Hilton Head Island: quick; No Ears on moving; surviving the TITANIC with regret

I have observed and often noted during the past several years that I heal more slowly than when I was younger.  However, I seem to have healed from my recent slicing unexpectedly quickly.  I’ve had no discomfort since last Thursday.  On Saturday I rode my bike.  On Monday I carefully did fifty of each exercise in my standard workout.  I certainly do not want to rip anything apart inside me.  Yesterday I did my full weight workout, which of course is mostly upper body, but includes 100 crunches with 20 pounds of weight on my chest and two minutes of planks.  And today I did my full workout without a twinge.  Tomorrow I plan to go down and wax some of GANNET’s hull.

I just finished reading Larry McMurtry’s BUFFALO GIRLS.  Light entertainment, I thought, until an unexpected twist at the end gave it greater depth.  Many of the characters are historical:  Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody;  some are not, including as far as I know an old Indian, No Ears, who got his name when at age ten his people were attacked by French trappers who killed everyone except him and cut off all their ears.  He was shot but survived.  You know that I would like this passage.

I am nearing the end of A LITTLE GAELIC KINGDOM, the last volume of Tim Robinson’s Connemara Trilogy.  Fortunately I have his two Aran Island books still to look forward to.

Yesterday I read of Bruce Ismay who hid himself away in Connemara after the sinking of the TITANIC.  Ismay was the President and Chairman of the White Star Line, which owned the TITANIC, and was on board when the ship sank.  According to an official inquiry, he helped women and children into lifeboats and when finally there were no other passengers around got into the last lifeboat to be launched and survived.  There were many who thought that he, like the ship’s captain, should have gone down with the ship.  In public disgrace, even slandered that he had put on women’s clothes to get into the life boat, he and wife exiled themselves to isolated Connemara for a quarter century.  After his death his widow had a chunk of limestone placed in their garden as a memorial to him.  On it is inscribed:  He loved all wild and solitary places where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see is boundless as we wish our souls to be.