like a sailor

It’s two o’clock in the morning: do you know where your feet are?

At the end of my legs, stretched out under a light blanket, so yes. Usually I don’t know, am not keenly mindful of, because they’re ensocked even at this hour. Bare tonight, though, I’m minding carefully against stubs. They’re at ease on the porch hassock as I witness two shrimp boats motor back and forth in front of me, under the moon.

Witness, and sip. Community, not Kona, breaking the silence at this hour with its grinding and crunching, the machine would wake Linda; so Community. And that growl: what was that this high, this late, this dark? An angry cat has climbed the building seven stories to snarl at me. Or is it that thrice a decade phenomenon, supper from Captain D’s, now being wrung through furosemide forty — like the shrimp in the nets off my port bow just now.

They race back and forth in the hairpin channel. Close green buzzing, circle, close red buzzing, rounding at the hairpin swinging stern on, far green silent, circle, far red silent, at the hairpin swing round bow on, close green buzzing, … Tonight my Bay is flat calm, but to say “what a quiet, peaceful life the fisherman’s work” would be to lie: I’ve been there when exhausted fisherman tied up at the dock and began unloading their catch. Exhausted, stinking, and so elegantly and grotesquely profane as to befoul and darken the dawn. Comes to me now: that’s where I learned it, not as I had thought all those years, as an officer and gentleman going down to the sea in ships, but right here in St. Andrews as a small boy on the dock seventy years ago.

Spring, summer 1945, I was nine years old.

Close now, green, so near the hum is a grind. And not two, I count three. One far and red, one in the near channel and green, but still too far to hear. And this near one. Port and starboard, starboard and port.

Family Special at Captain D’s, ten pieces for twenty less a penny, or for a coupon and fourteen less a penny, plus tax. Twenty-five and thirty years ago I used to stop there on the way home to Apalachicola from clergy conference at Beckwith, buy supper to munch in the car on the final leg of my trip. Those years, the whitefish was superb, large hot moist pieces of delicious flaky fish, hot, crunchy crust. The Chinese must have bought them out, now it's needle thin strips of fish encased in thick batter. But in another three years I will have forgotten that and go again.

Red now, buzzing west, making for the hairpin turn in the channel. If shrimp had sense enough to get out of the channel, they would be safe.