Venerable

The best part of life is being alive unless a man has sons and daughters, in which case the best part of life is loving them. We just had a birthday weekend, all six of my girls were here. Ray and Jeremy too, for Tassy’s forty-first birthday celebration. All my girls. Joe called, and all my girls were here. Linda, Malinda, Tass, Kristen, Caroline, Charlotte

To work up appetite for Sunday dinner of an enormous baked red snapper and pan broiled grouper with lump crab, purchased at the fish market at Tarpon Dock Bridge, we cut broken branches from the Ven. Mr. Hideous Grotesque, the cedar tree that shades My Laughing Place down by the Bay.

Another best part of life is having grown up on St. Andrews Bay and being able to look back on it. And reading Sheila’s “Coming Home” reminiscence in the PCNewsHerald Sunday mornings. Sheila Leto Scott was in my brother Walt’s class at Bay High, and grew up with us at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, she at home here in St. Andrews, we over in the Cove on Massalina Bayou. Her husband John was in my sister's class. Sunday's essay about scallops stirred again the Saturday my father took us across the Bay with a washtub or two in our boat, a sixteen foot skiff powered by an early Johnson SeaHorse outboard.

The boat was built for us, from scratch, by Chris Johnson, a gnarled old Norwegian fisherman who lived on his boat in what is now called Smith's Yacht Basin. We watched our boat being laid down and come together on the beach across from our fishhouse on 12th Street in St. Andrews. The Shrimp Boat restaurant stands where that beach was, and the original Shrimp Boat before that. So, it was some time back, in the forties, I was maybe twelve. The boat was built from lumber that had to be bowed, clamped, seasoned, cut and caulked. Red lead paint bottom, white with green trim. Fitted with oar locks, and oars: you could get home if the motor conked out on you. Bow seat, stern seat, and maybe two seats amidships. Quite frankly, my memory holds no life preservers.

As Sheila said, the scallops were plentiful. We filled our washtubs with scallops that Saturday. Wear tennis shoes or go barefoot and find them with your feet. Sometimes you got a toe pinched; or a finger pinched if you were careless. Sometimes you did step on a pincushion, so you learned to move around without lifting your feet. We always had a knife to open a few scallops and eat them raw. Scallops are tasty pan-seared in butter but the taste is so delicate that they want nothing else cooked with them.

This regrettable story has been told here before; but as I said, Sheila Leto stirred it up again. Getting the scallops home, we carried the tubs up to the house and I left for a date with Linda. My father shucked scallops until late night and it was never forgot. I mean, never forgot. Seventeen that Saturday evening and fifty-seven when my father died, the scallop fiasco was still a subject forty years downstream. This morning I'm seventy-seven and the memory is still -- sharp is the right word -- still sharp sixty years on. If memory is correct, Gina and Walt participated in the scallop treachery and they also were never allowed to forget our scalloping adventure that ended all scalloping in our family. It never disappeared in the mists of time, nor did it ever become a laughing matter in my father's memory.

This was the greatest place in the world to grow up. The Venerable Mr. Hideous Grotesque, beloved ancient cedar that shades MLP is almost a laughing stock after Sunday's trimming of the large fallen limb. It would be a shame, humiliation to photograph it. Like my picture at seventeen beside my picture at seventy-seven. Or at seven with my second grade class at Cove School. Who is that? Who was that. Which one was you, Papa?

It's the greatest place in the world to grow old too. One of these days +Time will be called on me, but it's good while it lasts. And it's best right here in this beloved spot.

TomW