I took the week off work after finishing a big project, because I was feeling burned out. It was a great week, the only thing I missed out on was a bike ride on Friday when it was 70 degrees. Now it's ready to snow outside, and I'm heading back to the mines.Some questions have popped up as I've been writing about the kayak project. These were different than I expected. I expected "how will you clamp on the cove side without breaking the sharp edges of the cove?" Well, hypothetical-rhetorical reader, I'll tell you. I put a dowel in the cove and clamp away.
The questions I do get are listed in no particular order- "Where are pictures of the baby?"
- "Do the forms stay in?"
- "Will it float?"
- "Are you an avid kayaker?"
- "Where are you planning to use that?"
- "Can you get it out of the basement?"
- "Claire is letting you do what?"
- "Are you crazy?"
Also, yes, I can get it out of the basement, I've kayaked before, there's lots of lakes and rivers (and the Atlantic) in this neck of the woods, and Claire thinks it's really cool (there's no real way for a person to evaluate their own sanity, but I think I'm ok). As for Karl, we're pretty much dealing with this kind of thing right here, all the time.
The question I do get that I did expect is "why." And I thought about that a lot this week. Ten years ago today, my dad lost his battle with cancer. I've had a hard time with this ever since because I felt like I missed out on a lot; in particular I always felt disconnected with him. Half the time I knew him he was in his fifties, and other than the significant generational gap he was retired from the career that would be defining for him. He retired as a naval officer when I wasn't yet in kindergarten. I grew up in the part of his life spent in calm suburbia, when a few years before he was conducting missile drills with the crew of a nuclear submarine off the coast of a large, asiatic country. The only hint of this life seemed to be funny plaques, a faded anchor tattoo, and a particular way about stacking the dishwasher.
When I would ask my dad "what do you do," his response was that he was an Engineer, which is about as nebulous as you can get, even if you're old enough to know what the words engineer even means. So I never really knew what he did. I even went to his office a number of times and helped out with paper work on 'take your brat to work day,' but I still have no clue what any of it was about. M. Rosenblatt & Son, his employer was styled as "naval architects and engineers", and I vividly remember a large model of the Arleigh Burke taking up valuable Crystal City office space. If I was cornered I might say that he did things like planning and engineering calculations for destroyers in this class, or talk about how he was helping out with the engineering for repairs to the USS Cole when it was hit.
For hundreds of years now shipbuilding and repair has been the affair of the military industrial complex, and it dawned on me that no one can really call themselves a boatwright or shipwright anymore. They're all part of a larger team, even the people at the yard are just welders or carpenters or crane operators. They probably don't tell their kids that they "build boats" because adults don't see that kids need things to be a little less abstract to understand them, and there's a bit of lost humility for even a welder to say they were a shipwright. I could be wrong.
Anyway I sort of find that building my own sea-going boat is a good way to connect with my dad. Besides, it's cheaper than buying one!
1 comment:
My father always told me that he kicks ass for a living. As a kid that's what I thought he did.
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