The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water Part 7

After a very quick tour of the small boat, we headed for the neighborhood restaurant that had become his haunt over the summer.

Sunset Beach is a little piece of St. Barth's transported to the Northeast. A groovy ground-floor bar s.p.a.ce faces out at the beach. Above that are several levels of open patio areas, strung with festive paper lanterns and open to a great view of the sound. The staff is young and French. The music is always in a style I think of as international hip-very atmospheric but you'd be hard-pressed to hum a few bars. Heat lamps stand like vigilant sentinels, ready to turn away the chilly night breeze. Sunset Beach is always packed and the prices are obscene. But it is like a trip to the French Caribbean-dollar for dollar, if you don't order dessert-and worth every penny on a moonlit summer night when you want to have fun.

Oh, the fun we had. We had to wait at the bar until our table was ready, but it didn't feel like waiting. We picked up our conversation where we'd left off before, and by the time the host came for us, we'd forgotten all about eating. When I turned to pick my jacket off the stool I'd been sitting on, I found myself planting a light kiss on Lars. I didn't know where that urge had come from, but it just felt right.

"h.e.l.lo," he said with a grin. "I guess this is going pretty well so far."

It was, I realized suddenly, not only a date but my first real date with a man. I couldn't count that guy in high school who came to our door in a c.o.o.nskin cap with a shotgun. I know, you think I'm joking, but unfortunately I'm not. This was upstate New York, and he had been out "checking his traps." No wonder I was gay.

So how did I feel about sitting across the table from a funny, good-looking guy on my second date, a mere twenty-five years later? Absolutely normal. No different than if I had been sitting across from a funny, good-looking girl. And that was the only surprising thing about it: it just wasn't surprising at all. What if what I had said all those years ago really was true? What if I had always just happened to be attracted to women, and now I had finally met a man who fit my unique idea of lovable?

It was quizzical but I wasn't worried. What I was a little concerned about was his girlfriend situation. I know this may be hard to believe, coming as it does from a lesbian on a date with a man, but I'm fairly square. I don't like messiness, I don't like overlap. Love is complicated enough without deception. I had never cheated on anyone, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be a party to someone else's cheating either. But as I was soon to learn personally, love makes its compromises.

And so our surprising and aimless affair began. In the weeks that followed, I found some way to excuse myself from worrying about Adele, Lars's girlfriend who lived in Florida. At first I felt a guilty sense of sisterhood betrayed. But I rationalized that whatever deception was going on was between the two of them, and had nothing to do with me.

At the same time, I was no fool-I never fully let my guard down and forgot about Adele's existence. Lars and I were having more fun than seemed legal, but spoken romance was off-limits. It was as though we had agreed that that belonged, rightfully to Adele. Still, it's hard to keep a lid on love. Every now and then, one or the other of us would slip up and let some deeper feeling spill over the edge of our self-containment.

The magic place that Lars and I seemed to inhabit together slowly worked its spell. It was a big world: we talked about books, music, our childhoods, places we'd been, places we wanted to go and, most of all, politics. We were kindred spirits in our liberalism, in our despair about American culture, in our outrage about Bush and the erosion of civil liberties. When we weren't working ourselves into a lather about the state of the world, we were laughing, drinking more than we should have and fooling around. Within a month, we figured we had almost made up for the previous four decades I had spent estranged from male anatomy.

A couple of weeks into all of this, we were at Sunset Beach on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon drinking rose (again) and soaking in the suns.h.i.+ne.

"I do love you, you know." Lars said suddenly.

"I know you do. And I love you."

He looked me in the eyes and smiled, nodded his head and raised his eyebrows.

It was a sweet moment, as natural, relaxed and easy as the warm sun on our faces.

Hey, maybe I'd been gay my whole life but even I knew that guys don't generally like to admit this kind of thing.

Then again, Lars was not your typical guy. He was a real man's man-there was nothing metros.e.xual about him. But he also genuinely loved strong, independent, interesting women. He loved s.e.x but had not even a tiny, venal interest in the Paris Hiltons or Pamela Andersons of the world. He hated professional sports, with the exception of cycling (his pa.s.sion in life) and occasional tennis. Boats had long ago become more of a livelihood than a love, though he was very accomplished and took pride in what he did. Lars liked p.o.r.nography, but he also liked going to the opera. He loved both the Grateful Dead and waltz music. He liked five-star hotels and camping. He would push the limits of his body with triathlons and long road races, but he also liked, occasionally, to sit by the pool and drink all day. Lars was truly a free spirit, but I also sensed that his lifestyle sometimes made him feel lonely, that he needed connection to someone to give him a sense of place.

