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Captain Morgan

 

 

In May of 2007, Dad and I drove to the northern shore of Massachusetts to circle Cape Ann in our 27-foot twin-engine-powered Robalo, Andiamo. It was the first day of the season; Dad’s truck bore the added weight of not only a three ton boat, but a truck bed full of tackle boxes with shiny lures and rusted hooks, fluorescent life jackets, fishing poles, extra line, rubber bumpers, first aid kits, replacement flares for those that were out of date, and countless emergency water jugs. The smell of burnt rubber signaled that the salt-ridden trailer had once again failed to withstand the hour-long drive to the coast. Dad pulled over to the shoulder of the highway and whacked the trailer with a sledgehammer until it no longer rubbed against the tires, while I stood hunched in the beating sun pathetically pushing on the metal as if my force was actually affecting anything. Dad managed to give the tires enough freedom to endure the final fifteen miles to Granite Pier without another problem.

 

We reached the pier. Despite my thirteen unconfident years, Dad always had me back up the truck until its concave trailer hitch perfectly covered the ball on the trailer, allowing Dad to crank until the ball slipped into the hitch. He was always pushing me – trying to make the uncomfortable comfortable. But that day the trailer was already attached, so Dad remained in the driver’s seat; he backed the trailer, its tires slipping on seaweed and barnacles, down the ramp and into the biting water of the Atlantic Ocean, not yet warmed up by months of summer sun. As water lapped over the trailer’s back wheels, Dad braked, and I hopped out of the truck and bounded into the water, the salt burning my legs.  I unhooked the boat from the trailer, and yelled to Dad in the cockpit of the truck to back up further. As the rear truck wheels reached the water’s edge, the boat began to float and I pushed the bow off the trailer until Andiamo drifted on water deep enough for me to drop the engines. I mounted the boat. Dad got out of the truck to push her away from the ramp as I put the engines in reverse and pushed down on the throttle, releasing the engines’ toxic fumes. The boat separated from the trailer and as the propellers dropped further into the water, I felt myself at the helm gaining control of the boat’s motion. It was then that I realized Dad had not jumped on board. I had never docked a boat before.

 

“What do I do!?” I yelled in panic, completely forgetting the procedure he had taught me several times but that I was always too scared to execute.

 

“Cut the wheel hard to port!” he yelled from the ramp with not nearly as much anxiety as I felt.

 

I cut the wheel to the left.

 

“Put the starboard engine in neutral!”

 

I did so.

 

“Now straighten out and go at the dock at a forty-five degree angle and give the port engine some gas,” he yelled, remarkably confident in my ability to do as he told. “Go slowly. You’ll drift in without much power.”

 

“Yah doing fine. Slow it down a little.” This voice was not Dad’s. I looked up at the pier and saw two tanned and weathered fishermen watching me confidently but also looking slightly amused by my nerves.

 

I tapped the throttle back. The lions at the stern of the boat roared more quietly and the boat’s progress slowed. But the dock was still growing closer, and I was aimed directly at it. Dad had gotten back in the truck and was driving it up the ramp to his parking spot atop the pier.

 

“In a sec yah gonna to cut the wheel to stahbahd,” a fisherman directed.

 

“Ok,” I responded, my voice cracking.

 

“Now,” he said. “Cut it.”

 

I cut the wheel to the right. The boat turned parallel to the dock and drifted to its edge. I knew what to do. I bounded away from the helm to throw the bumpers over the gunnel so they hung at the boat’s side, protecting her from the harsh wood of the dock. I ran back to the helm, cut the power to both engines and then hopped off Andiamo onto the dock, which was miraculously waiting for me. Perfecting the knot I learned the previous summer, my practiced hands tied the bow and stern lines to the cleats on the dock. With a breath of relief, I looked up and thanked the fishermen for their help.

 

“Yah did perfect,” one of them said.

 

My eyes found Dad standing above me on one of the pier’s granite blocks. Only on my high school graduation day have I seen him look prouder.

 

Dad was a tri-varsity athlete in high school. He bought a motorcycle before he bought a car and a boat before his motorcycle. He was on academic probation at the University of Massachusetts during his freshman year and had to complete five years in order to graduate. He was always a bit of a daredevil and chose his company accordingly. You cannot meet Dad’s closest friend, Scott Story, without hearing the story of how Scott lost three of his fingers as a teenager: Scott Story was building a pipe bomb when he heard it click, responded with an, “Oh, Fuck!” and it blew off three of his fingers. The shattered pieces put holes through his shoulder and knees, and a piece barely missed his head, instead impaling the wall just next to his skull. I cringe every time I look at Scott’s left hand – just three stubs where fingers used to be.

 

According to Dad, my grandpa wasn’t overbearingly strict when it came to rules, although he did have a plastic tube he used for the occasional whipping of his two boys when they were dishonest. Even as a young boy, Dad liked to test the limits of his father’s allowances. He told me a story once about when he was twelve years old. He was out roughhousing with a gang of boys he now describes as “punks.” They were in an off-limits park causing a “public disturbance.” As the boys ran around Mill Brook Park yelling and tackling each other, a young Dad looked up the hill path that lead to the town’s main road; he saw his father, his face hidden by the shadow of the trees, standing above him.

