Projects

Holiday Letter 2010

I try to avoid clichés, but this year I bit off more than I could chew. Every year as summer wanes I find myself with a list of winter boat projects. It sits staring at me on a yellow post-it note just forward of Carrie Rose’s helm. Though different each year the length never seems to diminish. 2009’s was particularly long.

Of course it does not includes regularly scheduled maintenance; things like bottom paint, oil and filters, and maybe, if I have the energy, waxing the boat. These tasks are straightforward and require more grunt work than psychic energy. But the others are, well, unique and hopefully once in a lifetime projects.

How to begin? First mate (and purser) Charlotte advises plotting each project on a spreadsheet. Arranging the details neatly in little rectangular boxes according to start and finish dates, part numbers and cost projections. She assures me the process will then proceed in a logical fashion from purchase to installation. Alas, I cannot fit myself into little rectangles. Just looking at a spreadsheet causes my mind to go into hibernation.

Granted, over the years I have accomplish a lot, and I know if I were a little more organized I could have saved myself a decade over the last half century. I am as organized as I am ever going to get and I’m all right with that even if it drives my first mate nuts. One of the convoluted ways I ensure that a project will be completed is to spend thousands of dollars on hardware prior to knowing what I am getting myself into.

In Chicago, winter is spent going to boat shows and devoting hundreds of hours online or with my head buried in marine catalogs. Boats are peculiar entities in a world of look alike mass-produced items. They are individuals. Patience is required when working on them. Each project entails funding, logistics and consultation prior to picking up a wrench or cutting a hole. The old adage, measure twice—cut once, though not always followed, has deep roots in the marine community.

Before beginning I familiarize myself with the anatomy. I sit on Carrie Rose and stare at what needs to be repaired or replaced. I gaze into the void where something new is to be installed. Manuals are read and highlighted. Equipment is fondled. Consultation’s sought. I visualize the job and note the steps.

Sometimes, no matter how much study, I am stymied. This may seem obvious, but I know that if I do not start I will never finish. Caution is thrown to the wind and I begin, hoping the inevitable mistakes will not be too costly. This year I was blessed with several opportunities to put this approach into practice.

It started with the head. While not complex, plumbing can be frustrating. Installation is simply getting the correct hoses attached in the correct way without a lot of extra curves and of course, without leaks. An understatement if I ever heard one. To get the proper bends, so I would not have to cut more holes in the boat, I experimented with heating various hoses in the oven. Nothing much came of this approach other than stinking up the house. Then I discovered just the right hose and it all came together. Not without a few scraped knuckles and a kinked back, but that is the price you pay for not hiring a professional. This first project was miraculously completed before Carrie Rose was launched and worked splendidly all summer.

Now with the boat in the water, it was essential to install the autopilot. It is a complex device that encompasses the entire boat, so the first thing I did was to expose every hidden cubbyhole from the bow to the stern. It made Carrie Rose unlivable. Several weekend sleepovers had to be canceled. To make matters worse we had an early heat wave with temperatures over ninety degrees.

Every chance I got I rowed out to the boat and slaved. I’d get home, reread the manual and the next day find myself redoing what I had done the day before, only correctly. After 50 hours of uncompensated labor it was finally installed. I turned it on and nada.

I restrained from jumping in the lake. It would have been a fitting end to the misery, but the water was too warm to do much damage. Flashlight in hand I delved into the guts of the boat looking like Slim Pickens straddling the H-bomb in Dr. Strangelove. I waited for the next morning to push the power button again and sure enough it worked. Hallelujah!

Next came the propane cabin heater. It took me all winter to find the correct combination of fittings to connect it to the twenty pounds of propane at the stern. Then I tortured over the decision about where to locate it. Once decided the installation was straightforward, if you think drilling a four-inch hole in the roof of a Nordic Tug clear-cut. It worked perfectly during the premature cold snap other than for the leaking propane (quickly fixed!), but we won’t go there.

Now, already mid-August, it was time to enjoy the boat. I invited Charlotte to inspect my handy work. It was so exciting to be finished. To celebrate I planned a short cruise south to the casino and steel mill laden coast of Indiana when I discovered a leak in the exhaust system—back to the drawing board!

Gone

Well, mom died. The little pistol, as my father referred to her when he was warning me about some impending crisis I had or had not precipitated. She died at 9:15 PM on 12/9/10. A few days short of what would have been her fourth Christmas in captivity.

If I could, I would have a monument in the shape of an ironing board made for her. It would be frivolous and thus an insult to her memory, but she did love to iron. Or maybe nurture is a better word. Though petit, only four foot eight, woe to the person who mistook her for a cute little old lady.

She was not cuddly. I only remember giving her a kiss that she returned in these last few years. What I do remember is that she was fiercely loyal to her family, in a Sicilian way. Nothing else mattered.

Though she loathed animals, I thought that her and dad would have made great dairy farmers. They had never ending energy. Dad wore out first, but up until the last six weeks of his life he was not allowed to rest. After he died she did not allow herself to either.

I think activity was her way of keeping the demons at bay. She had a tough life growing up, as I learned when she could only remember the past. The baby of the family, she protected her mother from our grandpa. There were never any specifics, just cold facts filtered through worsening dementia.

The above, the depression, the war and poverty made her who she was, take-no-prisoners serious. That said she loved to dance with my father. Something they did until a month before he died. She reveled in their newfound friends from the Moose club where they danced every Saturday night.

She could cook. I grew up blessed: pizza, pasta, bread and cookies, and baked Alaska for heavens sake. And when I betrayed her by becoming a vegetarian, she invented a new cuisine just for me. I admit to being a momma’s boy. I am not at all ashamed.

She insisted on doing the laundry and the ironing. She did not allow any weeds in the garden or the lawn. She did not tolerate clutter and hassled me about my room (too many books), my basement (too many boats) and my house (too much stuff). She threw out my clothes just when they were perfectly worn out. She did not understand how I could have gone to school for 27 years. I mean just how many diplomas did I need.

She and my dad loved the boys. It was great fun to see them interact. I never experienced the relationship between grandparents and grandkids. Theirs was textbook. To watch them after a day at Great America, I will never forget the sight of my dad and the boys soaking wet even after driving home from Gurnee.

Of course she managed, not participated. For all her spunk she had a fearful streak. It might be why dad and her got along so well. He was fearless in the natural world and she was fearless in the civilized one. They were a matched set. He adored her and would do anything for her. Granted he occasionally got frustrated, but at once a decade it hardly counts.

So what do we do now that the matriarch has died? We can’t kid her any more. We can’t piss her off just to try to calm her down. There will be no more aglio e olio with egg noodles, no more cannoli, no more breaded eggplant, no more …

I know this is the natural order of things. I know we are all chopped liver in the end, but I do not have to like it. Maybe it is that I am now on my own, totally responsible for myself. Maybe it is that I finally have to grow up. It is hard to be a momma’s boy with no momma.

Theresa’s gone. Look out God!