what my father said

"Douglas,... the best thing two people in this world can ever hope to have between them is an understanding."

What I've come to realize in the last fifteen years is how that actually comes to be.

Understanding someone first arrives in understanding who that person is. This is only gleaned after many months or years, in very small increments, over the course of countless conversations. It means knowing the key points in history that formed how the feel. I can predict with somewhat amazing accuracy what made these people act a certain way and, with much less accuracy, why they behaved a certain way in the past. All this just by knowing those moments in their life, as recited in anecdote, when they first encountered a feeling.

The second part, and the one FAR less likely discovered, is understanding where that person intends their life to go. You see, in my experience, people hold their hopes much closer to themselves than they do their past. The past being prologue, it's kind and amusing to share those stories - they are what has happened and what is irrefutably true. Yet the future, that is what we dream of. We feel, maybe superstitiously, that by airing those distant hopes that we are unconsciously blowing them out - candles on a birthday cake. And so we only voice them in the strictest of confidence, afraid that the listener will run through the streets shouting them or whisper them in the ear of another and the two will share a mocking laugh together.

I am trying, with all my patience and aptitude, to learn these thing about the people already in my life. To support them in their desires, maybe without them knowing, and to help them. I want them all to know that everything will be just fine,... for all of us.

And, yes,... I want them to do the same for me. 

:doug @ 1:57 AM

yacht rock

Yesterday, to celebrate the first day of 100+ degree weather; T, myself and another joined our roommate on a short boat trip around the harbor. Now, I've always considered sailing to be just another rich persons' pleasure, right up there with skiing and squash, but dare I say it - I enjoyed myself.

Now a motorboat is a luxury, but sailing seems to be a little more hands on. Not that I've become an expert after a five hour excursion - but I did learn a jib from a jab, a bimini from a bethany, and a halliard from a mallard. Nor did I earn my sea legs. After years of foolishly overestimating my constitution, I wisely purchased some Dramamine half and hour before we motored out of the slip.

While the rest of the group were content to sit near the back, steer and soak up the scenery; I kept moving up and down the rocking course of the hull playing with my balance and standing on the bow. Now G, the roommate, a month old sailor after purchasing The Serenity on a lark, will be bravely (or tragically) attempting to move her all the was down the Atlantic coast to a new home and new job in Miami near the end of this month. I can't say I'm not disappointed that my discovery of this interest didn't come sooner, I would've really liked to have seen if I was as instantly adept at it as I thought I was.

New things are exciting. 

:doug @ 6:10 PM