My mother and Moby Dick

Here is something I need to remember for future reference: my mother does not like Moby Dick as much as I do. The truth: she pretty much hated every minute reading Moby Dick for her class at Harvard. What she had to say about the pleasures of cetological lore does not exist. What she disliked about whale minutiae and viscera would fill the brain of a sperm whale to capacity. (And yes, the sperm whale brain, at 17 pounds, is five times larger than the human brain and has a volume of 8000 cubic meters.)

The only good thing about Moby Dick, as far as my mother is concerned, so far as I can tell, is the fact that the Pequod’s first mate’s name is Starbuck, he of “deep natural reverence [and] wild watery loneliness”, and this means that every time she passes a Starbucks coffee shop she can allude to this convergence of names, each time as if for the first time. Given that there are 13,279 Starbucks in the USA alone, this is an opportunity unlikely to expire. (The founders initially wanted to name their company Pequod, which I would have voted for; this gives you an idea of my business savvy.)

I, on the other hand, consider Moby Dick to be the greatest American novel and one of the funniest novels ever; the novel that keeps on giving. I like Moby Dick so much that I wrote a short story about a character who may or may not resemble the writer, who is obsessed with Moby Dick and spends an entire summer - a summer rife with dramatic life changes – alluding to Melvillian wit and wisdom. (You can read this story, “No I am not a Loose Fish, and Neither Are You”, in the 2006 issue of the Southwest Review,Volume 91,Number 3, which, alas, is not available on line.)

So why did my mother find herself reading Moby Dick?
My father loved taking classes and he loved to be around interesting people. And if there were no interesting people on hand, he was happy to be around uninteresting people. He liked to be around people, and he didn’t much like being left alone. He loved school as a young man, and excelled; his only complain about his undergraduate years at Harvard was that his time there was too brief, having been interrupted by his service during WW2.

My mother likes to give lectures and generally prefers to be around very few people, for short periods of time. Some people she would prefer to never be around.

In the decade before he died Dad enrolled at HILR, Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, which allowed him to take classes about current events, environmental degradation, Shakespeare’s plays and modern novels, and be around people. A good day at HILR involved a class discussion on Islam and Petroleum, lunch with an attractive female grandchild and her attractive roommates, then an afternoon class tracing the causes of Climate Change to the Protestant Reformation. He once took a course called the “Traditions of Mysticism and Christianity and Islam” and called me once a week to explain the reading and, please, to write a précis of the 800 page tome assigned that week. But he kept going to class. Only a national emergency or death could stop him from going to class and lunching with an attractive granddaughter.

The only course he actively resisted taking was “This is Your life: Memoir Writing”, and it was the one course above all others I begged him to take.

But for all their love and devotion, my parents were apparently clueless about each other’s social preferences. Which explains why my father persuaded, urged, hectored and implored my mother to join him in taking classes at HILR. Naturally he wanted her company – even though they wisely never took the same course. He also believed, or wanted to believe, that after his death - and he knew quite well he would predecease her, and soon - she would enjoy the classes and the collegiality of HILR. Even his children, their children, could have told you this was delusional.

Nowadays, my mother likes to tell people she took the Moby Dick class because Philip chose it, and she wanted to honor his choice. I don’t contradict her. But in fact she didn’t even look at the catalog until after his death. I know because I was there with her, and in the matter of taking classes, I am more like my father than my mother, so I was drooling over possibilities like the “Philosophy of Yoga”; “T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Other Catholic Converts”; “Anti-Matter and Alexandrine Meter”; “The Last String Quartets of Beethoven”. You get the idea.
And so I must take responsibility slash blame for my mother signing up for Moby Dick, and “The Philosophy of Yoga”. (She dropped the P of Y after the second week.) But she stuck with Moby Dick, more or less. More, because she never actually dropped out. Less, because she never finished the book and so never got to Chapter LXXXIX on “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish”, in which all of jurisprudence and human history is explained, brilliantly and hilariously, in the context of harpooned whales.

