Do you have a personal flag? I need some suggestions for my crimson canoe, the SS Carousel, because I have decided to become a pirate. Canoeing past egrets at sunset I spied a white feather like a Pharaoh’s barge, so delicately afloat that I plucked it up and pinned it to the bow, like running colors up the mast of a worthy vessel; but I need something more permanent. Come to think of it, I need a mast.
It’s been a month of nautical stuff -- memories, current adventures, and future plans. One of the memories was believing as a child that I had missed a birthday aboard some kind of merchant marine vessel sailing from the US to Argentina. I cannot recall the exact nature of the ship, or whether it had been pressed into service due to hostilities, but my father was charting sea lanes to avoid enemy submarines, and this particular vessel had gun tubs on it and a “motley crew” (the memory of which explains my fondness for pirates). There was one sailor aboard named Big Moose who used to carry me (Little Moose) around on his shoulders, and he solemnly assured me that birthdays didn’t count at sea. We crossed the equator -- where there was a big initiation ceremony into the court of King Neptune or somesuch -- and that supposedly supplanted all birthdays.
Had enough birthdays since then, but not enough adventures. Why do we lose that sense of newness and magic as we grow up? Why do we fall out of sync with the rhythms and poetry of life? Otters don't. Six of them played hide’n’seek around my canoe the other evening. Like synchro swimmers, they surfaced in unison, craned their necks in my direction, then rolled under simultaneously. Their sense of adventure is stronger than their insecurities. People should be like that.
And the future? Ah, that has an exquisite new twist. Inspirational speaker/author Grant Soosalu called from Australia to interview me, and the 2 1/2 hours went by like five minutes. The upshot of this rapport is that he and his soulmate Fiona invited me on a 12-day ocean kayak adventure, camping from atoll to atoll, in exotic Tonga about 12-13 months from now. Very early planning, but you know I can’t resist that, and the Tonga kayaking may segue into a stop to see another friend, world famous artist Peter Adams, who lives on a beach in Tasmania. Pete is currently visiting me, and tomorrow we are bound for the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota.
I could leave for the South Pacific right now, though I can’t pretend that athletic injuries aren’t a factor in planning. At the moment, a torn quad (kickball with the five kids in my adopted family a.k.a. Norby Nation) is slowing me down a little, but it’s fashionable for pirates to only have one leg.
Lots of interesting mail last month, for which I’m most grateful. An answer and a question: MB, the cell phone ringtones for “Words” (mentioned in July’s column) are neither Boyzone nor Bee Gees but some kind of cool zither. And hey, Hal, I’m still trying to figure out what, “…everyone knows Sully -- when he puts on his yellow shorts, you watch out for flying stones...” means.
This month’s column on StorytellersUnplugged.com is about not waiting for the perfect circumstances before you chase perfection. Here’s the link: http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/thomas-sullivan-the-perfect-setup-writing-with-lizards-and-other-keys-to-inspiration#respond . And the photos below include the canoe launch point behind my house on Rice Lake and a shot of kayaking on Lake Minnetonka. Somewhere behind the kayak is a $38 million dollar house on an island, unfinished because of a divorce (guess they couldn’t decide on a welcome mat). Shortly after the kayak pix was taken, a fugitive from the DNR, who shall remain nameless, put a contraband water lily in my hat with the result that a thriving population of tiny bugs homesteaded in the hatband; so now I shave my head twice a day. Not the same hat as the Panama Jack on my foot in the next photo. That one was taken at a frequent working location, a gazebo overlooking Lake Minnetonka in Noerenberg Gardens. And Doc Foto (folksinger Mark Manrique) caps it off with a pirate touch in his latest creative effort.
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click http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
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anonymous and you don’t have to do anything after that. Even if you join in order
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just an informal ear to the wall to overhear things on almost any subject,
sometimes in sustained exchanges between parties. Example of recent Tweets: “To my heirs: there’s a fortune in carwash coupons lost around the
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taking the car with me.” And at the end of a Tweet conversation with a friend:
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Sully
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