dad, dog and boat

June 19, 2011 at 3:51 pm · Filed under boats, books, dogs, my father and tagged: boats, books, dogs. dad

Page four 

In 1969 (I’m pretty sure), when I was sixteen, my father’s dog died. A black lab mix called Sarge, he was my contemporary, being fifteen or sixteen when he died. Sarge was a fantastic family dog, as many labs are, with his breed’s loyalty and gentleness. I think it’s quite possible that he was my father’s best friend on the planet every minute that he lived.

Naturally there was a great hole in Dad’s world in the space where Sarge had been. And to fill that hole, my father did something he had never done before and would never do again: he paid a ridiculous amount of money to get himself from a pet shop a purebred puppy. This was a complete aberration in my father’s life, in my father’s self. He had grown up in the depression. You did not pay for family animals. There were unwanted puppies and kittens everywhere, and the way you got yourself an animal was to grab one of the many that someone else had thrown out, or was about to throw out. And you did not get purebreds. The results of this snotty breeding stuff were temperament problems and even worse, many physical problems that you just didn’t get with mutts. Yes, we called them mutts, mongrels, Heinz 57’s.  In both cats and dogs, you got a much safer deal with a mutt. I still hold to this precept.

My parents were doing some business in Haverhill, as I recall the story. They happened to walk by a pet shop and decided to look around, because my father needed an heir to Sarge. He went in there expecting to just think about his next dog. When the time came to actually do it, he would get himself a mutt somewhere.

Falling in love, as we all know, can be so damnably sudden, and damnably unexpected. So it was that day with Dad and a very tiny black Scottish terrier puppy. Almost all of my father’s personal animals, all his life, were black: many dogs, one cat and one guinea pig. He had this penchant for black animals. So here was this tiny thing, black, and love ensued. This pet store sold its puppies by weight, each breed having its own per-pound price. The pup weighed three pounds, cost $33 a pound, plus tax. My father paid over $100 that day for this purebred dog who would no doubt turn out to be riddled with defects. A hundred dollars was a huge amount of money for our family in 1969, and if such a sum was spent, it was spent on a bill or a doctor visit. Not even for a new TV had my father ever paid $100 at that time. He splurged on himself for one of the few times I ever saw him do so, and none of us begrudged it to him or grumbled, thank goodness. My father got enough grumbling and begrudging from us. I’m glad we didn’t do it over the dog. In fact, it became a great joke in the family for the next two years that this little gremlin had cost $33 a pound.

The name on the kennel club papers was Scot Rob Roy the 34th, or some such nonsense. But once out the door of the pet shop, he was just plain Scotty.

Dad had never had such a small and portable dog. Like all his other dogs, Scotty could ride in the car. But there was much more fun in the offing, because Scotty could go just about anywhere. For several years Dad had a little wooden boat that he would take to the clam flats. He called it Skoshy, which I think is the Japanese word for small. Skoshy, Scotty and Dad would head out to the bay every fair-weather weekend, supposedly to dig clams. Yes, clams were often brought home, but they were really just an excuse to go out on the water. If there was red tide and the flats were closed, if my father was sick of eating clams, still they would go off in the boat. Dad would come home many times from these trips and regale us with stories of how Scotty had jumped into the brine and needed to be rescued. Or how a thunderstorm had come up and Dad had had to hold tight to Scotty so not to lose him in the boat’s picthing. Or how the motor had died halfway to or from the flats, and they’d had to sit in the hot sun while Dad worked on the motor, and he’d wet Scotty down with the seawater to keep him cool. Or how Dad would toss Scotty a clam while he dug, and the dog would proceed to shake the bejeezus out of the poor clam.

Now we arrive at the part where I will cry as I write — because it’s father’s day, and because the man and the dog and the boat are all gone, and because the magic that I shared with them out there on the water happened only the once.

My father had been bugging us all for a couple of months, my brothers, my mother and I, to go out in the boat with him. He had suddenly decided, after about a year, that he wanted to share this with one of his family (though he didn’t use those words). We were all teenagers, and we didn’t like to hang out with our parents anymore than we absolutely had to. I regret this now, but can’t go back and change it. Finally I caved. I waited for one of his sons to go and do this man-thing with him, but they wouldn’t. I waited for my mother to do this thing with her husband, but she wouldn’t either. It hurt me, all of it. And even though I didn’t particularly want to be stuck out in Rowley bay with my father and risk him yelling at me about something, or asking me to dig the clams out of their homes, I agreed one Saturday to go.

Out there on the water I saw a father I’d never seen very much of at all in seventeen years. Little glimpses now and then, but nothing like these few hours in the boat. He did not take me to the flats and ask me to dig. He didn’t yell at me about anything. He smiled and laughed and spoke in a fairly quiet voice. He pointed out everything to me: Straight ahead the ocean; left Newburyport, right Ipswich. There’s Plum Island, and that little island over there is such-and-such. And, as if conditioned by Pavlov himself, when Dad cut the engine, Scotty thought we were at the flats and immediately jumped out of the boat — into the water. And Dad went in after him. I was the only dry one left.  My father was, for Bill Nakis, ecstatically happy, and clearly tickled pink that I had agreed to come. He told me, again, the stories of the adventures he and Scotty had had out there.

I was seventeen. I both loved my father and loathed him. I both needed him and pushed him away. I had Asperger’s. I did not smile and laugh there on the boat. I was emotionally very, very closed in until I was twenty-three. I did not say to him what I was thinking there in the boat, and I so fiercely wish that I had: Dad, you’re so happy here. I’ve never seen you this happy. I didn’t know you could be this happy. Bring me out here again.

But he didn’t. As far as I can remember, that was the one and only time he ever took one of us out in the boat. I wish he’d asked me again, but he didn’t. I wish I’d been able to ask him, but I was too reserved to invite myself, and too scared to risk the rejection if he should say no.

Scotty lived ten or eleven years, until summer of 1980, I think. His adventures with my father, their bond and their antics, are still treasured family legend to me. On the day Scotty died, and at my father’s request, I stood guard against the visits of neighborhood children so that he could be alone to bury his dog. We already had another black dog, Groucho, so there was no new one acquired after Scotty’s death. Skoshy only lasted another year or two past the day of the outing. It was fall ’71 or ’72 when she was tied up at the beach, but my father hadn’t yet brought her home. There was a violent thunder storm, and the little boat was pretty much torn to bits on the rocks. Dad brought home the stern board with the name Skoshy on it and hung it in the enclosed patio. He never had a boat again. And the man himself only lasted until 1999.

Nineteen June 2011, today. My thirteenth father’s day now with no father. In the first few days after his death, I wrote a poem about that day on the water, but with all the destruction in my own life since then, I have no idea where that poem is now. It may or may not turn up again. I have some jewels to look back on in the years that I had a father, and that day in little Skoshy with little Scotty riding on the bow beside the wheel, with a father so happy I almost couldn’t believe he was the same man I’d always known, is the brightest, most costly of them all. One of those rare days in a person’s life that is always wished back again down the years, always longed for again: Give me that day just one more time. Please. Just one more time.

And that, of course, can never be.

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