We had these (and many other) qualities in common, though probably in reverse proportions. I suspected that Lars believed that adventure was what happened to you alone, and that love, though he believed in it and needed it, was the natural enemy of adventure. I loved a life of adventure, but deep down, I still believed that life with the right person could be twice the thrill, the greatest adventure of all.

I had held to this stubborn belief like a cactus in the desert, despite my bad luck in love. It wasn't that I wasn't capable of happiness alone, because I'd certainly been alone, often and happily. But my parents' marriage had poisoned me with the belief that true love was what it was really all about.

After more than forty years, my parents still left little notes for each other around the house. One year my mother gathered some up and laminated them, then cut them into shapes that fit into the soles of my father's fis.h.i.+ng boots, so he could take the notes with him without getting them wet. Another time, my mother was regaling us (as she is wont to do in excruciating detail-I once teased her that she was the reason I became an editor) about a dream she'd had. In the dream, she was wearing her grandmother's pearls when the string broke and they spilled all across the floor. My very down-to-earth father noticeably blanched. "What?" my mother asked him. "I dreamed I was on my hands and knees picking up pearls," he said.

I know-it's sickening. What's worse is that they were married while they were still in college. My earliest memories are of my father doing handstands on a skateboard in our Philadelphia apartment.

Of course, their relations.h.i.+p isn't perfect. I know they've had their fair share of ups and downs. The truth is, they're totally codependent, but it works for them, so who cares? For years, I wished for a relations.h.i.+p that was half as happily dysfunctional as theirs.

It took me a long time to see an accidental downside to my parents' lifelong love affair. It had created a small but intense emotional vacuum in the rest of the household. As much as they loved us kids and put a lot of thought and energy into educating us, there was a way in which my parents' love for each other felt unintentionally exclusionary. We were always on the outside, watching through the window as they danced to music we couldn't hear. Home was a great place, but we were subjects of that kingdom, not citizens. We moved so often-every two years, at least, throughout my entire childhood-that home for me was less about a place than about these loving and slightly eccentric people with whom I lived.

As a result, when I first left my family to go to Brazil (and for many years after), I felt lonely and deeply compelled to create my own family in some form.

Consequently, I've led a life of serial monogamy, otherwise known as one failed relations.h.i.+p after another, though-you know me by now! I prefer to think of it as a series of short successes. I wish the love of my life and I had met at 20 and stayed together. But it's not what fate had in store for me. I've looked long and hard at myself to discern a pattern, but I can't find one. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy relations.h.i.+ps are all alike: every unhappy relations.h.i.+p is unhappy in its own way.

This thing with Lars puzzled me at times. It was different, no doubt about it. It was comfortable, less intense-as though the innate differences between a man and a woman wedged a firm pillow between us. There was no merging going on, no blurring of ident.i.ties that so often happens between women. I liked it. We were very similar in lots of ways, and we gave each other plenty of s.p.a.ce. Most of all, it was fun.

As summer drew to a close, Lars talked of going to Maine to s.h.i.+ngle his barn. We had already agreed that he would help me with the last, short leg between Sag Harbor and Maine that I needed to make aboard the Bossanova. Now, though, I looked beyond those next few months. I needed a plan. Where should I go next? The Bahamas seemed appealing, but as I already knew, it was a long journey and I would need crew. So I made Lars a proposition: What if I stayed and worked with him for several weeks on his barn in return for his help taking the Bossanova south? It was a deal that was beneficial to us both, and he quickly agreed.

Lars went to Maine a few weeks before me to get started on some projects. One day as we talked on the phone he said, "You know, I don't want you to think this is just a business deal-that it's all about you coming up here to be my barn slave. Yeah, that'll be great, but I've been thinking about how much I want you to meet friends I've had a long time, meet my mother, hang out at my house. You know what I mean?" Of course I did.

WE SAID GOOD - BYE TO Sag Harbor on a Wednesday fternoon and h.e.l.lo to midcoast Maine about thirty-two hours later. The weather was perfect and we timed the trip to have the current with us. We took turns standing watch, pa.s.sed through the Cape Cod Ca.n.a.l and ran all night. At around 1600 hours we arrived and tied the Bossanova up at a local marina that had already emptied for the fall.

