raw) material from which I'll be trying to fashion a hummable ditty that'll become a radio favorite. There are other tunes, actually - some of them a bit farther along in the fashioning and polishing process - but I thought it might pique your interest to look at a bit of the raw material, so to speak.

So, you throw your bag in the back and you get in the car with your sister. She'll drive, because she likes to. It's four hundred miles, give or take, to that town above Boston where your Dad grew up. His brother, the last boy from that family of eleven kids, has finally moved on to the next phase.

We listen to music and we talk - talk about George's hundredth birthday that we celebrated with him last year. We'll see the cousins - now we're THAT generation, since there's no more of the other one left.

"Did you like the character that guy played on that other show?" What has that go to do with anything? "I don't know I was just wondering . . . passing the time with some idle chat . . .

he played a bad cop - but maybe not a bad guy, just a conflicted guy - stuck in a bad situation - anyway, he died. In the show, he died"

Can I make something out of that? You'd better believe it.

I have to believe it - because there's no Plan B.

Some damn thing . . .

(MQMurphy photo)

From the "Lunchbox" journal - something about the book that I've been telling myself that I will write:

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ideas for chapters and metaphorical devices.

For example: plumbing.

I’m remembering the time that I soldered together the pipes for a new sink in the upstairs bathroom. The floor was out – I was running pipes through the joists. There were elbows and angles and couplings and valves. I remember counting the number of separate joints that were soldered – perhaps more than forty. When I connected the water and turned it on, there were no leaks. It was like I’d taken and passed a major exam.

Returning

(MQMurphy cameraphone image)

Today – this beautiful August the twenty-fourth – has the feeling of a tipping point. 

It’s almost as if there is a current, or a stream of biology deep inside of me that feels or knows this. 

As though the year is a ball tossed into the air and today is the day when the momentum slows, slows to a halt – there is a pause that is 

eternal and only a millisecond – and we fall

back towards the contracting and condensing of the year from which we’ll need to be hurled up again to air and warmth and light.

When I'm ninety-four.

I'm the little guy in this picture. The big guy behind me is my Dad. I was about nine months old when this was taken, and that would make him just shy of 39 years old. He lived for about 15 more years. He died just a little over 40 years ago, on New Year's Eve 1967.

But - I've only given you a photograph and some basic math. I'm told that I am the little guy in the picture. The big guy is defintely my Dad. He looks happy. I'm guessing that my Mom is taking the picture, so there I am - sandwiched between two people who loved me.

I wasn't even nearly a human being when he died - I was still a blob of some sort. Didn't know who or what I might turn out to be, and didn't really have much to talk to him about.
I can see him clearly in my mind, on that wicker chaise in the background. He'd have a terrycloth jacket and a Phillies cap and a transistor radio and maybe a beer, and he'd sit back on that chaise and listen to the baseball games in the summer.
He gave me that wonderful right hand of his to grip. When I got older he told me about the importance of having clean hands - clean, well manicured fingernails. He told me a secret about how he'd punched a man once. He was ashamed and proud of it and he wanted me to understand. I think I did.
Another thing I understand now is how quickly fifteen years can go by.

I put this post up and took it down more than once. On one hand, I felt that I was charmed by the photo and sort of wrote something just to justify posting it. On the other hand, children and families and the crazy passage of time are still relevant. Maybe more than ever.
To quote Jackson Browne " . . . they say in the end, it's the blink of an eye."

Not Dropping Heavy Things.

I don’t feel as though I’ve got to justify my sailing hobby – or more accurately, my ‘learning-to-sail hobby’ – but if I did, this might suffice.
One of the additional benefits of learning how to control a boat is learning how to use rope. I’ve flailed at ropes for years, hoping that if I put enough loops and "knots" in them they would do a job of holding whatever needed to be held. So now, when circumstances might require you to park your horse, or you’ve got a captive, or some big pieces of scaffolding need to go from down here to way up there – it is a relief to know that no matter what else may go wrong, your knot will still hold. This knot is the bowline (pronounced “bo-lin”) and it is sometimes referred to as ‘the king of knots’.
Such was my desire to begin the mastery of rope that I taught myself to tie this knot one handed, with either hand and with my eyes closed.

Why I blog.*

If you are lucky enough to own your home (check) and it is an ooold home (check) with old systems (check) and you are not rich (double check), you’ve probably had an occasion to be treated to a scene like the one above.

