Friday evening Carol and I shared a bottle of white wine with takeaway Chinese food she bought on her way home from work. While we watched the early Hitchcock classic, 39 STEPS, I poured myself a glass of Laphroaig.
Carol needs more sleep than I, so after she went to bed I poured myself more Laphroaig and returned to reading IMMORTAL POETS where I found of Robert Frost “at age sixty-six…his writing had all but stopped.”
That gave me pause. I am on the record as stating that life is only forty years long, that what matters is what you do between roughly twenty and sixty or sixty-five. But even with a lingering virus, only pause. The sea lion of the flatlands no longer barks so often or so loud and ended his self-imposed exile to the living room several days ago.
Deny doubt. Press on.
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The four above photos were taken from the same location, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA at anchor in Whangamumu, just south of Cape Brett, New Zealand, within a span of twenty-four hours on October 23, 2010.
I’ve run them before, but not for a while, and used a cropped version of one for the cover of THE FIFTH CIRCLE.
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Next year is almost upon us, and I found myself thinking that a year from today I expect to be sitting exactly where I presently am on our living room sofa. Look in the window and nothing will seem to have changed. But GANNET instead of floating in a slip in San Diego will be six thousand miles southwest on the hard at Ashby’s Boat Yard in Opua.
