Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (13 page)

“It feels strange
to be writing this…to you on the tray table of an airplane,” my next letter to Susan began, on December 26, 2009. “I never expected to be where I am today—flying home on the wind to see you, instead of sailing on the wind farther from you. But then, life is like that. Things happen—beautiful things—when we least expect them…I didn’t expect the
Gypsy Moon
to be stopped in her tracks by a Christmas Eve storm, but neither did I expect to be stopped and stunned by a ‘date’ I had in Charleston one week ago.”

By then, I think we both knew that what had occurred the week before was much more than a date. It was an opened door, and I was now hurrying back to the welcome that waited for me there. I had something to say to Susan. I wanted to tell her that my prayers had been answered, in hopes that her answer would be the same, but I needed to find the words. A letter would help me begin, and so I kept writing:

“I think many times we pray with little faith that God will actually grant us exactly what it is we seek, if anything at all. This sense of doubt can be so strong that when prayers are answered, and the very blessing that we hoped for arrives at our door, we assume it must have come to the wrong address.”

I knew when I stepped off the airplane in Charleston and saw a woman waiting there, her smile beaming down the Jetway at me, that I had come to the right address and that the
Gypsy Moon
had known her proper heading through that Christmas gale far better than her captain.

Nassau would have to wait, again. It was well that I had turned back, as a strong north wind was now blowing and would continue to blow into mid-January. Had I somehow made it all the way to Nassau, I would have missed Susan’s birthday—her fifty-first—the day after Christmas. As it was, the only gifts I had to give her that day were my hand and heart, but she took them without hesitation and refused ever to give them back. Her answer, thanks be to God, was yes, and with that acceptance she banished every doubt I’d ever had about the power of Providence to see us through.

Four months would
pass after my return to Raleigh from Port Canaveral in late December 2009 before I would see the
Gypsy Moon
again. In that brief interval, events in my life streaked past like leaves in a gale.

I had arrived back in Raleigh engaged to be married to a woman whom I had not known when I left. Two months later, I found a little yellow house that would become our new home on a leafy street in the suburbs and raided the remnants of my retirement savings for a down payment. In the meantime, Susan sold most of what she owned, ended a twenty-year career with the City of Charleston, and prepared to move north.

Longfellow wrote that “a boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” I had begun my voyage south in the variable winds and slack tide that followed the slow ebb of a twenty-five-year marriage. My decision to embark had been the final expression of a boy's will that his life should find some deeper meaning. I faced a sea of doubts in my search for what was certain and solid and true. Now, with Susan by my side, Longfellow's lament was no longer my own. An older and wiser man had at last taken the boy by the hand, steadied him, and set him upon the way forward.

When I piloted the
Gypsy Moon
out of Charleston Harbor to sea and the outer limits of wireless transmission on December 21, 2009, Susan's last words, “I am totally committed to you,” had been all the more powerful for their unguarded simplicity. That unconditional sentiment had not been expressed to me by another woman in my life. Now that I was back ashore and in the earnest beginnings of a new year, I intended to make good on her commitment and match it with my own.

Improbably, new cases and fresh funding for my law practice came rolling in the door in spring 2010, and not a moment too soon. My cupboards had been nearly bare, but by the same mysteries I have witnessed all my life, the Good Lord again placed bread on my table in spite of my considerable efforts to interfere. With my workload suddenly mounting, I took out an advertisement that attracted the welcome interest of two young attorneys who helped me transform a sleepy solo practice into a respectable law firm. I found the perfect building, where I could lease expanded office space not three miles from the house Susan and I had chosen, and she and I prepared to begin a new life together with a vigor I had all but forgotten.

A young writer for a weekly newspaper that circulates among the state's lawyers became intrigued by the story of Susan's fairy-tale romance and decided to tell the world, as it were, in a front-page feature about a sailing attorney waylaid by a storm who came home with a bride. Good wishes followed from friends new and old, and the sun suddenly seemed a little brighter and higher in the sky. I planted roses in the garden of the little yellow house where we would begin our life together in August. But long before the wedding pipes might sing, there was a decision to make and a voyage to complete.

