Author Archives: Melissa

For Kitty

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This week Mike and I have been talking about what constitutes a ‘relationship’ in this new world of the internet, this world that sometimes seems so very small. Is there such a thing as ‘Friendship’ when one has never met the friend in person? How can our hearts be touched in a personal way by people we have met only through the graces of social media or over email? This is new in human experience. We are all the pioneers in this era of connecting with people solely through the world wide web of energy known as the internet. After this week, Mike and I know that these connections are real, if different, and that they can break our hearts just as surely as if the people involved lived next door to us.

This week my friend Cidnie (Our Life with Ceol Mor), and her husband Mark, lost their precious little girl, Kitty, at age 5.  Even as I type this I cannot believe it to be true. How could it possibly be true? How could such a vivacious, precocious, sassy, smart little girl be gone from this world in the blink of an eye?  How could my friend be living every parent’s worst nightmare? Kitty fell into the water at the dock by their boat and slipped away before anyone could find her.

Mike and I were both as stunned by our visceral reactions to this loss as we were to the news of her death. Shocked to the core, we were both enveloped with overwhelming sadness;  a dense fog that has yet to be cleared. We went through the day on auto-pilot. I got lost driving to work. Mike came home looking tired and tearful. Kitty was on our minds and hearts all day and still is. Kitty was not our child. We know Mark and Cidnie Carroll only through our blog and Facebook presence. But we felt as though we had lost something precious and dear in our lives.

I  know we are not the only ones. On the Women Who Sail Facebook page (which is closed to new members at the moment) where Cidnie is one of the administrators, thousands of women all over the world share the grief. People set up a go-fund-me site, which seems to be the modern day equivalent to neighbors bringing food and taking care of chores where a family can grieve with support. I know we are not supposed to equate money with love, but in this new era of friendships where we live far apart, money is physical energy that represents our most fervent feelings sometimes. It gives people a tangible way to say that they care, that they are suffering along with others.  Donations to this fund will allow Cidnie and Mark to continue paying their bills, which don’t stop just because a child has died, while they piece their lives back together. People are keeping their anchor lights on in her honor. Candles are burning all over the world in her memory. Children blew bubbles today at a specific time, wearing pink; Kitty’s favorite color. It is a touching display of human kindness on a deeply personal level. Most of these women have never met Cidnie in person, much less met Kitty. But many are grieving deeply, even so.

Mike and I have been talking much about why we are having such a truly emotional reaction. Is it really about Kitty? Or is it about some other grief we are holding that has yet to be resolved? The sad truth is that little children die every day. We can read about it in the news, we might comment on how sad the parents must be and make noises about how we don’t know how they will ‘go on’, but we quickly move on to other things in our lives because we don’t know those people and the world is full of sadness every day. If we felt this way for each child who died, we would never be able to function in the world. What makes this child different to us? We begin to examine ourselves.

Mike remembers a little girl next door to us when we were first married. She died because she had phlegm that could not be cleared. We did CPR on her until the medics arrived, but she died anyhow. He still holds that memory and it is painful for him. For me, that was terribly sad but I do not feel the same way about it that he does. I saw that child, I touched that child, but I did not know that child or her parents.

Then, of course, we are parents of a child who had a tragic accident, in spite of the fact that we are good parents. All tragedy involving children triggers us back to that day. We know the guilt that parents feel when their beloved child is badly hurt. We know the ‘what if’s’ and ‘why didn’t I’ thoughts that beat a continuous tattoo through the mind. We know how it feels for people to judge us as parents because of his accident. Time never erases that wound, but it does make it easier to bear and to put in perspective. And we have done that. Our son is a strapping young man now and while he has his own burdens to bear because of his accident, he survived it and you can’t tell by looking at him that anything ever happened. We are grateful for that. That particular flavor of grief appears in my body in brief, intense flashes of pain now. I recognize it, I know it well. It’s there, but it isn’t sustained for long. No, I’m pretty sure that’s a different grief than what I am feeling. I cannot speak for Mike on this one.

I am forced to go back to Facebook and blog ‘friendships’ and see if I can make sense of things.  I don’t remember who found whose blog first, but Cidnie and I followed each other’s blogs, became ‘friends’ on Facebook, and then I think it was she who invited me to join Women Who Sail back when there were about 500 women in the group. Over the years we had personal conversations about sailing, boats, Scotland (Mark’s native land), and kids. I loved her blog. Her writing is entertaining, her photographs stunning. They, too, were preparing a boat for long distance cruising. I feel a connection with her, even though we live far apart and our children are of different ages.

