In an old journal I found lists of original names for knitting stitches. The stitch named Gull Wing made me think about my father Dominic, the fisherman, who earned a hard living as a car mechanic, but whose head was always in the salty wind and whose feet were in the sea. Today is his birthday. If we lived in Shangri-La, it would be his 109th! He would walk into the room and announce,
today is Father's Day! (his birthday always fell very close to or on Mother's Day). As I write, thunder is rumbling, the sky is the color of this old photo, and chilly rain is falling hard. If this were a day at sea, we'd be pulling in right about now.
My father was a master at escape. I knew him as a man with hobbies. Darkroom, electronics books he hid behind at night in his chair in the TV Room. He wasn't interested in variety shows. He preferred Saturday afternoon westerns and we watched them together. Horses dashed across what I now know is Monument Valley. It appeared in those movies as the quintessential Wild West. We were New Yorkers so those cowboys and Indians were galloping across another planet and we loved it. He would have liked it here. The mountains, mesas and wide open spaces, horses, real cowboys. Indians. But he would have missed the ocean. He was kin to the gray green water of Long Island Sound, the bobbing up and down in a boat. He didn't get seasick when the water was choppy and whitecaps skimmed it like low flying snow geese. He was tough, he boasted. And told stories of whirlpools, turning tides, and the crab on his boat that skittered away into the bilge, and how when he sold
The Sea Joy, the crab went with it.
When he caught fish, he brought them home and and we ate them. I grew up on flounder, bluefish, striped bass and the crabs that didn't get away.
The small striped bass appears on the ocean shore in the last days of April. Not until the time of lilacs in late May or early June, say the old people, will the bluefish arrive, in company with large striped bass... Rounding Montauk Point, the migrant species scatter along the ocean shore; many more continue north and east along the New England coast.
Peter Matthiessen, Men's Lives (1986)
After selling his boat he regularly fished with his friends on their chartered boat in the Bronx. A boat ironically named after a Southwestern Indian tribe. That boat, with another generation at the helm, still works out of City Island.
Some days I long to share a mug of sweet coffee with Dominic who has been gone for more than two decades. And today I wish him a Happy Birthday, wherever he is and whatever ocean he's sailing on.
gone fishing, be back later