Something else I would do well to remember in the future: just because we have the same taste in chocolate and shoes does not mean that my mother and I will find the same books, or classes, interesting. Moby Dick could be the 63-ton tip of that iceberg.

Poor Mv Lyubov Orlova. She is currently adrift in the North Atlantic, and no one wants her. Or maybe the soi-disant owner wants her, but he doesn’t want to actually catch her. For the finer points of this question we must refer to Melville’s Moby Dick, Chapter 89, in which he elegantly parses the rules of ownership at sea, to wit: I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. Since the MV Lyubov Orlova is currently fast to no party, then she is a Loose-Fish.
Let me back up. Or go astern as we say in maritime-speak.
About 2 ½ years ago several siblings and I traveled in the Canadian Artic, from Iqaluit to Nanisivik to Devon Island and back to Ungava Bay, aboard the Russian ship, the MV Lyubov Orlova. It now seems we were the last passengers on board. After we debarked, she was headed to Newfoundland to be refitted. But she never got past the harbor at St. John’s. She was finally “arrested” by Canadian authorities for nonpayment of fees owed. The Russian crew on board had not been paid for months, and they had run out of vodka.
The ship is named for a Stalinist era film star. “Volga-Volga” was Joe Stalin’s favorite and we all know of his avocation as a film critic. Her photographs and movie posters decorated the saloon where we drank and played Bananagrams™ or Scrabble™ late into the Arctic night. (Things could get very heated. Do Inuit words count? Vodka was spilled. Glasses were broken. Then we went up to the bridge to view the Northern Lights.)
For almost two years, MV Lyubov Orlova was stuck in Newfoundland; locals raised money to send the poor Russian sailors home. It was cheaper than the alternative. (Use your imagination.)
Meanwhile, the ownership of MV Lyubov Orlova remains a tricky wicket. Back when we were on board, we all knew about the “Owner’s Cabin,” the locked room that stayed locked, on the Captain’s deck. Nobody would speak on the record, but we heard stories about this mysterious and nameless owner who mostly lived in Paris and did Parisian things, but liked to know that at any moment his cabin awaited him. During the more than two years the ship was detained at St. John’s, the nameless owner was unheard from. Neither was the shell company registered in the Cook Islands that is named as owner on the ship’s manifest.
Then in 2012 MV Lyubov Orlova was finally sold to a shipping company for scrap. (That is one version of events.) An American tug boat, the Charlene Hunt, was contracted to tow poor MV Lyubov Orlova south to the Dominican Republic, where underpaid workers could perform the nasty toxic job of dismantling the ship for parts and scrap metal. On the other hand, I have also read that the owner is Reza Shoeybi, an Iranian, who is hoping to snag the vessel back once she floats over to Europe. But I also read that Mr. Shoeybi is the owner of the tugboat that lost her connection to MV Lyubov Orlova. Who knows why it happened, but it did: on their first day out to sea the tow-line broke and in the 35 mph winds and high seas, the tugboat’s crew were unable to reattach the ship. A few days later a Canadian vessel, the Atlantic Hawk, secured the ship and managed to get her out of range of drifting into off-shore oil rigs and platforms, where a rogue Russian ice breaker/cruise ship could do a lot of damage. Once they had her in international waters, out of danger’s way, the Atlantic Hawk cut her loose. So there she floats; she could end up anywhere from Norway to West Africa, or she could just get caught in the North Atlantic gyre and spend eternity. A Loose-Fish if ever there was one.
But if you do hear of MV Lyubov Orlova being made fast anywhere, I would like to know, because I think my missing hairbrush is still on board, in Cabin 417, along with my sister’s lovely fleece hat with pompoms.

What St Francis and the animals don't mind

The whole point of a temporary tattoo is that it is temporary. That would make sense to me. But it is not that simple. Temporary tattoos are temporary if you happen to have make-up remover in the house. If you do not, and you are unwilling to scrub your granddaughter’s arm with a pumice stone or an SOS pad, then you must consider the tattoos as temporarily permanent.