But it was when I made friends with her on Facebook that I got to ‘know’ Kitty. I looked forward every day to my daily dose of Kitty on Facebook. Her cheerful, saucy little face, her sweet little songs, her love of playing dressup, her complete ‘attitude’, how she loved to work with tools with her dad. She reminded me so very much of our Claire when she was little; filled with life and spirit. Lots of people I know post photos and stories about their kids on Facebook. They are entertaining sometimes, but not the same. No. There are many beautiful children in this world.

But I had a special place in my heart for Kitty in some intangible way. I looked forward to meeting her in person some day. Each morning I would sit down with my coffee to check things out on Facebook and see what the world was up to, hoping Cidnie would have posted something starring my favorite four year old. I would share these posts with Mike and we would both dote on her from afar. In this everyday, mundane way, Kitty worked herself into my heart.

Our hearts are broken for the loss of this beautiful child and for the grief, no, devastation that her parents are experiencing. We are forced to reckon with the fact that the friendships we form online are real, even if different from friendships we have with people who live close to us. We are forced to acknowledge that being on-line friends will not insulate us from feeling grief when there is suffering, nor joy when there is happiness. We should keep this reality in mind as we make comments, write blog posts, and post updates on Facebook. We bring ourselves to the community of the internet just as we bring ourselves to the communities in which we live and work. The people we connect with online are real, our relationships with them true.  Our hearts have just told us so.

Bon voyage, beautiful Kitty. Until we meet again, sweet girl. Our lives were happier knowing of you.kitty

 

 

We’re a Soul Man

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They saying goes that life somehow begins when you get outside of your comfort zone. Well, I don’t know about that since I’m pretty comfortable right here right now, and yet I’m living just fine, thanks. But I do know that when we set sail and start landing in other countries where we don’t speak the language, where we don’t fit in with the general population, we will both be well outside of our comfort zones. Why is that?

Well, I’ll tell you why: we are white. I mean REALLY white. And not just white but white-middle-class-suburb-living-educated white, which is a special kind of pale. We iron our shirts, if not our sheets, believe in the importance of the Queen’s English, and like our beer micro-brewed; preferably locally. We buy organic. We take a lot of supplements. My personal comfort zones include Costco, Safeway, and possibly Corrina’s Bakery in Tacoma, on a day when I’m feeling extra wild. I can go to the yoga studio downtown, but I cast a wary eye at all the body art displayed there with nary a thought for anyone’s sensibilities; not a care for whether one wants to see those parts of another’s body. Which, by the way, I don’t. Mike appears to be comfortable at West Marine, but I think he secretly goes to places down on the Tacoma tide flats, the rough industrial part of town with all its weird roads and businesses with no apparent signs. Who knows what goes on behind those business doors? It could be anything, and it probably IS. Mike lives more dangerously than I do because I don’t know the rules in those places.

See this guy? He has a death wish. I do not have one to my knowledge so there will be none of this crap.

Anyhow, this is the year we prepare to be well outside our comfort zone. So when my voice teacher, Melanie, told me she sings in a ’70’s rock and roll band and invited me to their ‘gig’ last night at a place in Tacoma, I thought maybe we should start our travels a little early and go about 5 miles from our home. In Tacoma, 5 miles will take you somewhere that’s like another country, only closer and without all the drama of crossing an international border.  I wanted to hear her band. I mean, I was in a rock and roll band once in the 1970’s for about 5 minutes. Sure, I was only in 8th grade but I was living the dream. Also, the student in me thought maybe if I showed up for her, she would let me sing something in English during our lessons, rather than, say, Italian or French. You know, a little give and take brown-nosing. Melanie is pretty hip, even though she teaches high school students. So I figured her band, High Rollers, would be playing in a hip dance club; the kind of place where people get dressed up and drink fancy drinks with snooty, unpronounceable brands of alcohol. Mike looked the place up on the computer and that’s when I realized the truth: This is not Seattle. This is Tacoma.

Emphasis on ‘Bar’.

The place they were playing is called Dawson’s and it’s a Tacoma bar. They don’t call Tacoma ‘Grit City’ for nothing but I always thought that was a reference to all the grime that gets on our boat due to all the traffic close by, and the bridge we are practically underneath. I was wrong. Apparently it’s because of bars like Dawson’s;  bars the likes of which I have never encountered because Mike would never take me to one and I’m certainly not going to a place like that alone. Dawson’s is on the corner of 54th and South Tacoma Way, an area of town that is not exactly high highfalutin and is filled with ‘interesting’ characters, many of whom have embraced ‘grit’ as a lifestyle choice. It’s not a club. It’s a bar. And apparently there is a difference. Who knew?

