Last evening Carol and I were sitting on the screen porch watching the sun set blood red behind Skull Creek and Pickney Island. Erik Satie’s music was playing.
As some of you know, I have divided my life into three parts: longing, being, dying; and I have understood my life as I have lived it.
I know I am repeating myself, but the division between longing and being was 11 A.M. November 2, 1974, when I pushed the engineless EGREGIOUS from her slip at Harbor Island Marina in San Diego for my first attempt at Cape Horn.
The division between being and dying was about 9 A.M. on April 29. 2019, when I tied up to the Customs Dock at San Diego’s Harbor Island, a mile from the slip I had pushed away from forty-five years earlier, at the end of my sixth circumnavigation.
I sensed the end of that part of my life and the reality has proved that true.
Yet I have been a long time dying.
I am still extraordinarily healthy for one my age. A genetic gift for which I claim no credit.
I could sail around the world again, but if you have read the comments to journal posts, you will have seen that recently in response to a query about my not expecting to enter the monastery of the sea again, I wrote: I abandoned the five year plan several years ago. Six is enough and I don’t want to spent that much of my remaining time away from Hilton Head Island and Carol, who, considering the differences in our ages, likely faces a long widowhood anyway.
So last evening I said to Carol, “I would have liked to have left something as lasting as Satie’s ‘Gymnopedies’ and ‘Gnossiennes’.
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