Page Two of Sailing, Part One
He once told me a revealing story about his own mother, my Grandmother Malone. She was an Irish immigrant, having come to America when she was fourteen from a tiny village in County Tyrone called Seskinore, reputedly the only village in Ireland with a post office, three churches and no pub! Her family were dour, no-nonsense Ulster Protestants, members of the Church of Ireland and the Grand Orange Lodge. Grandmother Malone did not waste a lot of time smiling, as I recall. Anyway, Papa’s story went something like this:
One day, when Papa was fresh out of Yale (Class of ’26), he and some business colleagues were walking back to the office after having lunch at the Duquesne Club in downtown Pittsburgh. Papa saw Grandmother and a lady friend of hers coming toward him on the sidewalk outside Kaufmann’s Department Store. He greeted her and tried to kiss her on the cheek, but she became flustered and shoved him away roughly, hissing “Ach, Jack, not here in the street, fer pity’s sake!”
I don’t know why he kept telling us children that story, whether it was to explain something about him or something about Grandmother. Perhaps both. It must have hurt him a lot. At any rate, later in life Papa was never comfortable with physical contact with anyone, not even with his own wife and children, while Mama was the exact opposite. I grew up somewhere in the middle of all this, confused by the mixed messages I was receiving from my parents and having to guess at what normal behavior was in any situation where intimacy was involved.
I suppose all the above is really just a long, roundabout way of preparing the stage for the family dramas that later took to the “high seas” when we began to sail our Thistle together on summer weekends up at Pymatuning Reservoir.
Clancy taught me to sail a boat during World War II, when I was about nine or ten. Granddaddy Gardner owned half of Ballast Island up in Lake Erie near Put-In-Bay, and we all used to go there for vacations in the summer. Clancy had another home-made sailboat then, and I got to sail it under his expert tutelage. I learned to love sailing during those vacations, a love which has lasted all my life, and I apparently had a feel for it, because it quickly became almost second nature to me.
Papa would come with us in the boat and take his turn at the helm too, but he could never learn to keep the sails full, and he steered a zigzag course through the water trying. By the time we had the two Thistles finished and trailered them up to Pymatuning, he had more or less resigned himself to being jib-tender and second in command, leaving the tiller and the main sheet to me. I say more or less, because the fact that he put me in charge of steering the boat and controlling the mainsail in no way prevented him from telling me how he thought I should be handling things and then becoming agitated when I didn’t follow his suggestions.
It wasn’t until we began sailing in weekend races at the Pymatuning Yacht Club and actually won the handicap trophy one year that Papa finally stopped trying to be in control and let me handle the boat my way. Before that summer we were notorious for having loud arguments out on the lake, so loud and prolonged that other boat owners used to joke, “Here come the Malone’s, sailing on hot air again!”
It must have been hard for Papa to control his anxiety while I sailed the boat. He would fidget with the jib sheet, letting it out and pulling it in, trying to keep the jib full but not hard, just on the verge of shaking. One day he had a brilliant idea. He taught Mama to tend the jib. She was reluctant at first, but she agreed to try it. Then he was happy again. He was back in control, not of me but of Mama. “Isabel, tighten up that jib-sheet. The sail is shaking!” They kept it up for a few weekends, but finally the jib-tender mutinied. “Jack, I’m not going to do this anymore. You’re making me too nervous!” She became more and more reluctant to accompany Papa and me, even when we were just going out for a “pleasure” sail, rather than racing with the other boats on the lake.
Papa simply couldn’t relax on the boat. He would wrinkle up his brow, purse his lips and say, “Johnny, what are we doing wrong? That other boat is gaining on us!” “Don’t worry, Papa. He’s just got a puff of wind. We’ll be getting it too in just a minute.” I had learned from Clancy to read the ripples on the surface of the lake, watch the leaves on the trees along the shore and see the little puffs of wind coming minutes before we could feel them. Winds on Lake Pymatuning were extremely variable, and we were constantly changing course or tacking to take advantage of the wind changes before our competitors did. Reading the winds made the difference between winning the race and losing.
Another trick for winning races was to sit absolutely still when the winds were light. Any movement by the crew would stop the boat cold, and Papa could simply not sit still. He would continually get up and down, moving around, and adjusting things anxiously. The final rule for winning races was to move the tiller very slowly and gently when changing course, rather than jerking it back and forth, overcorrecting. Each sudden movement of the tiller was like putting on the brakes. Papa desperately wanted to steer the boat, and insisted on taking turns, even though I remained nominally in charge during actual races. But when he did, we left a crooked wake behind us.
I think being his teenage son’s crew was very hard on Papa. His self-image suffered. Other members his age teased him about it at club parties. And when we won the club trophy that time, he could not really rejoice with me.
Editor's Note, Next time, Part Two of Sailing
©2009 John Malone for SeniorWomen.com