True background story: Before we were married we were at Mike’s home in Martin, Tennessee and he wanted to go to a bar there named Cadillac’s. I don’t know what this bar used to be like, but a quick Google search turned up a couple of interesting reviews of the place. The best one was by a patron named David Hitsman who ranks Cadillac’s as “A good place to get drunk at.” So, you know, it must be excellent. Apparently I was ‘too good’ to go to said bar because Mike refused to take me, saying it was no place for a girl like me. That was so cute of him. Maybe Dawson’s looked like it might be one step up from Cadillac’s. Maybe being married for 33 years has taken a few of the stars out of his eyes when he looks at me. Well, not really, because he says he still wouldn’t take me to Cadillac’s. There are some parts of this man I will never be privy to. Vivre le mystere.

This is the kind of place where you can drink all the cheap beer you want for 10$. And he wouldn’t even take me there 35 years ago.

Still, Dawson’s type of place wasn’t really on my radar and I failed to understand the implications of that. I figured there would be dancing. This was my opportunity to wear one of my kicky little dresses I will have to give up when we move aboard. I put on a dress and gave it a test twirl. I thought I looked great. What do I know? Mike gives me the once over. “You are wearing that? You are way overdressed for this place.” He muttered something about ‘Fine, wear whatever you like.’  This did not bode well so out came the old jeans and a semi-decent long sleeved t-shirt that would allow me to blend into the dark. I managed a bit of hair and makeup. On some level, I knew he knew more about bars than I do. Never mind he was wearing a paisley shirt and his sport coat.

“I’m not carrying a purse. It will just get stolen in a place like that.”, I said as I handed Mike my driver’s license, just in case someone decided to card me. LOL, as they say. “And I’m leaving my expensive phone locked in the car.” I notice he left his as well. We walk down the sidewalk, past the One-Way Jesus People coffee house, where there is music going on and someone waving a white flag. I don’t know if this means that they are ‘surrendering’, but based on my previous experience with religion, it probably does. I felt like the fact there was a Jesus coffee house close to Dawson’s would offer some kind of spiritual protection perhaps.

See? I’m not making that up.

So a man and a woman walk into a bar. That would be us, and that’s the joke already so start laughing. We scan the crowd and notice that there IS one. It’s really crowded. There are all kinds of people in this place and no place to sit, or even stand. No one is wearing a dress. Not. Even. Close. Thank God I listened to Mike or I would not be living that down ever. He looks at me as we are standing just inside, looking for a place to fit in, and just starts laughing. Damn it.

That’s Melanie with the blond hair. She got to be all dolled up even if I didn’t.

So far, this place is living up to all my stereotypes nicely. I feel so out of place I may as well have worn the damn dress. It wouldn’t have mattered.  We find a place over by the darts (yes, darts) and across the room from the pool table (of course) and stand feeling like wallflowers at their first school dance. The band has not yet started to play. Mike leaves me alone and goes and gets us two Pacificos at 4$ apiece. Ah, so that’s why there is no cover charge. Still, I’m a cheap date when it comes to Mike so we stand around and sip our beer with lime and try to look natural. There will be no ‘drinking’ tonight. We need to keep our wits about us. He looks extra spiffy in his sport jacket next to the guy in Harley leather with the Duck Dynasty excuse for a beard. Crap, he may as well be wearing a bow tie.  
I begin to imagine our exit strategy. I’m thinking we’ll stay long enough to make an ‘appearance’ for Melanie, and then go home and go to bed like normal people do on a Saturday night. It’s already 9:00pm and Matlock is probably over. 

Then the band starts to play and they are excellent! I am really in good hands with Melanie because she is a great singer. Every instrumentalist is excellent. ‘Black Magic Woman’? No problem. ‘Smooth Operator’? Indeed! ‘Ladies Night’? It sure is. They play all the songs of our soul, part of which seems to still live back in the 1970’s. My foot starts tapping but we are hanging back. I mean, it’s a throng out there; the dance floor is small,  and we were both fully into the swing of responsible adulthood by the time mosh pits became a thing. I have visions of being lifted into the air and carried off or, worse, dropped onto the floor and moshed to death. A large biker dude (not a cyclist) might want to cut in, forcing Mike to defend my honor, resulting in a bar fight and a night in jail, if not broken teeth. If television has taught us anything, it’s that the world is a terrible, dangerous place full of menacing, drunk biker people.

At some point we felt safe enough to retrieve our phones from the car and take some photos just for the blog.

