Marlow’s Coastal Empire

Author’s note: what follows under this title is the first of a series of collected thought fragments, remembrances and observations. As a whole, they should not be taken as a defense of or apology for my mortal doings nor recommendations for my readers to follow. They are solely a compilation – a simple cutting and pasting of my draft notes into a somewhat more coherent form.

I hope to capture both the miracles and monsters that attended my life. Be advised that they will be mostly streams-of-thought that dart from topic to topic.

It will be a work in progress. Perhaps it will always be so, much as my life has been.

I was a peculiar boy from a young age. My younger siblings told me so, stating repeatedly and emphatically that I must have been adopted. I was a talker, they were taciturn. I was brash, they were conservative. And so on.

My Franciscan nun elementary school teachers found my extemporaneous speech and thoughts provocative. They considered my Yiddish sprinkled vocabulary – mother had been in NYC radio and theater during the 40s – to be

sinful in a Midwestern mortal Roman Catholic way. Consequently, I had my mouth scotch taped shut more than once before I entered the third grade. Sometimes weekly.

I put up with these indignities with the good graces my mother had instilled in me. When 3M muzzled, I learned to communicate silently through the scotch tape with fellow back row classmates using eyebrows, smirks, blinks and

subtle body language manners (again leaned from my mother the actress; her business card touted that she could do southern, ingénue and street voices) that kept the attention and respect of my peers of both sexes.

I had almost two dozen ways to communicate without words. One facial expression and hand movement meant oops, another that your fly was open, a simple one meant wow, one more elaborate meant I want to marry you, another

signified that we had dropped bombs and blown something up, and on and on and on.

This did further enrage from time to time the black and brown robed sisterhood, but they could not bring themselves to further complain or admonish, since I was an overall good person and student who helped his fellow classmates

of lesser abilities.

My compass did not always point me due north. It and I swung wildly. With no fixed personality, an inner unruliness ruled my undulations with sky winds and ocean tides.

Here are but a few of my peculiar windy, wavy wildings from my early youth.

More than a few times I boasted to amazed friends that I was master of all possible landscapes, sort of a technicolor superhero of the garden in the black and white TV world of the mid1950s. I supposed this was due to the

indentured servitude that I and my brother served for eight years in the perfecting of my father’s half acre dreamscape yards. This will require several pages of descriptions in another piece at a later date.

I was partial to drawing expressionist doodles that caused some medical professionals concern. My surreal carnival backdrop water paint drawings, literature text extracts in crayola, Latin church music notes and phrases in pencil

with occasional misspellings with suggestive ancient erotica meanings, plus a longer than normal term love of the Howdy Doody Show and an early understanding of Soupy Sales double-entendres caused my parental units deep

concern.

Only now can I admit that I assigned colors and tones to English language vowels. Don’t ask but the colors included black, white, red, green and orange.

Before I go any further, there are a few things you ought to know up front.

I rarely if ever prayed.

When I was little, I had several vibrant dreams of empty roads and fair seas.

My teenage soul was beset by an endless war between stupid and clever. My youthful mind was a battlefield, where my inability to reason accurately and my inadequacies in judgment were in continual conflict with my passion and

appetites.

My reason and passion were the rudder and the sails of my seafaring soul. When either my sail cloth or rudder was broken, I would toss and drift about in heavy seas and winds, or I was in irons in windless mild seas.

As I aged, my judgment and appetites became like two well liked house guests, whom I never favored one over the other.

So when my personal life’s storms finally arrived decades later with their forest flattening winds, thunder and lightning, I was ready to rest in reason and move with passion.

As a teenager, more than a few took me as a bit crazy. I didn’t think I was. After all, my only issue was that I just could and would not believe in things I couldn’t see. Faith in unseeable beings? Uh, no. Belief that poverty could be

ended after millennia of its continued existence? Loved the thought but seemed impractical. Fighting for peace during a multi decade long cold war? That phrase always made me smile. Eternal salvation? Living life with the

expectation of a coming reality wasn’t my reality.

During an exceptionally boring 9th grade algebra class, I made a mental bucket list. Here’s my scorecard 55 years later:

Climb mountains   check

Go through jungles   check

Fight wars in space   no check

Get the girl   check

Kill bad guys   check

Have zippy one liners    check

Have bulging muscles    no check

5 out of 7 ain’t bad.

My life charted along these lines at various time -– rhumb, zigzag, straight and crooked. My temperament caused me to meander in an indirect fashion until I straightened out, deepened and ran truer when I reached the ocean.

Not long before I reached my twentieth birthday, I came to believe and trust in the freedom of the open road and ocean.

Many say that inside every man is a crazy boy. After decades of denial, I have come to accept this. That irrational part of the long ago me was bedrocked by a massive self-assurance, a no-fear attitude, the craftiness of an organized

crime family boss and an absolute insanity. The unknown art of male maturation finally led me to the whittling, sanding and polishing of that crazy boy part out of me on a daily basis. My parents did it at first, followed in succession by my grandparents, friends, girlfriends, teachers, bosses occasionally the cops and then finally in my 25th year by myself.

I didn’t plan for my life journey to ramble about this way, but I am happy to be where I am and that I finally got here.

So where am I now?

In the rear cabin of my life’s ship, looking aft at my wake.

To be continued.

Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat

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