Stem to Stern: The Older I Get
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I was sitting at my desk a few days ago, contemplating the accelerated rate at which the universe is expanding, due to dark energy, and I arrived at an unfortunate conclusion: Just like the universe, I am getting older. I am getting older, and I might not actually live forever. Damn. I had plans. Oh, stop. I don’t mean I’m sick, other than hearing the torturing voices which force me to write this column. I’m not throwing in the towel or circling the scupper. I just mean that I’m at the age where the road behind me is longer than the road in front of me. How do I know this? I’ve got a positive ID on the Ring camera of the Old Man banging on my door, but I’m not about to let the bastard in.
As everyone is aware, the older we get, the more time flies. I am reminded of this “Time Flies” phenomenon here, in the yard, as I walk through the carpenter shop and pass by the big planer and the big jointer. When I change the knives out for the boys in the wood shop, I mark a piece of masking tape on the jointer fence and the planer cowling with the date on which I set the new knives. I’m in there every day with the crew and, all of a sudden, two months have flown by since I last swapped out the knives. No wonder that planer is howling in protest, against the feed of wide, 10/4 teak. Where did the time go? We haul a boat for bottom paint, the list grows exponentially, and before you know it, she’s been here through the whole sailfish season. Ouch—can’t get that back. In the yard office, renewals on business insurance, health insurance and worker’s comp come once a year and yet it seems like once a month. Christmas is over and I swear, a week later Santa is pimping a new Mercedes, with a big red bow on the grill and Publix is running its PC, perfect-family-around-the-holiday-table ads. Incidentally, it’s a good thing that those ads are only 30 seconds long. Eventually, the wine will take over and the discussion will turn to the daughter’s refusal to eat animal flesh while seated at this celebratory feast, the grandson pondering his gender-identity dilemma or the grad student lecturing the old folks on our nation’s inherent racism and obscene reliance on fossil fuels (after you picked them up at the airport following their part in burning several thousand pounds of Jet-A into the stratosphere to get home). God, I love the holidays! I just wish they gave us a real year between them. Time flies and, apparently, so do geniuses.
The older I get, the less tolerance I have for human behavior, and it requires infinitely more effort to accept the fact that there are things that I just can’t change about people. Where did my patience go? I thought that we were supposed to mellow with age, like good bourbon. Not. I seem to be mellowing more like a wolverine, which, in turn, requires that good bourbon at the end of the day to fair out the highs and lows and keep me from sharpening my incisors. I shake my head a lot these days when confronted with modern culture, but I’m learning to walk away. I try my best to forgive human behavior and to bury more hatchets than I take to the grindstone. The brevity of life on Earth has become all too apparent and hauling the extra payload of grudges will only shorten your range. As Don Henley concludes in “Heart of the Matter”: “You keep carryin’ that anger, it will eat you up inside, baby.” For a wolverine, that is a song worth a listen.
The older I get, the fewer people I call real friends. I can count them in single digits. When we are young, we hang with lots of people. Everyone we meet is “my buddy.” With age we begin to evaluate these casual acquaintances. We get burned, insulted and lose the ability to tolerate. We learn that true friendship is a very rare and personal thing. In my younger days, I wanted to be one of the guys and hobnobbed with everyone I met through my work in the boatyard. I hung with my crew, vendors and customers after hours. I was warned about what would happen when you don’t separate work and personal relationships but, of course, I didn’t listen. People will take advantage and soon you’re in a quandary of the consequences of favoritism and quid pro quo. True friendship is about understanding, support and brotherhood, and keeps no ledger of payables and receivables. The older we get, the more I realize that real friends are hard to find and holding on to them requires you to be a good friend as well.
The older I get, the more I try my best to avoid crowds. I think most of us feel the same way. Boat shows, Sunfest, major airline hubs and trendy, celebrity-owned restaurants make us wish we were somewhere quieter where we are not reminded of the insignificance of our micro-circuit in the world schematic. We seek refuge in the woods or out to sea to turn the volume knob down and the squelch knob up. When I was a young man, I actually enjoyed the stadium atmosphere, rocking with all my “buddies” to the Stones or the Eagles at the Orange Bowl or Folsom Field. Now, on those rare occasions when someone worth my time hits the road, I search for shows in small venues like the Lyric Theater or the Bamboo Room. Intimacy has replaced the need to be part of the action. Time spent running boats offshore in the indigo Southern Atlantic is increasingly less a work assignment, and more a priceless gift. The older I get, the more I need to get away.
The older I get, too, the more I understand what really matters in this life: work, family and friends, in that order. Bet I’ll get some feedback on that one. But the older I get, the more I have come to realize that unless you are a trust-funder or a politician, you must work to support your family, which is your most precious responsibility on Earth. You need to drag yourself out of the fun house every day and make a living for those that depend upon you. Without an income from work, that beautiful family that you love with all your heart will come apart at the seams. Our urban streets and projects are lined with solid evidence to that effect. Stopping to smell the roses every now and then is fine, but if that’s all you do, you’ll soon be deep in something else and it ain’t roses. Retirement after a lengthy career of hard work is an honor and an earned privilege. Retiring after high school and living on the sweat of others is disgusting.
The older I get, the more I realize that perfection is unattainable, but the knowledge gained in the pursuit of it is well worth the effort. One of the advantages of getting older is the opportunity for long-term refinement. You have time to tweak your flaws and edit your message. You will never be without those flaws, but time can roll the rough edges of sharp glass in the sand and sea and turn that shard into a valuable piece of the mosaic. As I age, I see this happening in my old friends, and I hope they see the same in me. The older I get, the more time I have to learn to laugh at shortcomings in myself and others and the more I understand that nothing is my parents’ fault. Not one damn thing. We make our choices out of free will and it is up to us, with age, to clean up our own mess.
Let’s face it. The universe is expanding at a rate of 73.24 (km/s)/Mpc. It has been expanding since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. With that in mind, I suppose I’ll have time to change out the jointer knives and prep for a worker’s comp audit for quite a few more trips around the sun. Son of Sam. Oops, I meant to say Son-of-a-bitch. The voices are telling me to: “Shut up with all this philosophic arrogance and focus on next month’s column.” I guess I lost track of the time. Time flies!
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/stem-to-stern-the-older-i-get