Living My Father’s Regret, Part 1

The nurse asked me to step out of the thirteenth floor hospital room so my mother could get some intimate care which family was not suppose to see.   I complied locating a lounge on the same floor in the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Hospital.  Directly across from the lounge door was a wall full of wide windows opening onto the expanse of Gravesend Bay, New York Harbor channel and New Jersey.  I saw a tanker ship in the Bay at anchor near the channel, another tanker steaming in the channel outbound and a smaller cargo freighter coming in.  As I followed the moving ships feelings of regret for many water borne paths not taken rose with as much awe as the vista itself. 

Over many of my older adult years I’ve wondered what it was that prevented me as a young man from following the strong urge to go to sea.  There were opportunities, or at least the prospect of possibilities, but they were never realized.  Certainly my father, a New York City high school English teacher, had a lot to do with it.  But, still I was an individual, not an appendage to the man’s body, although there were times I felt more that way then being my own person.  So, what was it that prevented me from going down to the sea?

Certainly, I was born to the water.  My earliest memories are ones where I am in the bath tub staying underwater so long that my mother would have to be sure I was alright, which at the tender age I was then was not an embarrassment to me.  I had a fleet of boats I would sail all about the bath water surface until my skin wrinkled.   In the nursery school’s kiddy pool my best friend and I would play tug boat and ship where we would take turns being the tug and being the ship and where one being the tug would guide with his head the other being the ship to his proper docking space.  We played tug and ship for as long as we were allowed in the pool for as many times as we were in the pool.  Where we lived during this time my father and I were able to frequently go bike riding along a wide promenade curving the ark of Gravesend Bay seeing tugs, barges, boats and ships of all sizes and types as we road and stopped to rest. 

Even when we moved to a different part of Brooklyn, we were not far from the water.  We lived in comfortable walking distance to

Shore Road

, the stretch of street, parks and ball fields along and below a ridge of the Brooklyn side of the Narrows, the Narrows being the New York Harbor passage between Brooklyn and Staten Island.  When my friends and I went to

Shore Road

to play ball with our little league or amongst ourselves or against friends from other blocks we were playing just feet from the water.   I must admit, I was far more interested in what was going on in the water, with all the ship traffic, than I was in anticipating my turn at bat or the play in the field.

At age thirteen at summer camp I discovered scuba diving!  And that was duck to water!  Indeed, it was the fulfillment of the play in the bath tub; this time I could stay underwater breathing for as long as the scuba tank allowed and not have to worry that my mother would stop me from this pleasure.  And since we didn’t go any deeper than about twenty feet, we could stay down a long, long time which we did.  I knew then what I wanted to do for all my life:  to work underwater either as a U.S. Navy diver or as a commercial diver.  But, my father having other ideas while allowing me to take scuba training, slammed the door on either career saying that scuba was only something for recreation and working underwater was not a suitable career for me, period.  I was a dutiful son and complied.  In fact once I finished being a camper at age sixteen, I gave up scuba until my own son became interested in it when he was a teen-ager and then I went on to become an instructor.

Actually, my father wanted me to be a scholar-officer in the U.S. military, something which he regretted not being himself although he had the opportunity.  He was in the Army during W.W. II, had taken and passed an entrance test to the U.S. Military Academy but ultimately rejected the opportunity.  Now, he wanted me to do what he forswore.  Which branch of the Armed Forces didn’t matter, so, being that I was water-borne I thought to go Navy, which, if all worked out the way I wanted it to, I could be a Navy diver after all.  But, his insistence on my going in as an officer required me to go directly to college, especially one of the fedeal service academies, from high school, which I really didn’t want to do.  I definitely had the brains for college work, even the tough service schools, but the interest for things academic just wasn’t there having spent four years being academic and being frustrated in being unable to stretch my mind-there is a big difference between being intellectual exercising one’s cognitive abilities pondering the questions aroused by ones reading and by one’s teachers and being academic having to memorize for ready recall in those specific ways schooling imposes the factoids of subject content.  I loved the learned conversation and hated the memorization. But I acquiesced and translated all this angst into an application to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which would have definitely put me on the water, if not under it.  I received the Congressional nomination, but not the appointment.  I had alternately applied to the State University of New York Maritime College where I was accepted and started with a program for incoming freshmen-fourth classman as the military school called them-in July, 1966.

Well, when one is uninterested enough in a thing, one should not have to wonder too long or too deeply about the reasons for a rebellion against what one is feeling forced to do.  While I decidedly enjoyed, and was successful in, the military aspects of the Maritime College experience and even more the seamanship I was learning, the academic nature of the exercise was just way too much at the time.  I rebelled by doing so little academic work that I had to leave by the end of the first year.  And here I begin to understand a part of the answer to my question:  I was living my father’s life, not my own.  I was putting my love of the sea into a framework constructed by my father’s regrets.  Being a dutiful and loving son I could do no less than to do as requested by him, but in the end it built a barrier too high for me to scale on the way down to the sea.