The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

She showed up at the door out of nowhere. Rather than scurrying off at the harsh rebukes, she simply wagged her tail and gazed forlornly. She was black, short-haired, young, and thin – obviously lost, but just as obviously well-cared for. Her look melted the old man’s heart and pierced a hole in his grief out of which a good deal of his stress temporarily drained. Now that the numbness of his wife’s death had worn off, he was engaged in the thankless task of sorting through a century of accumulations.

At his age, it takes effort to bend down and read a dog tag. “My name is Tilly.” Followed by a phone number. His usually grumpy 15-year-old dachshund seemed to welcome this pup, following it with his eyes as she happily bounced about the living room amidst boxes and displaced furniture. He called the number. A grateful fellow said he’d be right over. He and a male companion were soon at the door, ostensively to collect Tilly. They stayed all day. And returned the following day. And the next. And the next, for weeks, helping the elderly widow sort a lifetime of stuff into three groups – stuff to sell, stuff to give to charity, and the rest in a large, rented dumpster in the driveway. The dogs became friends, as did the men. 

Two middle-aged men; one old man. Over time, his story emerged in spurts and sputters of memory. His was a tale of yesteryear. The son of Portuguese immigrants; his father a commercial fisherman, his mother scrubbing floors and taking in laundry while raising ten children. He was the youngest, the only one left. His two oldest brothers were lost at sea during the hurricane of ’65 – their names inscribed on the Gloucester memorial. After their deaths, his mother’s movements slowed. She went about her daily tasks as before, but with a cloud of despond draped over her shoulders. 

His dad became angry at the world. He drank heavily and went into rages during which glassware shattered and offspring were bruised. Social services showed up numerous times, but one look at his dad and they melted in fear. His father stood six-foot-three, weighed 310 pounds, and, from his days as an amateur boxer, sported a pair of grotesque cauliflowered ears and one lifeless eye. The retina detached, it gazed off into nothingness, disconnected, independent, dead. His skin was a dark olive color; he spoke with a thick Portuguese accent overlaid with rage. The social workers backed off. The kids dodged beatings. The mom silently wept and worked.

He tried to protect her when his dad, drunk and furious, cursed and swung. For his trouble, he was the recipient of a powerful left hook that broke his cheek bones and knocked him unconscious. Every cut, every broken nose, all the blood that flowed from his father in the ring merged with each time he’d returned from the sea with his holding tank nearly empty, his face stung with salt. The hurt and anger of generations surged through him to be met with a rip-current of parental bereavement and explode in the abuse of the only ones he had left. 

The old man’s sisters all fled – the successful ones to college, marriage, families of their own. The others fled into a series of abusive relationships. He took off when he was seventeen – shipped out on a massive ocean fisher. He never saw any of his siblings or his mother again. The ship was a commercial factory fishing vessel. They caught, processed, froze, and packaged the catch on board. The hold was a factory. Marine life was swept up indiscriminately in massive dragnets. Everything living died – dolphins, porpoises, sharks, inedible ocean creatures of all kinds. Raw sewage and dead fish spewed out. The stench was unbearable. It was dangerous – high seas, icy waves washing over the deck – on average, they lost a man per month. Unceremoniously buried at sea, their names lost to all but poor mothers and young widows in far-away slums. 

A dozen times a year, they would dock somewhere, taking on supplies, cleaning out the hold, filling the massive fuel tanks. He and his mates would go ashore, drink, fight, pass out, wake up in holding cells, suffer verbal berating from the first mate, and be shoved back aboard with the promise of docked pay to compensate for court fines.