This is our water pump. Well, maybe it is our third or fourth water pump - not sure.
I was down in the cellar this morning to try to determine the cause of the loud noise that recently began accompanying the pumping of water.
My guess was that the vibration of the pump had caused it to shift on its platform and come into contact with related items that transmitted the vibrations to other related items until there was a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
Please excuse the techno-jargon.

As I looked at the shiny new fittings that connected the pump to the copper waterlines of the house, I realized that I’d been here at least twice in the last twelve months.
I’d come down to the cellar for something last winter (Christmas decorations?) and heard that familiar sssssss-ing sound before I saw the water running on the floor. I turned on the light in the back section of the cellar and saw the jet of water coming from the side of the PVC coupling that threads into the body of the pump. (see Fig. 12-J) – just kidding.
The ‘pump repair’ guys (summoned in a previous emergency, no doubt) had managed to force a 1 1/4” fitting into a 1” outlet. Only a pro would attempt to do this. Or a maniac. Granted, it was probably a Sunday evening or a Global Holiday – thereby making the proper fitting totally unavailable. It worked – for a while.
Skip past this next part if you are a poor old house owner – you already know it.
I drained the pressure tank and cut the fittings apart. There’s an hour. I took the coupling out to the hardware store to be sure I was getting the right part. There’s an hour. I cut new PVC pipe to replace what I’d cut out and I dry-fitted the new parts together a couple of times to make sure they’d line up with everything that hadn’t been cut out. There’s an hour. Is it too late for me to make a long story short? Basically, you’re looking at half a day for a non-professional plumber to replace the fittings that connect a pump to the rest of your water system. Oh – I’m a non-professional plumber with about 29 years of experience here at the classroom.

About six months before this I had gone through pretty much the same process because something about our water doesn’t get along with copper. Yeah - go figure. Our water eats little holes in the copper pipes, and then water gets out in places where you really don’t want it to.
To correct this problem, repeat the process outlined above, but this time you'll substitute copper pipe, flux, solder and a torch for the relative pleasures of PVC pipe and vision-inducing solvent glue.

Next week on "This Poor Old House": Let's re-wire!

* So that I've got someplace to share stuff like this - that's why. Thank you for letting me tell you that.

The pack

The pack exhales and the pack inhales.
When I'm feeding the dogs I still sometimes look around for Stella.

Our new girl Georgia had a pretty dreadful time of it last month - the folks that left her when they moved away thoughtfully chained her to a fence. She was taken in by the Atlantic County Animal Cruelty Officer and transferred to the Pleasantville shelter. There were maggots in her ears, her nose was being eaten by flies and the chain had gotten totally wrapped up in her fur. She went to a foster home in Dorothy where a couple of good people - Marie and Bob - have fifteen dogs and four cats on a couple of acres. A few sad stories for some of those dogs, too.
Georgia was pretty timid when we got her home - she ran to a far corner of the yard and hid. We coaxed/dragged her to the house where she hid in a closet. She spent a good part of the next day under the back deck.



It has been a week now since she arrived. She is still really thin but clearly becoming less fearful. We're watching the pack rearrange itself. She'll be fine.

The Charlie Brown of Sailing.

Beautiful breeze blowing today. Even more crisp now than it was a few hours ago when I sailed across that mooring line.

It was one of those bright pink mooring balls with three dingys tethered to it in front of me to starboard. I had just come onto a port tack and was making my way through the mooring field in the west end of Cape May harbor. I thought I would be able to get by upwind of the mooring ball, but it was going to be close. At the last minute I pushed the tiller a little and headed between the ball and the dingys.
As I scooted through there I was thinking ‘this is probably a mistake’.

I might have been better off if I’d just run down the mooring ball – at least there would have been a fifty-fifty chance that I’d have brushed by on the upwind side of it, instead of catching the mooring line and gaining myself a little train of three dingys.

The mooring held, I guess, and when I saw those three dingys following me I let the sheets go. I paused for a minute to assess the situation, then took off my shirt and shorts and went overboard to see how the line was caught.
What I had snagged is the line called the ‘pendant’. The mooring ball marks and suspends the chain that goes down to the anchor or weight that is more or less permanently set in the bottom. The pendant comes off the chain and is supported in turn by a small float so that it can be retrieved with a boat hook.
It was tight against the skeg in front of the rudder. I tried getting my feet on top of the line and pushing down but I couldn’t budge it. I thought it was jammed in a groove or something. I tried diving under to take a look at it but I couldn’t see well enough. I felt along the pendant to the bronze clip that secured the dingys. I figured that if I could unclip it I could pass the line back under my boat and then refasten it and be done. I climbed back in the boat and fastened a line to the lead dingy and tied it to a stern cleat.

