"The Lonely Sea and the Sky"

The left side of this blog page indicates that I've been blogging since 2004. I started slow and of late I've been even less prolific. In fact, the frequency of posts at Patterns of Ink forms a sort of bell curve with a flurry of posts and poems and stories in the middle fifteen years. Strange as it might seem, when I come here to write, I often find myself reading my own work as if it were written by someone else. I do remember writing each post, but it's almost as if they are old letters I've found in a dusty shoebox. Reading them years after the writing is surprisingly enjoyable. There is more of a cohesive theme throughout the years than I was aware of in real time.

Something I'm doing this week made me think of a line from "Kept," written in January of 2007.  That's the poem (if you can call it that) about the old feather pillow my great-grandfather gave to me. It was old when I got it, and I slept on it every night until shortly after I was married.  One line in particular came to mind because I recently came in possession of a family heirloom in need of a home. 

“… life is full of things still kept 

well past their being wanted…”

It's an old model sailboat, a cutter, my "Uncle Coop" (Claire Cooper) made during the Great Depression. (Because it has only one mast, it's a sloop not a schooner. A sloop with one mast but more than two sails is a "cutter," but I've nicknamed it "Uncle Coop's Sloop.") 

Uncle Coop and my Great Grandpa Collinge were shirt-tail relatives but mostly good friends. Both had served in the Merchant Marines. (My grandpa-great joined when he was only 13--a fact I wish I had known when I sat with him in the front room (watching Arthur Godfrye) in search of things to talk about.) 

I've written about my great grandfather's house on the corner of Forest Street and River View in Port Huron. It's the house in which my Grandmother was raised and where my mother was born in 1930. It's the house that made my mother doubt whether she could ever re-create a sense of "home" in Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe. And it was in the side yard of that home, that my Grandpa Collinge, upon retiring as plumber, created a large garden and goldfish pond that we grandkids helped him tend for many years. In that pond, Grandpa-great often floated this wooden cutter that Uncle Coop gave him as a gift. 

Grandpa Collinge passed in the late 1960s, and my grandparents who remained in the house filled in the goldfish pond. There are only a dozen or so folks still alive who might remember seeing this boat in that pond. To anyone else it has no meaning beyond whatever value people put on such things in musty antique shops. Even my children and grandchildren have no real connection to this boat. To them, the it is "someone else's memory," as I once said of a discarded page of photographs that blew right up to me as I was walking down our street. 

This is a corner of what we call our way-basement (its the fourth level of a tri-level that is sort of a man-cave. Otherwise, such things would never find a place in my wife's nicly decorated home. That's the boat there in the middle before I put the sails on it this week.

My wife and children know I am a notorious keeper of things "still kept well past their being wanted." I still have the actual Duncan Phyfe table from the story of that title down in our basement. The girls will have to decide what to do with that someday. This boat, however, had been in a cousin's barn for decades. He then gave it to my brother who then gave it to me because I'm "that guy" who can see an object and begin remembering things that might just turn into a poem or story in hopes of giving the thing meaning. A process that sometimes works better than others. My memories of this boat are vague and overshadowed by the aging patriarch of my mother's childhood home where this boat once floated in a goldfish pond. 

I didn't know it until recently, but my Grandpa Collinge was born in Ontario, Canada. His birth name was actually Gibbs, but as a young child he was adopted into the Collinge family. I hope to learn more about  the circumstances of his youth, but I'm even more curious about why (and how) a thirteen-year-old began sailing the Great Lakes in the Merchant Marines. I only know that the experience shaped him and stayed with him all his life. He and Uncle Coop were sailing the lakes at the same time, but they met much later in our tangled up family tree. They served on different ships together, as they used to say with a laugh. The Great Lakes are actually vast freshwater seas complete wuth storms and stories of sunken ships and lost souls. So stories there were for these two men to share. I only wish I'd been there to hear them.

Neither of them ever owned a boat like the model Uncle Coop made for the goldfish pond, but making such models was a common hobby at the time. Watching such boats on Lake Huron had become more popular in 1925, with the start of the famous Port Huron to Mackinac Sailboat Race, a tradition that is still a highlight of summers in Port Huron. I have taken my own children to see this annual event. We watch from under the Blue Water Bridge, but the tradition began many years before that bridge spanned the St. Clair River to Canada.  (My youngest daughter was born the year the second span of the bridge was opened. Her middle name is Clair (without the "e") in honor of that river.)

During the last several years of Grandpa Collinge's life,  he would push back from the dinner table and say, "I think I'll go down to watch the ships." It was a regular part of his eveniing: He'd  drive down River View Street, turn right at the Dunn Paper Mill, head south two blocks toward the Peerless Cement Factory, and pull his car right up to the river's edge. This was back when that area was still a rough industrial tract of shoreline. The ruins of fishing shacks still lined the river's edge from the gravel mountains of Peerless Cement to the end of Gurney Street. He would just sit there until well after dark, staring across to the Canadian side and watching the freighters pass. As a boy, I joined him there in his car one evening. He knew many of the ships by name and could tell you where they were going and where they'd been. His eyes were seeing past them, though. Without changing his gaze, he sighed, "There was a time I could tell you the names of fellows I knew on each ship, but those ships are long gone... coal burners--steamers... long gone along with the men that were on 'em." 

I wish I had known then how to prompt the stories behind such sighs.  

A few years after my great grandfather died, I headed off to college. By then, I had developed an interest in poetry and writing--enough so that I eventually changed my major to Education. In an advanced poetry class I learned "Sea Fever" by John Mansfield. I sometimes say it aloud and think of how my Great Grandfather was drawn to the water each night.

This weekend, I am going to Port Huron, my hometown. I do it at least once a year, usually in the summer. We'll be staying a few days at my cousin's summer house on Lake Huron. It's right on the lake, just a few blocks from where Grandpa Collinge used to sit in his car to watch the ships. My cousin lives out west, but he and I many of our siblings who live far away have a cyclical yearning to return “home” to Port Huron, and he’s kind enough to let us stay there when it's not otherwise in use. 

He doesn't know it, but I'm taking this boat with me, and I'm going to leave it there in that house on the lake. It's the one place on earth where those who visit will remember the boat and the goldfish pond and Uncle Coop and Grandpa Collinge. It's possible that he won't want it. I understand, but I'm also leaving a copy of this post with it. Maybe... just maybe... he'll agree that Uncle Coop’s Sloop,  deserves a view of Lake Huron from his window.