[Rhodes22-list] It's national rum month.

[Lynn Hoffman]

Major Jones is Satisfied


In case you missed the 70‘s, a Jones is a yearning. So let’s talk
yearnings. I’m not going to ask you yours and I’m not telling you most of
mine, because then we’d have to lie. You’d have to say something about
Mahler and I’d have to respond with Adriâ. Pish and Tosh. What I want to do
is take a risk and tell you about my major jones, no make that Major Jones.


My Major Jones goes back to 1983. I crossed the Atlantic Ocean as crew in a
92 foot, steel-hulled wishbone ketch named Sintra. Life-altering blah blah
blah, but there were two effects of that trade-winds cause. One was that I
will forever be in love with everybody who made that crossing with me. The
other is that I have wanted sailing ever since. Yes, wanted to move across
water powered by wind. Waves, breeze, smell, difficulty, craft, strategy.
Elementary.


I’ve owned a couple of sailboats since then, one of them so beautiful that
I could cry about it, but neither of them addressed, much less satisfied
Major Jones. What the Major wants is a boat on which a man could sail out
on big water, go to sleep and then wake up and sail some more. The Major
wants a boat that feels just a little bit like home, that smells a little
bit like adventure, that shrinks the world and blows it wide open at the
same time.  A boat where you plot your course, cook your dinner, drop your
anchor and pick it up again. The Major wants to be able to go to the boat
any time, to sail in the rain or eat a cheese sandwich in the cockpit and
not leave the dock on the prettiest day of the year.


Now, like every other unresolved human being, I’ve got a Jones family.
Fortunately, it’s a family that shrinks every year. Most of my Joneses now
are about accomplishments or wishes for some certain younger souls who-i
assume- have Joneses of their own. I don’t care much where I live, hardly
want any thing or accolade. But the one persistent, monster, Kick-ass,
Grandfather Jones is the one about the sailboat.

••


So here she is. A Rhodes22, red-hulled, white-sailed, carefully designed
and reworked by a genius named Stan Spitzer to be sailed single-handed by
an jonesing old man on medium-sized water in light to semi heavy air.


I met her last weekend in North Carolina and we had a couple of sails on
the Albemarle Sound behind Cape Hatteras. She’ll be delivered by trailer up
to the Jersey Shore next week. What’s it like to have Major Jones
satisfied? It doesn’t look like any of those Olympic gold-medal winner
ecstasy fests. In fact, it’s not ecstatic at all.


The feeling is more like coming home after a long trip. It doesn’t make you
want a new Jones to pursue, it doesn’t make you want to promote Major Jones
to Colonel and go for a bigger and faster boat. It makes you feel that
rarest of modern feelings: satisfied.

Oh yum, savor it-satisfaction-not ‘closure’ or any feeling that diminishes
someone else, feel free to smack your lips and throw a twenty in the
collection plate the next time it comes your way.


The best thing is that having one Major Jones satisfied, makes you inclined
to see the rest of your personal Jones family in a different light: a
slanted, low-angled, orangey light reflected off brackish water filled with
life. Sometimes, the Major says, enough is enough and if the Major is
satisfied, maybe you should be too.





On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 7:55 AM, <R22RumRunner at aol.com> wrote:

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