Sailing is an
odd thing, and sailors by and large are an odd lot. As a manner of transportation the sailing vessel is ponderously slow, but as a means of impoverishment it is deceptively fast. Sailcloth is woven in gold mines, halyards are knit together by feather-winged angels, and bottom paint is made from rare, fine wine.

In beginning a new life, I was loath to ask my bride to bear the burdens that had weighed so heavily on my first marriage, chief among which was an expensive passion that my partner did not share with equal enthusiasm. I resolved to give up the ship before repeating that mistake.

Susan, like many people I have met who hear that I have a boat and that I venture about to various places far from land, was intrigued by the idea of sailing. But the imagining and the doing of things can be very different, and never has that been truer than when it comes to sailing offshore.

Most guests temporarily aboard the
Gypsy Moon
have found little not to their liking. She is a snug home, encircled in warm teak, with tufted cushions, standing headroom, and a charmingly simple layout. From her serviceable galley I have brought forth many candlelit dinners, lovingly prepared and served. Such an evening—played out in the serene setting of a moonlit harbor, accompanied by Sinatra, Bennett, or, perchance, a Van Morrison tune for dancing—can be a strong magic. Susan was no less enchanted and herself so much more enchanting than all the others who had fallen under the
Gypsy
’s spell, but I had more in mind for her. And because I did, I had no intention of taking Susan to that place where the spell of romantic harbors would be rudely broken.

Susan would get no invitation from me to go voyaging around the world. It is one thing to endure a hardship of one’s own choosing but quite another to choose a hardship for someone one loves.

Far out at sea, days removed from the memory of a hot shower, a level surface, and a toilet that does not stand tauntingly on edge, defying the laws of gravity necessary for its use, there is no romantic thrall that can endure. In my years of bachelorhood, on those few occasions when I heard a woman’s voice, in whispers and kisses, speak the words “I will go round the world with you,” I heard the unspoken voice of reason in ready rejoinder say: “Alas, my dear, you will not.”

Now, before any paper and ink are wasted on cries of sexism, I hasten to add that I speak here in generalities, not particularities. There are, I wager, at least a hundred women at sea this very hour who could take tea and biscuits in the gale that would send me whimpering to the lifeboats, but I don’t care to marry any of them, and no doubt the feeling is mutual.

Selling the boat, I resolved, would not be such a bad thing. Perhaps it was time. The world of wind and sea was not Susan’s dream, and I wondered whether it should any longer be mine. The vacuum in which I had begun the voyage had, after all, been filled. I was no longer living an outward metaphor of a solitary inward journey. I had reached my Ithaca at last. Perhaps the day had come for me to lie upon my laurels, meager as they were, and enjoy a long-awaited rest.

I did exactly that for a time, but as you no doubt suspect, there is more to this story. Always in the corners of my mind the image remained of my little boat, tugging at her lines, waiting to be off. A still, small voice in my head pleaded to go with her, as impractical as that now seemed.

For a time, reason prevailed over all emotion and small voices, still or otherwise. I did actually and in good faith put the boat up for sale. Several would-be owners bent my ear with intricate questions about her design and capacities for this or that, but they were never in the game to go. I tried to explain that here was a ship that had the heart of a vagabond and the means to fulfill the seduction she promised to men who looked longingly her way. Some listened intently but without real understanding. I answered their questions instead about the number of people the boat could sleep (five altogether, but only two in comfort); whether she had a hot and cold shower (she has neither); and whether she was wired for Internet and cable TV (blessedly, she is not).

I breathed a sigh of relief when no suitable offers came my way. The
Gypsy Moon
was saved from a sad fate as a floating South Florida condominium. But that didn’t solve my problem, as I understood it at the time.

I found myself considering a donation of the boat to a church camp on the North Carolina coast, where it undoubtedly would have found a happy home. A man planned to come to my office to discuss details of retrieving the boat from Florida and bringing it north, where boys and girls would use it to learn to sail on their summer vacations—a worthy cause indeed.