 

“How did you know I was here?” Dad asked as he walked up to his father.

 

“It’s a small town and everybody knows you,” my grandpa responded simply, grabbing his disobedient son and leading him home.

 

Today Dad stands at just under six feet tall with silvery gray hair, which he will never stop insisting is blond. A few years ago, during what I can only assume was the beginning of his mid-life crisis, he grew a goatee covering his progressively sagging chin. Dad will never say that he didn’t have a mid-life crisis; he claims his will never end: “No one’s given me a good reason to grow up,” he says. “Kids get all the good toys.”

 

Dad’s eyes are an energetic blue and perhaps the trait he is most proud of giving to me. His legs have been permanently defined from his high school sports days and his calf muscles still protrude like boulders. In the past few years, since Dad stopped running every day, his stomach has gradually inflated, but his extra padding can only be perceived from the side. His hands are thick and strong, never failing him. Despite softening over sixty years, everything about Dad’s body conveys power and confidence. Still, his face exudes warmth and strangers know that he is a man that can be approached. He welcomes people and conversation. While the troublemaker in him will never be entirely suppressed, Dad has been focused and successful in his career. He finished college, completed graduate school, and even graduated from Massachusetts School of Law. The wooden plaque into which my brothers and I carved upon his graduation still hangs in his home office and reads:                                     

ROBERT A. MORGAN

ATTORNEY AT LAW

 

As a young girl with two older brothers and an athletic, do-it-yourself dad, I never considered femininity a desirable characteristic. I wanted to do exactly what the boys did - mow the lawn, peruse the doublewide aisles of Home Depot, saw the wood that would replace our rotting farmer’s porch, lay the bricks leading to the fenced backyard, shoot the nail gun into 2x4 planks of wood, and play basketball in the driveway against teenage boys. As my brothers moved through high school and into college, I was fully prepared to replace them as Dad’s third son. Dad subsequently christened me as his first mate on the boat and his partner on all building and landscaping projects. Throughout my childhood, I looked forward to weekends with Dad, sitting in the front seat of the truck with the windows down and listening to classic rock music as we drove to either the cape or the hardware store.

 

I returned from my freshman year at preparatory school to learn that my parents had separated.

“We need to tell you something,” Dad said quietly, his head down slightly but his eyes

looking across the dinner table at my mother.

 

I looked at him, dropped my head to my shoulder and breathed, “No.” I don’t remember what he said after that. It wasn’t important how he phrased what he said. I knew what it meant. I looked across the table at Nick, my brother, whose eyes were aimed at the floor.

“He already knows,” I thought. Now I understood why Jon had called and apologized relentlessly for not being home for dinner: He knew too. He wanted to be at home with his 15-year-old sister on the day everything went to shit.

 

When I was a young girl and still living at home, Dad filtered all significant conversations through my mother. He generally supported what she said, but he never responded to a child’s request without my mother’s approval. So he and I had a seemingly flawless relationship, but we didn’t know how to interact without my mother when our opinions differed. My parents’ separation removed my mother from my relationship with Dad, and I quickly learned his philosophy on resolving disagreements: “When I refuse to compromise, my children will accommodate me.” Which they do. All the time.

 

One month after my parents announced the separation, I went to visit Dad at the family beach house where he was living. I remember two things from that day: cleaning up the rotten fish that an overflying seagull dropped on the deck and the words “I’m seeing someone else.” I was given barely enough time to realize my parents were not going to be together; I wasn’t prepared to hear that they were going to be with other people.

 

 “I don’t need you to understand,” Dad said. “I just need you to accept it.”

 

I did neither.

 

Six months later, at Christmas Eve service, I met his “someone else.” I shook her hand and promptly averted my eyes. They were watering, but no one would see if I kept looking at the floor. Three months after that, Dad and I spoke for the first time since the introduction. I’m not sure who instituted the silence, but it was not broken until March when I left a very angry message on his answering machine. He rebutted with an angry message of his own and finally, when I returned to Massachusetts for my sophomore year spring break, my father came to see me. He picked me up from my mother’s house – what used to be his house too – and drove to a parking lot so he could release all the anger he felt at my discomfort with his new situation. He barraged me with all the ways I was being “immature.”

 

“Don’t you understand how this could be hard for me? I’m sixteen years old!” I begged him.

 

“No. I don’t,” was all he said.

 

“You’re not even divorced yet. It was my first Christmas without the family all together and you pushed her on me in front of the entire church.” I reached for him to understand. I was crying.

 

“This is the way it is now,” he said harshly.

 

I had no response. I had never seen Dad look so disappointed. I had never seen those youthful blue eyes turn to ice when they looked at me. He drove out of the parking lot and took me home.