I must have figured out that the mooring was what was holding me in place and that if I got loose from it, my boat and the three dingys would drift off away from the float. With this in mind I threw out my small anchor, but I failed to make sure that it was set.
As Lyle Lovett says, “ . . . I had made my second mistake.”

I went back overboard and managed to pull some slack in the line and get the dingys unclipped. With the mooring line no longer taut under the skeg my boat began to drift, pulling its un-set anchor.
I climbed back aboard and watched as the distance between me and the mooring grew to ten, twenty, thirty feet.
I had traded up in problems. Here’s where I should mention the unreliable motor.
It runs, and I’m confident that it’ll get me out of a jam, but it won’t idle or run at slow speeds. You’ve got to start it, jam it in gear and push the throttle up. No close maneuvering, no backing up.
I shackled my bigger anchor to the main anchor line and tossed it off the bow. At least I’d still be in the right neighborhood when I finally figured out how I was going to get those dingys back where they belonged.

I decided that I should get in the lead dingy and row back to the mooring, pulling the other two behind me. I would clip the little train of dingys to the pendant and swim back to my boat. Simple. I climbed down into the first dingy and put the oars in the oarlocks.
Ahh, the circus is in town. Maybe I’ve rowed a dingy sometime in my life. I don’t really remember if I have. I rode a motorcycle once – that I remember. So maybe I never have rowed a dingy before. You’d have gathered that from watching my performance.
I could barely make it the two feet that separated the dingy and the boat, let alone row upwind fifty feet back to the mooring. I was picturing myself and my little dingy village being blown across the harbor. After what seemed like endless flailing I secured the dingy to the stern cleat again and climbed back aboard.
Time for Plan C ®.

I started the motor and with the dingys in tow I made a big circle, aiming for a spot between two moored sloops upwind of the mooring ball. I planned to drop my anchor there and ease my boat back down on the mooring by paying out line. I used up the eighty-odd feet of braided anchor line and had to add a hundred feet of nylon three strand. This worked out pretty well, but when I was down to the mooring it was about twenty feet off the starboard side - out of reach. I started the motor again and powered over a little past the mooring ball and got the boat hook ready to snag it as I swung back on the wind. No success, but this looks promising. Motored back past the mooring for another try. Got a hold of the pendant this time and secured it to the pulpit on my boat.
When I took a good look at the lines on the dingys I was pleasantly surprised to find that I hadn’t lost the bronze snap hook from the lead dingy. The second dingy was clipped to it and it had just been pulled back underneath. I clipped it back into the pendant and slipped my temporary line off the bow of dingy number one. See ya later, fellas.

I pulled my boat back up the anchor line hand over hand, stowed the anchor and got on back to the slip to clean the mess up. Maybe - if I'm lucky - no one was watching.

Look at this dog.

Look at this dog. If you're wondering 'what kind of dog is that?', welcome to the club. Don't let me lead you here, but maybe you're thinking 'that is one complex pooch'. Or maybe you think she looks simple-minded. Let me tell you: there may have never been a more self-aware canine on earth.
Having had the pleasure and honor of knowing Stella for at least 14 years I would like to share with you my thoughts about what is going on in that picture. She is made up for a dog show. A local 'here-is-my-great-dog' show. No fabulous prizes. She is totally in on the joke. A tutu, a tiara, a feathered boa leash in hot pink. She totally gets it.
This is a dog who - I swear - understood irony. But the look on her face says "This is the real me!" (Please click on the photo for a better look.)

Stella had to leave us today. She was 16 or 18 or 15 years old. Ellen saved her from a shelter in 1993 - she surely would have been put down in a matter of weeks. Ellen felt like they saved each other.
Rage on, Stella.

Something I believe, and a nice picture of a boat.

So. How is it again that we are God?

Because we get to decide how to make sense of our universe – our experience.
It all sweeps in – we gather it and swing it back out – ju-jitsu of some sort, redirecting or deflecting the waves.
For sure, we’re already selecting and rejecting input on a level that is far, far below ordinary consciousness.

And here's that nice picture I promised -

This is a lightly Photoshopped picture of our boat Ikey Boy, sitting in the slip at Harbor Lane Marina.

two old journal entries

3/28/93
Trying to throw away some stuff that was cluttering the kitchen.
I looked at a '92 wall calendar sent by the oil company - inside the front cover, under the flap where you dutifully tuck each page as the month passes, is a little grid with a dozen lines for entering the date and the amounts of your fuel deliveries.