There were couples dancing like nobody was watching, even though we totally were. There were threesomes dancing, individuals dancing; people of all body types, skin colors, education levels, and probably religious and political preferences were jammed together on this small bit of throbbing space. I noticed a couple about our age, except the guy had an earring and a tattoo. But he was also wearing what looked like a fairly expensive, tailored shirt, and there was no beard or ponytail in sight. Why do people tend to mix stereotypes like that? It makes me sweat. I don’t know the rules in this environment.

The band may have been outstanding, but the star of this show was the man with his arms in the air. We both were completely charmed by this tiny man who was having the time of his life. I don’t know if he was drunk, simple, or just happy, but he kept this big smile on his face all the time and he worked the floor, let me tell you!  Mr. Tan (not his real name we don’t think) would walk out onto the dance floor and open his arms to the sky, begin gyrating as if invoking the goddess of all dancing, and simply wait with these open arms until a woman wiggled into them and danced with him. Whatever his mojo, it worked for him.  He had one partner after another. He was having the time of his life. Mike told me I should dance with Mr. Tan, but I felt like that would open the door to possibilities that I wasn’t quite ready to embrace. One thing at a time, Mr. Boyte. One thing at a time.

Work it, Mr. Tan!

Work it, Mr. Tan!

And his lady of that particular song! Go Mr. Tan, GO!!

All of this was really amusing but I finally decided enough was enough. We are already really good at hanging on the fringes and observing people quietly and unobtrusively, making up stories about them in our heads. There is no challenge in that.   I got tired of waiting for Mike to ask me to dance so, breaking all rules of white-middle-aged-recovering-Baptist custom, I said ‘let’s go’ and we wove our way to the floor, leaving our beer on a table to get warm.  We joined the throng on the dance floor. And this is where it gets interesting.

I love to dance. I’m not very good at it, but I can feel the music in my blood and I just kind of move in time to the music. I can still do the ‘bump’ like it was yesterday. I’ve got some great moves to ‘Disco Inferno’. Burn, baby, burn. (Oh, I think that burn is actually my hip.) Mike loves to dance, too, but he gets distracted by his enchantment with the musicians, whom he worships with the childhood innocence of a “Little Baby Jesus in Golden Fleece Diapers”. Plus, he went to high school in Tennessee, where they don’t believe evolution is even a ‘thing’, much less that dancing is fine. At least that was true in the 1970’s and I hear tell that in some places little has changed since then.

According to Mike, the Church of Christ kind of ran the school system back in his day. They believed dancing was somehow of the devil, if not of the basic sinful nature of children, so school dances did not exist for him. He never learned the high school skill of slow dancing by grappling with each other and just kind of hanging on. I’m trying to teach him but he won’t let me lead. Plus, nowadays draping oneself over one’s partner and swaying around simply isn’t enough. Now there are hips and legs involved and I think his Southern Baptist upbringing gets in the way. I tried, but then I noticed some people laughing and thought maybe we looked ridiculous. Sure, they were looking the other way, but we probably still looked ridiculous. Enough of that. We’ll practice at home. I want to get this leg thing down. If only he would stop watching the musicians long enough to pay attention!

Go Here to see more great awkward photos of historical dancing technique.

Before we knew it, we were having fun and lots of it. I guess we kind of forgot to be uncomfortable in this zone, the differences between all the people there and us becoming a huge blur as we all knew all the words to all the songs and nobody gave a crap who voted for who in the last election.  By 11:00 we were still having fun, but my knees and hips were starting to give me grief due to all the hip grinding action going on. It was a little like turning into a pumpkin as I realized that I am not, actually, living in 1975 with a body that can dance all night without stopping. Damn it.

We decided we’d go home and come back another night. Yes, that’s right. We’ll go back to this place and dance some more because we are mighty comfortable there now. If we can have this much fun expanding our comfort zone in the grittier, seedier side of Tacoma, I’m pretty sure we can take on Mexico and beyond. I mean, in Mexico the worst thing we had to deal with was clowns at stoplights and driving off-road trails in a rental car. So there you go. Easy.

 

On Being a Short-Timer

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We are starting to think of ourselves as ‘short timers’ ; people who have very little time left until they leave for the next assignment, or retire, or something like that. Ever since we made the decision to leave a year early, we have been living life in a strange combination of ‘fast forward’ and ‘pause’. It is really mind twisting, gut wrenching, just a little off-putting, and in a word: stressful. Oh, and here’s another word: emotional. Stress and emotion. Yes.  A year sounds like a long time until you begin ticking off all the things that need accomplishing during that amount of time.

Spring Frittilaria in the garden. Only one more year to take garden photos. So be prepared.

I know lots of our readers have “been there, done that” and I wish, every single day, that we could just take that experience out of their brains and insert it into ours so that we would not have to go through this part of the transition. That would certainly make things a lot easier, but we all have to experience our own suffering on this earth.