It was the feast of St. Francis, and I thought it would be a good idea to remove beloved granddaughter’s faux tattoos before we went to church for The Blessing of the Animals. Which probably shows you how shallow I am. Would God or the rector mind that a five-year-old is sporting faux tattoos? Not at all. Nor should they. Would St Francis or the animals? Ditto.
But I really wanted those tattoos off her soft little arm. Perhaps now is not the time to explore my feelings about tattoos, almost entirely a result of my daughter’s tattoos, each and every one of which I consider to be far less beautiful than the skin it currently mars. Maybe all mothers think this is the case, but in my case it is an absolute fact, that my daughter had and has the most beautiful pale and soft skin imaginable. What is not imaginable – to me – is why she would willingly allow herself to be pricked, dyed and scarified by some random tattoo “artist” who may be suffering from any number of infectious diseases and is surely suffering from a good-taste-deficiency. No, it does not matter to me in the least if her tattoos are ‘interesting’ or ‘tasteful’ (the alphabet in Czech modernist font?). What matters to me is her skin. No matter how much I love Moby Dick, the fact that Queequeg was covered with tattoos does not strike me as a good reason for my child to get a tattoo. She is not a South Sea Island whaler, nor is she a cannibal.

I thought I was not going to rant about tattoos. And lest anyone get the idea that I an prejudiced or narrow-minded, you should know that last week CSB and I went to the opening of Tattoo Flash at the very cool Lift Truck Project in Croton Falls. To be honest, I went because it was curated by my friend the poet Pam Hart and not because of an intrinsic fascination with the subject, because I do not have such an intrinsic fascination. But I discovered the wonderful stories of the early tattooists and their close connection to seaports and circuses. Of the tattoo flashes, I especially liked the buxom dames with Indian headdresses.
There were no wolves at our little church’s Blessing of the Animals, but we did have 1 rabbit in a hamper, 2 gerbils, at least 4 hermit crabs, a white cockatoo, a green and yellow parakeet (or parrot, I can’t tell the difference), 1 live cat, 2 photographs of cats too fearful to come out and play with all the dogs, and many dogs of all sizes and ilks, including one of ours. Bruno had to absorb the blessing for his rowdier sister in absentia. There were also about 12 honeybees, in a small jar in my pocket, and they too had to stand in for their thousands of sisters. Cherished granddaughter held the cockatoo’s cage for much of the service.
Should I tell her that on most Sundays there are not so many animals at church?

The Log in Question

We were not yet arrived at Georgian Bay’s Belle au Clair beach on the 14th concession before B - alerted us to the latest contretemps among the cottagers. A piece of driftwood is a key player in this drama. As pieces of driftwood go, it is remarkable for its length and straightness. From its top to its tangled roots it is one straight shot, uninterrupted by branches or bends. As a pivotal player in a dispute, it is remarkably unremarkable.

B -’s Georgian Bay cottage is rented out for the month of July. For the past seven years she has rented to the same family, who are also friends with the neighbors on the beach. So the renters are no strangers to the beach and its dramatis personae. This is all by way of background.
This past month, the renter noticed the driftwood that – as driftwood is wont to do - had drifted up onto their bit of beach, that is, B -’s beach. Perhaps now would be a good time for a disquisition on beach ownership as it is adjudicated in Canada, with pithy allusions to beached whales, royal prerogatives and of course the Fast Fish/Loose Fish chapter in Moby Dick. The renter – we will call her Wendy – determined it would make an excellent table and stump chairs for sitting round her children’s bonfires. She called B -to inquire about this and left a voicemail. Not hearing back, she gassed up her chainsaw* and headed down to the beach. She yanked expertly on the starter cord and the chainsaw roared into life; its metallic shriek ripped through the peaceful susurrus of the waves like unmuffled Harleys in a nursing home parking lot.
Wendy had barely applied the rotating blade to the tender wood when Odette from the Island-that-is-no-longer-an-Island came rushing down the slope, over the causeway and onto the beach. Because a chainsaw is very noisy and drowns out all other sounds, Wendy was not aware of Odette’s approach. It was only when Odette stood directly opposite her on the other side of the recumbent driftwood, bellowing, “Stop this right away. You have no right,” that Wendy jerked upright, clutching and even proffering the still-roaring chainsaw.
(I do not know much about Odette, other than her persona non grata status on Belle au Clair Beach, but I am assuming that she missed the important childhood lesson to never startle or bother someone in possession of an operating chainsaw. This is how accidents happen.)