Staring at it, I felt as though I might as well have been looking at a postcard from the Alps, or Polynesia; a picture of a life blessed with simplicity. A dream of a life so simple that you could hang this calendar in your laundry room, or near the back door, and whenever the oil truck came - maybe you'd have a pencil hanging on a string from the nail the calendar is hung on - you could write down the date, the amount, and the price.

I can do it from memory: the date is passed, the amount is never enough, and the price is always too high.

-------

4/29/93
My mood got fixed
maybe it was by the two little girls
chalking hopscotch diagrams on
that sidewalk. Maybe it was the
sunlight and the white splashes
as the ocean hit the rocks.

Kurt Vonnegut, 84 years on Earth

4/12/07
Sad I am, and happy too, for Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. He was our patron saint of Irony. It might well have been called Vonnegut. I have poured a glass of whiskey.
Writers – do they give shape to things we need words for, or make shapes for us to pour ourselves into? Is that the same thing? And yet again I am brought to wonder about what awaits us when our eyes close for the last time.
Godspeed, Kurt Vonnegut.

Ego wins . . .

2/10/07
Ahhh . . . the more I think about it, that “Along the Road” entry in my blog is like B-minus high school writing. I should just stick to observing and skip the trying-to-make-a-political-point stuff. There I went, with my imitation Kurt Vonnegut irony and my faux-naïf cutesiness. Ego tempts me now to post my criticism on the blog, too.

Sailing 101

Saturday, December 2, 2006
Hmm . . . this running aground is getting to be a theme. Did it again today, but in my defense it was out in the harbor where you’d have thought there was plenty of water. Well, some of us would have thought so. We had this great temperature swing over the last 24 hours – a front has been coming across the country dumping snow everywhere. Yesterday the temperature here was 72 or 75 degrees – a record for the date. Today it was in the low 50’s. The front also manifested itself in a strong W and NW wind. It was blowing about 15 this morning. I thought I could just hop out onto the harbor for about an hour of fast tacking. Wrong. It was just about 45 minutes to low tide when I left the dock, and that NW wind was blowing the tide out. I was out of the channel in the area in front of the Harbor Cove development (World’s Largest Houses). I felt the bottom start to catch the boat – I was sure the centerboard was up but I checked it anyway. No damage, the bottom being mostly mud out there. Black, black mud. Chuck called me on the cell phone. Jack Sayre had seen me run aground and called him. Small town, eh? He offered to come out for me if I needed it. I thanked him but said I’d try a few things first. I had the jib up but not sheeted in, so I tried trimming it to see if the extra pull would get me off. Nope. I hoisted the main to try to heel the boat over and still possibly sail off, but that didn’t work either. I called Chuck back and told him that I thought I’d just sit tight and wait for some water to come back in. It was just after dead low at that point. I took down the jib and main, heaved the anchor to windward and set about cleaning up the lines. The flogging had ripped the ring off the release piston of the snap shackle on the main halyard. I put a different shackle on the halyard and repaired the bronze snap shackle. If I’d had my cordless drill with me I would have gone ahead and installed the mounting blocks for the navigation lights. I tried to fold the jib in the V-berth but there wasn’t enough room and it was definitely too windy to try it on deck. Giving up on that, I dug out one of the New Yorkers I’d stashed on board and started to read a short story. Up against the bulkhead in the cockpit I was out of the wind and the sun felt great. It would have been nice to just doze there for a while, but that was just too far out of the program. I read and kept checking the tide indicator on the GPS. I jotted down the coordinates of my position so that I could tell if I started to pull the anchor. I had no way of knowing whether I’d get blown into shallower water if I pulled. The anchor held (probably assisted by the broad hull resting in the mud) and after a while I could feel a little rocking that told me there was more water under the boat. I had the motor running and put it in gear – forward motion! Yay! I pulled up the anchor and made a turn back toward Devil’s Reach. Thanks – another lesson learned, only 67,481 left in the Intro To Sailing.

Lettuce Zen

If y'all can't forgive me for pulling these old bits out of my journal . . . well, too bad.

Sunday, May 29, 2005
I’m getting this ‘page-a-day’ calendar by email, a Zen stories calendar. This is today’s:

Three wandering monks, Seppo, Ganto and Kinzan, had lost their way while making a pilgrimage through the mountains. Then they spotted a green vegetable leaf floating down a stream, which meant that someone was living up the mountain. But they decided that anyone careless enough to lose one vegetable leaf was not worth meeting. Just then they saw a man with a long-handled hook racing along the stream, looking for his leaf.

“LETTUCE” ZEN