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must           walk the path.” Gautama Buddha, Sayings Of Buddha

Apparently there are no short cuts, so have patience while we suffer out loud on our blog. And also while we share the moments that are less about suffering and more about excitement, or at least peace and contentment.

Pulsatilla in the rock garden.

It’s true what the Buddhists say: all suffering is about attachment and about NOT living in the ‘now’.  So very, very true. I am trying to stay mindful of my own process of attachment and letting go and let me tell you: it is exhausting. On the one hand, I am holding an attitude of gratitude every day that I have had the opportunity to own this beautiful home, to sit in comfort in any room I choose, to have a garden that is lovely to behold and a joy to all who experience it.

On the other hand each time I fill my heart with that gratitude, thoughts come in about how difficult it is to keep this home clean, that I am tired of noticing what work needs to be done, that the garden is really too big for me to easily maintain anymore, that our children will never want to own this home for themselves. And mostly that my husband has to work full time in order for us to afford to live here. And that leads me to the ‘knowing’ that we will have to let it go somehow.

A giant cement leaf. I made it years ago.

So I wander room to room asking myself the one simple question of each item: does this bring me joy to own? And as time goes by, there are fewer and fewer objects that really do bring me joy to own. And I guess that’s a good thing. Maybe by the time we are ready to move out, it will be easy.

It’s interesting, this setting of a date of June 2016. It is a little like getting a death sentence. Not that anyone is going to actually die here, but in that suddenly I began to feel the reality of this decision in a way that makes me want to hurry up and do the things I’ve always wanted to do in my land life, as though I will never have another one. Completely irrational, but there it is. So I began taking voice lessons, which I have been loving. I started playing my piano again, which I am loving. And I started doing art again. Also loving. Don’t ask me what I’m going to do with all these huge canvasses when we move aboard. I have no idea. But I was feeling like I was living life ‘on hold’, waiting until that day we untie the dock lines.

And that’s just stupid and it made the suffering/attachment part of this whole transition much worse. All work and no fun. Bad idea.  Life is for now. I’ll figure out what to do with the canvases later. So I began saying ‘yes’ in my heart to all the things I had been saying ‘no’ to because we would someday in the future be leaving. Our future is not guaranteed. I do not want to die having not sung my song, or painted my painting. To me, that is just as important as doing our trip. And if because of some horrible twist of fate our trip didn’t happen, I would still have my art and my music.

It’s possible my Virgin will be in storage. I’m not yet ready to let this go.

And what is Mike doing while I am meandering through my own mind gearing up for the day we dig ourselves out of this place, sorting things out, doing big yard projects, painting and singing? He is working like a dervish on Galapagos, getting her ready for the trip this summer, which, by the way, cannot come soon enough for us. Last time you heard from Mike, he had his head down in the refrigeration space. That little project is stalled temporarily because the holding plate was just a fraction of an inch too large to fit in the space provided. So he had to send that back and the Cool Blue people are making one specifically for our space. Their customer service so far has been so good it has given us hope for the human race.

While he was working on that, he assigned me the sanding and painting of the top of the hard dodger, which I completed. Thank God he feels free to assign me tasks, a new and useful concept in our marriage. Otherwise I would stand helplessly just trying not to get in his way. Once the paint was dry enough, he installed our new solar panels from Renogy. They are lovely to behold but now the handholds for the dodger top will need repositioning. I’m sure he will get a post in about all of that in his spare time.

Mount Rainier, in pink.

In yet another money-spree we’ve measured for a stack pack, which we are ordering from Jamie Gifford of Sailing with Totem fame. Jamie is a sail maker and he helps support his family of 5 aboard their boat S/V Totem by selling sails and sail covers. We are glad to throw business his way and hope he can help us out with other things in the future. We will both be thrilled to have a stack pack sail cover for our huge mainsail. While Galapagos has a full set of canvas, it’s a PITA to take the cover off and put it back on. We will be much more likely to use that mainsail on short excursions if we don’t have to wrestle that sail cover to the ground first. Plus, no storing it below. YAY!

Measuring for the stack pack.

So we are both busy with life. Every day I do my best to remain grateful for both the home we have and for the boat we have and the trip that is in our future. Every day I am amazed at Mike’s focus and how he works all day, then comes home and does other things. He will sleep for a month when this is over.

I do wish I could fast-forward to the place where we have adjusted to life aboard, don’t really miss our house, have said all the goodbyes that will break our hearts for awhile, and are excited about the adventure we are on. But since that is not possible, I just put one foot in front of the other, believing with all my heart that someday I will arrive at that destination.

On a February day.

On a February day.