“I’m no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.” ~
O great sea, how you call to me, with your beauty and danger and mystery. That a landlocked boy should feel such an affinity for a place and space that would always be out of his grasp is one of life’s conundrums, unsettled and unbalanced but no less beloved because of that. The call of the sea is a song I’ve had in my head since I first glimpsed its seaweed-strewn splendor as a child, and as the years go by I feel its pull evermore.
“There comes a time in a man’s life when he hears the call of the sea. “Hey, YOU!” are the sea’s exact words. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.” ~
I’m not taking life advice from Dave Barry, so this spring and summer’s theme for our trips to Boston will be the sea – in particular the Seaport – which has grown in leaps and bounds like the arms of a starfish. Where one has gone missing, another sprouts up again. It was the backdrop for the Spring Stroll I took with Kira recently, and will form part of an upcoming anniversary visit to Boston, and later our annual BroSox Adventure. Life events have been founded upon flimsier ideas – and the sea is anything but flimsy. It will more likely be a matter of trying to tame the power and might of an idea that has the immensity of its reality surging behind it – a reality that has never been defeated. Our shores and beaches are but barely holding their own, and that delicate line between land and water is tenuously held. Let that be our only drama, and let us enjoy it.
“There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