The night before my meeting with the kind gentleman from the camp, I could not settle my thoughts. I finally confessed to Susan that I was not sure I had the will to let the
Gypsy Moon
go. Something in me resisted the idea. It was a fear, as best I can describe it, that I was giving up on myself and losing something that I would never get back. We all face these kinds of decisions in our lives, and often the moment of truth is not something we can avoid or forestall. We grow up. We leave. We change. We move on because we must. The nature of life is that it progresses inexorably in only one direction.

But this was different. This was a choice, not the passing of an epoch. And it was a choice about which I was unsure until Susan spoke her mind.

“Keep it,” she said. “You’ve always sailed,” and she was right. She reasoned that I needed at least one thing in my life that was all my own and that I loved to do. Sailing seemed to be that thing for me.

As Susan spoke these words, I felt a glacier thaw and a great burden fall away. The message that it was okay to be the man I am was both revelation and validation. I needed no revision or refurbishment as a condition of Susan’s acceptance. My voyage would be acknowledged, accommodated, and celebrated between us. Had I demanded as much by stubborn force of will, the treasure she now offered would have slipped through my hands. But instead, Susan had freely opened her heart and made a home there for the dreamer and his dream.

The next day, with some embarrassment but no shortage of determination, I told the man from the summer camp of my change of heart. He was surprisingly supportive, and I dare say he’d even seen it coming. He told me that he had faced similar decisions and reached similar conclusions in his own life, and that he understood. It was okay. I had his permission as well to be exactly the person I wanted to be.

Susan’s blessing to
follow my dream was like a strong wind at my back. I now had Nassau in my sights with a zeal and single-mindedness unknown to previous legs of the voyage. I planned to set sail from Port Canaveral on the second day of April 2010.

Passing through the airport on my way to Florida, I spotted a woman who knew me, my ex-wife, and our children fairly well and who herself was recently divorced after a long marriage. Her children and mine attended the same Catholic school. But still in that strangely adolescent phase of awkwardness that the newly divorced must endure, we pretended not to recognize each other as we walked past. She would not fail to notice that I was traveling alone, headed out of town on a pleasure trip in shorts and flip-flops without the fiancée whose engagement had just been announced to dozens of our mutual friends.

Not long after my plane landed in Florida, a rare and welcome unsolicited text message arrived from my teenage daughter, inquiring as to my well-being and whereabouts. I wondered but never asked whether there was some connection between the message and the woman in the airport, but regardless, there was no need for alarm. I was not running away from home. On the contrary, I was running headlong toward something I could now see clearly, and I had never been more certain about anything in my life.

For at least ten minutes.

With a rented car, I traveled around Port Canaveral to gather the usual impedimenta of an ocean voyage aboard a small sailing vessel. This included great quantities of bottled water, canned food, and items from a running list of common stores from the local ship chandlery. I must tell you, however, that I can scarcely bear these preparatory errands. In fact, I dread them.

Shopping for an extended voyage brings on a tinge of melancholy in me, as though I were a condemned man gathering victuals for a last meal. Nothing is surer to cause me to question why on earth I am heading out, alone, to endure the deprivations of life at sea than to be in a marketplace among happy families who are safe, warm, and dry and have nothing to fear. Their contented smiles convey a clear message to my imagination: “We are sane, and clearly you have lost your mind.”

I have a ready antidote, however, for this malaise. I imagine myself an old man, reclining in an armchair, no longer able to move with ease. I have the same inclination to go traveling over the horizon as I do now, but I cannot. A woman I do not know listens politely as I tell the story of the solo voyage I almost made to a distant South Sea island. It is a place, I explain, that I would have and could have reached—not easily, mind you, but with some effort—aboard a well-found sailing vessel I used to own. Awkwardly, I reach into the pocket of my robe, retrieve a weathered photograph of the
Gypsy Moon
, and strain to bring it to the woman’s attention. She smiles distractedly, fluffs my pillows, and writes a note for the doctor about checking Mr. Hurley’s medications for hallucinatory side effects.

In that imaginary moment I am warm, safe, and dry—just like the crowd—but unhappily so, and with nothing to fear but the memory of what might have been.