The first place we went was Lars's house. The Block Cottage, as it is known, is perched dramatically on a shelf of rocks, with almost 360-degree water views. It's an old-fas.h.i.+oned s.h.i.+ngled summer cottage. One year when he was away at school, Lars's grandmother had misguidedly renovated the downstairs, to his everlasting chagrin. Except for the stunning ocean views from every window, and an old fas.h.i.+oned, homey kitchen that was left untouched, the downstairs had been drywalled and redone in a modestly formal way that would have been at home in any good suburb. On the other hand, that's like saying except for the big nose, Jimmy Durante was handsome. The views were staggering. Upstairs, the house retained its original charm and was wonderfully unpretentious: painted floorboards and bare wood walls, wallpaper with sailboats printed in primary colors and an old claw-foot tub in the dormer-style bathroom. This was the rustic dream of summertime that Ralph Lauren painted with gloss and sold to people who didn't know that imperfections were signs of taste that money can't buy.

Lars's mother rented the house out in the summers and had built a sweet apartment above the barn where she could perch. In the winter, she went to Camden, but for the first few weeks of our stay, she was in the apartment each night. She was a terrific cook and spoiled us rotten. We gathered in the Block Cottage kitchen each evening after a full day of hard work. Lars and I were clearing out his barn, then building a floor and, finally, s.h.i.+ngling; Lars's mother was involved in the painstaking labor of varnis.h.i.+ng a boat. We'd listen to NPR, drink wine, cook, debate and sometimes even dance. In the weeks leading up to the election, we also ganged up on Lars's mother in a relentless effort to convince her to change her vote. She was a good sport about it, but living with Lars, you'd have to have developed excellent sportsmans.h.i.+p skills from way back.

Lars was very funny and he loved to tease. I grew up in a family where teasing was a comfortable way of expressing love, but I noticed that out in the larger world, many people were offended by teasing or sarcasm. Lars and I spoke the same language.

I remember one day when we were s.h.i.+ngling, I was in a rare bad mood, quieter than usual.

"What's the matter with you today?" Lars asked. "You're not your usual fun self." I told him it was nothing, I was just premenstrual.

He dropped his hammer dramatically. "Uh-oh. You know what we have to do, don't you? We're going to have to use the old Indian remedy. They'd send a woman out into the woods alone for a few days and tell her not to come back until it was over. Do I have to do that, too? Because I will. I don't want any mopeyness around me. I'll just send you out into the woods like a squaw."

He wasn't always funny, but he always made me laugh. Freud be d.a.m.ned, one day I realized that Lars reminded me a little of my father. They had the same s.a.d.i.s.tic but hilarious sense of humor-they were both tough but sensitive and intelligent. And all of the physical work we did each day no doubt reminded me of my youth. I loved to help Dad with ch.o.r.es: splitting wood, painting a barn, dragging things to the dump-anything I could do alongside him was fun. Now, being outdoors each day as the Maine fall trotted toward winter, I realized that it had been a long time since I'd enjoyed such hard work. It was exhausting but satisfying, and Lars was always good company.

One evening, he stopped by my boat for a drink before we joined his mother for dinner. We were chatting about nothing, listening to jazz-I think I was cutting limes. Completely out of the blue, he rattled the ice in his gla.s.s and said, "You know, I'm in love with you."

And I realized it was true. I was no dummy. We wouldn't be here in Maine together for any other reason. We'd had a perfect way to say our good-byes in Sag Harbor if things had really run their course.

This would have been a good time to try and get to the bottom of what all this meant regarding Adele. But I didn't know what to say, and I felt, as I always did in our affair, the sensation of going down a steep hill that should have been wildly exhilarating but wasn't because the brakes were on. It was both wonderful and a shame that it was so much less than it could have been. It was baffling, like a connect-the-dots picture before the lines are drawn. I sensed what it might be but wasn't.

Toward the end of our six weeks in Maine, we spent a very decadent Sunday at the Block Cottage. The gorgeous foliage that had waved to us on arrival was now halfway to mulch, and the bare tree limbs grasped for the sky like arthritic fingers. The house was swaddled in a gray woolly fog. It was raining intermittently, and the waves crashed rhythmically on the rocks below the house. We read the New York Times on the livingroom floor before a fire that snapped and hissed. We shot trap off the front porch and drank red wine and cooked a feast of some sort. It was a perfect day. That night, we were still stretched out on the livingroom floor talking as the fire burned itself out. Lars was telling me about how he was a little bit tired of his profession, and I was quizzing him about what else he'd enjoy doing.

"Think about it," I said, in career counselor mode and looking for ideas. "Look back. When was the happiest time of your life, and what were you doing then?"

"This summer, when I met you," he answered without hesitation. If I hadn't been lying down, I would have fallen over.

And obviously, I had no idea what career that suited him for.

There is one thing I learned a long time ago: there is no point trying to see into the inscrutable heart. Once in a while, Lars and I let ourselves talk vaguely about the future, but I knew enough never to imagine it would actually happen. Lars's plans, like my own, were constantly changing. And if he couldn't go to Miami for a weekend without feeling torn about Adele, he wasn't going to make it through a few months.