He was thirty when he had had enough. He went ashore in ancestral Portugal (he had picked up enough Portuguese to get by) and never looked back. This time, he hiked beyond the seedy bars and docks, hopped a train, and fled to Spain. From there, he signed on to a container ship headed down the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal. They unloaded and loaded in Singapore and sailed to Long Beach. He did not bother to quit – he just left, hitchhiked to Massachusetts, landed in Provincetown, met the daughter of a fisherman, and got married in the Catholic church. His father-in-law hired him as his first mate, where he worked until pops became too old and frail. He bought the business at a steep discount from his father-in-law and moved from first officer to captain of his own vessel. He and his wife had two sons and two daughters, all long since grown and gone – a daughter in LA, a son in Portland, another daughter in Boston and the youngest son in New York. They were all doing well. None of them wanted anything to do with fishing. 

His was a good size fishing boat, but nothing like the factory ship. She carried a crew of four. She was designed strictly for offshore fishing – out off the continental shelf – in port every evening. Four kids, a sturdy wife, drinks with other fishermen in the pub – life became routine. Men were lost at sea occasionally, but due to advanced weather alerts, sonar systems, and radios, it was rare. Not like the old days.

Provincetown began to change. An artists’ colony emerged. Later came the beatniks, then the hippies, and finally the wealthy cis-gendered gay men. With their arrival, real estate prices skyrocketed. The hippies moved on to cut their hair and become stockbrokers. The Portuguese fishers hung on – reduced in numbers but firmly planted. They mostly ignored the gay men. The two groups were not antagonistic; they were just separate. The sailors had their Portuguese pub and the two Portuguese restaurants, and their tiny parish served by the old Portuguese priest. The gays had their high-end clothing stores, art galleries, coffee shops, cafes, and modern glassed houses overlooking the bay. The two groups lived side by side in a small town on the outer tip of Cape Cod, but they rarely even saw one another.

That’s why, even though they were essentially neighbors, the old widower and the two 50-something dog owners had never met. They came from vastly different worlds in every respect. An old man weathered by a rough life, steeped in old world tradition. Two younger men from wealthy families and Ivy League colleges, sophisticated and modern.

The old dachshund eyed the bouncing pup warily, but tolerantly. When Tilly wore herself out, she slept with her head on the old dog like a pillow. When the old man wore out, he dozed in a recliner as the younger men sorted. When he awakened, he told his story, which seemed like a Melville novel to the others. Their story – one of place and privilege, combined with a sense of injustice that produced an expectation of reparations – gradually melted into humility as they listened and imagined themselves under less advantaged circumstances. 

They had both always thought of their lives as enduring the hardships of victimhood, the rejection and hatred of homophobia; and, while all that was true, they began to realize that they didn’t have it so badly after all. They had wealth; they lived in one of the most accepting communities in the world. In fact, they were part of a small group who pretty much owned the town. The animosity they felt for younger LGBTQ+ folks drifted away like the lifting of morning fog. They never met Harvey Milk. They weren’t there during Stonewall. The narrative they inherited was that they were born gay – it was genetic. Now these youngsters were coming along talking about being gender fluid, nonbinary – insisting they could choose their sexuality. They didn’t particularly like lesbians. Somehow, in listening to the old man, all of that dissipated. They both felt humbled, less judgmental, more accepting, more open to nuance.

The Goodwill Truck came and left. The secondhand shop picked up the more expensive items for consignment. The refuge company took away the dumpster. The old man’s well-meaning children had made arrangements for him to spend his last months in an upscale assisted-living/nursing home. They put him on the list three years ago when their mother first got sick. They were scheduled to pick him up the next day.

The two neighbors, his newest friends, were the only ones to see him as he donned his foul weather gear and slowly made his way to the dock. A gale was brewing. The fishing fleet was grounded by the Coast Guard. Two red-square flags with black squares in the middle stiffly blew in 63 knot winds. Waves crashed against the seawall. 

With stiff fingers, he uncleated his 22-foot sloop. They watched in silence as he hoisted the jib and mainsail, took the sheets in one hand and the tiller in the other, and headed her up close-hauled on starboard tack into the jaws of the storm. Waves crashed over the boat. As he disappeared into the fog and spray, they could barely make him out, now standing at the helm, alive, free. The laugh of a thousand generations echoed across the waves.