It was not reported what exactly was Wendy’s initial response to Odette’s exhortation. Versions differ. Gloria from two cottages down swears that Wendy told Odette to go back to the Island of Dr Moreau and stay there. Hugo says that Wendy reverted to her native Hungarian and emitted an aria of Slavic curses. According to Mr. Mitch in the pale green cottage, Wendy wordlessly brandished her still-roaring chainsaw in Odette’s direction.
Whatever was or was not said, all agree that Odette stood her ground.
Eventually Wendy switched off the chainsaw’s engine, to better enable the beach to hear the discussion.
Odette said, “That log is on our part of the beach. You are violating our property.”
Wendy said, “Look carefully, O-dette. The log is on the Barley’s beach and B - doesn’t give a flying fuck if I carve up a piece of flotsam.”
Odette said, “Please don’t use that language in front of my children.”
Wendy said, “I’ll say flotsam any time I damn well please. “ She mimed scanning the horizon and then said, “I don’t see any children.”
Odette said, “So long as you and your tools of destruction stay off our beach, your language can be as vile as you like.”
By now Gloria, Mr. Mitch, Hugo and Mrs. Hugo had ventured from their sections of the beach and stood at a safe but audible distance from the log in question and the interlocutors.
Wendy said, “It is the Barley beach and if you want to file a lawsuit over it, feel free. I am sure the judge will be delighted to see you guys back in court.” (For reasons that shall be explained later, this barb was particularly well-aimed. For now I will simply say that Odette and her husband - for whom lawsuits were mother’s milk, bread and butter, and their raison d’être -had recently lost an expensive battle over beach rights with their neighbors on the other side, and their loss was the cause of much merriment and glass-clinking up and down the beach.)
Odette retorted, “You are wrong. This part of the beach is shared property between ourselves and the Barley’s. Notice our tire tracks.”
Wendy said, “You are the one in the wrong. Again. Just because the Barley’s have allowed you an easement to drive to the island is no way means you have property rights. Where did you study law? Transylvania?”
Odette said, “I am not going to allow you to make this spectacle, and threaten me with your vile machine.”
Wendy said, “Who is threatening whom? Did I order you off the beach? Think again.”
Odette stood taller and said, “Until you can show me legal documents that prove this is the Barley’s sole property and that you have permission to destroy this piece of driftwood, I insist that you stop what you are doing. Immediately.”
Mrs. Hugo, who spoke so little that no one on the beach even knew her first name, interjected: “Do you really care that much about a piece of driftwood? Is it worth all this aggravation?”
Both Odette and Wendy ignored her reasonable question. Mr. Hugo patted his wife’s shapely buttocks as if she were a donkey.
Wendy gripped the chainsaw’s starter cord as if she might yank it into life again.
Odette said, “I will have the police issue a Cease and Desist order if you do not put that down immediately.”
Wendy said, “Just because you have a sleazy trial lawyer at your beck and call doesn’t give you the right to harass your neighbors.”
Mr. Hugo piped up, “I don’t think anything is being accomplished here. Why don’t you both go into your respective cottages and have a few cocktails to calm down. “
Odette’s final shot, spoken as if to the rapt audience at the Royal Theatre, “The last time Wendy had a few cocktails they could hear her off-key Marseillaise all the way to Penatanguishene.”
Wendy brandished her chainsaw once more but found herself at a loss for words. She strode over the dunes back to her cottage. Up on the sweeping deck she started the chainsaw up one last time, and revved it to make sure the sound carried all the way to the island.



*You are no doubt wondering, as did we, about the likelihood of a family arriving at their summer rental with their personal chainsaw. We can neither explain nor verify this detail.