Every time I went over to the Block Cottage to check my e-mail on Lars's computer, I was vividly reminded of my temporary status. The drop-down menu on his AOL sign-in page had his screen name, Adele's screen name, and a third name that was "Guest." That was me. I was Guest, and I never forgot it. Every time I signed in, I felt a little stab of sorrow for the sight but also grat.i.tude for the reality check.

A few days after our perfect Sunday, we put his Land Cruiser away for the winter and took the sails off his boat. I had reluctantly decided that I was too broke to go to the Bahamas after all. We brought the Bossanova around to a mooring on the other side of the island and left her to be hauled out, the last boat into the yard for the winter. It was gray and bitterly cold as Lars rowed us toward sh.o.r.e. I watched the Bossanova fade out of sight with a lump in my throat. I felt as though I was abandoning my best friend, but it gave Lars another chance to torture me. Stuck mostly indoors for the last few days as late fall dramatically became early winter, Lars took every opportunity to peek out the window at the lowering sky and howling winds. "Aw," he'd say. "Poor Bossanova, out there all alone, in the cold sea, by herself, with no one to take care of her or love her."

The first snowstorm of the season came through within days, and 5 inches of white transformed the world. It was officially winter. And though it didn't feel like we were anywhere near over, it was time for both of us to move on.

CHAPTER TEN.

There exists only the present instant. . .

Now which always and without end is itself new.

There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

-MEISTER ECKHART.

I know, you can hardly stand the suspense. Does the book have a fairy-tale ending? Does true love conquer all? I'm happy to report: yes and yes. But Lars and I did not sail into the sunset together.

For six weeks or so after Lars's return to Miami, we remained pretty attached to each other-frequently e-mailing and calling. Once in December, in the middle of the night, the phone rang, and when I answered, I heard just music, our song. I knew he still loved me then, and the happiness that short message caused made it clear I loved him, too.

But by January, things were changing. We kept in touch, but mostly by e-mail. He was busy with a celestial navigation course. I was engrossed in a writing project. In February, his mother casually mentioned in an e-mail that Adele was going to quit her job to join Lars in his new position as captain of a 97-foot sailboat bound for Europe. Lars called me soon after that, when he had just pa.s.sed a very tough Coast Guard exam for a license he'd inadvertently let lapse that fall. ("It was your fault," he accused me. "You distracted me with your s.h.i.+ngling.") He had been drinking rose and sounded happy but nostalgic.

That's exactly how I feel whenever I think of Lars and our time together. The huge gift of this relations.h.i.+p was its perfect impossibility, its planned obsolescence. My affair with Lars was just me seeing my very last, cherished, concrete notion of self go out the porthole.

However, before my mother gets too excited by heteros.e.xual possibilities, let me be clear that I am still gay. Sorry, Mom. The fairy-tale ending is that I have finally met my match: she is beautiful, sweet, smart, talented and crazy about me. I believe we will grow old together and that I will never shed another tear of loneliness or self-pity when I see a sappy toothpaste ad. Now that I have found her, she seems as inevitable and gorgeous as the sunrise. Everything is as it was meant to be. But it always was.

There were really no missteps on my road to here. I derived something important from all my relations.h.i.+ps, though at the time all I wanted was permanence. Meister Eckhart wrote "When you are thwarted, it is your own att.i.tude that is out of order."

Sure, you're thinking-easy for me to be philosophical about it now that I have found love. But I found love after I realized these things, after I felt a sense of peace and rightness with now.

Example: About a year ago, I was very worried about money. I was parked outside the Seafood Shop in Wainscott, taking a lunch break from some painting I was doing for a friend. I was sitting in the car I couldn't afford anymore with the top down, getting those first wan but delicious rays of spring suns.h.i.+ne on my face and eating a delicious $4 tuna roll.

I had spent the morning obsessing about buying a house and realizing how impossible that was now. Not enough income, not very good credit, and so on. I felt myself becoming anxious and depressed about the future. And then I pulled myself back to my very humble present in the suns.h.i.+ne and felt lucky. Okay, I'm poor. But I won't be forever. It's a beautiful day and I'm not sitting in a conference room in a suit listening to the deluded opine earnestly about things that don't matter. I'm where I want to be, doing something I enjoy. Right this second is wonderful.