 

I remember the day Dad told me he was getting remarried; that’s an email I never thought I would receive. I remember the day Dad got remarried; I was nineteen years old and crying like a child, Nick’s hand on my arm in the church pew. In early June of 2013, Dad became completely overwhelmed by Robert Morgan, husband. His priority became fulfilling his wife’s many requests. Her way of living consumed his, and he integrated few things from his old life into his new one. The clothes he wore on weekends – what he had always worn on our weekends together – were unstylish and embarrassing to his new partner. The food he ate was processed and unhealthy. His music choices were painful to her ears. Many parts of his old life were not welcomed by her, and so they disappeared. I was often not welcomed by her.

 

A few days after Christmas 2013, I looked around my father’s living room. The room was mainly unfurnished – the result of my father losing his job almost a year previously – except for one brown leather couch. Double glass doors opened onto the back deck and a view of the Annisquam River; Evie, the Yorkie, was laying in her bed snorting like a pig as she slept; and three pictures from my father’s wedding sat above the fireplace: one of Brooke, his wife’s daughter, one of Bridget, her other daughter, and one of Nick, my brother. My oldest brother, Jon, wasn’t able to attend the wedding. I was there. Yet, no one would know my father even had a daughter from looking at any of the rooms in his home. I, like so many other aspects of his previous life, had disappeared.

 

Watching my father interact with people now is heartbreaking. He’s still just as warm and friendly as he always was, but less genuine. Every time I visit my father, I sit in the wine and cheese shop he owns with his wife and watch him dispense a sip of wine from the one of the machines on the wall; he swirls the red liquid around in a perfectly shaped glass and hands it to a customer to taste. My father describes the flavor of oak infused into the grapes and lists the foods that should be paired with such a robust wine. Wherever I go with him – the grocery store, the car dealership, church – he promotes Savour Wine and Cheese. He networks; there is a goal to be achieved from his friendliness: money.

 

I remember what Robert Morgan was like as Dad, not a stranger’s husband. I remember

when he was allowed to wear his faded old-lady jeans with a hole in the back pocket from years of holding his wallet. I remember when he would walk in the door on Saturday morning with a dozen donuts from Dunkin, instead of offering me an organic kale salad every time I visit. I remember his obsession with chocolate – our once-shared fixation– rather than his new obsession with pouring me a glass of wine and asking me to distinguish the feeblest flavor of apple from the overpowering aroma of grapes. This is not to say my father is not happy in his new relationship, but he is consumed by it and so cannot perceive the changes as I do. Or maybe he can identify changes in himself and likes what he sees. Either way, I would not keep quiet if my father was not in love with his wife or happy with himself. But, I keep quiet.

 

This year I turned twenty. As I grew out of being a child, I realized that parents’ choices are not always the best for their children. My father has never once doubted my abilities or my mental strength. He never fails to tell me he is proud of me. He loves me, and I trust that despite our recent arguments. But his time is split now, and being a husband and a business partner has taken precedence over being Dad. I don’t know if I could still dock a boat if someone asked me to; I forget the lyrics to my father’s favorite songs by The Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd; I couldn’t make a free throw with someone’s life on the line; I barely remember how to fish for Blues and Stripers. As his “Dad” role became consumed by my father’s other commitments, I lost the parts of me that were like Dad. I lost my strength and some of my warmth. I lost my urge for adventure and new experiences. Most importantly, I lost what little self-confidence I had, all of which I gained from weekends with Dad.

 

My relationship with my father is still recovering from the months following Christmas 2009 when we had no contact. Four years later, I see bits of Dad re-emerging in our recent phone conversations.

 

“Hey Darlin’,” he answers my phone call. We talk about all the stress in my life and the many stresses in his. His newly created catch phrase, “be cool my little jewel,” reeks of pre-divorce Dad and makes me smile.

 

I make some sassy comment to which he responds, “I can’t believe some of the things you say. What a wise guy.”

 

“You get that from your mother,” he adds sarcastically, never missing an opportunity to point out my surviving Dad-like characteristics. He tells me about his newest plan to visit Nick with me in California, and how he can’t wait for the summer because he misses his boat. I tear up a little, remembering May 2007. Thirty minutes later he has to go to dinner.

 

“Thanks for calling. Be good, be safe. Love you,” he says as if calling him is some huge affectionate gesture. To him it is.

 

My father has never cried in front of me. He has never cried in front of anyone as far as I am aware. But he has grown more sentimental as first he moved away from his kids, and then they moved away from him. While he is happy with his life, he realizes that his children and his life are more mutually exclusive than he had once hoped. He tries desperately to bridge that gap. He drove thirteen hours to Ann Arbor, Michigan, so he could celebrate my twentieth birthday with me. He talks about driving out again when he has a free weekend. He calls me “Tiny,” something I haven’t heard since before my teen years. There is one day I know I will finally see tears in his eyes: my wedding day. And on that day we will leave the past five years at the church doors, and Dad will walk me down the aisle. 

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