A sense of meaningless I have felt at different moments throughout my life, the issues I have always had with loss, were a big, albeit subtle, part of what sent me off to sea. I'm intensely sentimental, insanely loyal. In the past, there has always been something r.e.t.a.r.ded about my grieving process. I can't let go. I don't move on emotionally as easily as other people seem to. It's caused me a ridiculous amount of woe, but I haven't known how to change that about myself. In fact, painful as it was, I wasn't sure I wanted to change it. I've never understood people who move seamlessly from one relations.h.i.+p to the next without ever being alone or hearing themselves think.

Yet I was able to let Lars go much more easily than I have most other relations.h.i.+ps. I don't think that's because he is a man, and I know it's not because I loved him any less. But when our relations.h.i.+p began, I knew it would probably not last forever. And so, when it ended, I was sad and I missed him, but I did not feel the same acute sense of failure that usually haunts me.

This was a revelation. I finally understood that my tendency to engage in lingering grief was much more about mourning the end of a dream than it was the loss of an actual relations.h.i.+p, which hadn't worked out, after all. Why did I freight each romance with the need to be eternal? Why couldn't I just see each of them for what they were-successful within the limits of their potential?

You may have figured this out years ago, but not me. I had no idea. Maybe this perspective was the dark side of my uber optimism. Perhaps I had always expected too much, but let's face it: we are trained to. Our culture inundates us with images of the happily married and reveres the notion of everlasting love, despite the divorce statistics. Maybe we'd all be happier with more realistic expectations.

I recently came across a Bertrand Russell quote that sums up one of my deepest beliefs: "The past is an Awful G.o.d, though he gives life to almost the whole of its haunting beauty."

This past year has changed me, though, and I've been pondering another thought of Andre Gide's: "Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one."

I mention these because separately they are lovely quotes and both quite true. But together, they are the one-two combination to the mystery of my life, the key to an understanding that has brought me a lasting sense of happiness.

An unforgettable moment happened when I was 5 years old; I wish it had been more immediately formative than it was. My grandfather took my younger brother, my cousins and me on a walk to the barnyard. As we gazed in at the sheep milling around the base of the silo, he said "I will give a marshmallow to the first person to grab that hotline." My brother and cousins immediately laughed and said, "No way! We'll get a shock! You can't trick us." But me, I was just old enough and mature enough to overthink it. "Hey, this is my grandfather. He wouldn't tell me to grab an electrified wire if it was really on, would he?" So I did. And it was. Maybe my whole life has been a little like the hotline incident.

Maybe things are as simple as they seem. I just suffer from wanting everything to make more sense than it does. Now I see that my life has plenty of meaning, even though it will probably never make sense.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not claiming to have arrived at some enlightened point where everything is clear to me, where I have it all figured out. Far from it. I am, however, often reminded of a favorite bit of knowledge I gleaned in seamans.h.i.+p school. All my life I'd been walking along beaches, watching the surf wash up on the sand, thinking about the journey that water made to finally lap thirstily against the dry sh.o.r.e. But a wave is not a moving ma.s.s of seawater. It's just still, stationary ocean with energy moving through it. I now see time as that same illusory wavelike movement through the present.

There was an ordinary moment that I often recall, walking down Christopher Street with Leslie. We were both on our way to work, and she reached out and held my hand for an instant. I can't tell you why, but a regular day became sublime that simple touch of love filled me with a sense of contentment, of rightness, that haunted me for years. For years, every walk down every other street became a walk without her hand in mine.

Somewhere that is still alive in my heart, my grandfather and I stand before a sweltering barbecue pulled out onto the gravel in front of the barn. Crickets are singing, dusk is falling, the bats and swallows have left the rafters in search of evening. Ham has on khaki shorts, a broad worn leather belt, a chambray s.h.i.+rt and suede chukka boots. He spits a long stream of clear rum into the kettle that causes a burst of thrilling fire. G.o.d, I love him.

It's another time, and I am 5, tucked in my summer bed, the faded rose wallpaper all golden in the late setting sun. My father has come up to say good night and on his way out, he accidentally walks into the door, trips over the rug, pretends to fall down the stairs, and each time he returns (about half as old as I am now!) to say sternly, "Stop laughing. Get to sleep. I'm serious," before he does it one more time. Almost forty years later, the memory of this little act of love for me still makes me smile.

And the Sunday afternoon that Lars and I spent drinking rose, when his eyes out-blued the cloudless sky and he told me he loved me, that's not gone. It's just not happening now. There's nothing to mourn. There are wonderful things ahead of us as surely as there are sad ones. What's important is to be alive, to feel these things deeply as they happen because they make us-we are just blood, bone, guts and the sum of these moments. They become who we are: individuals who are mysteriously flavored by our past, who live every minute with the consequences of who we have loved and who has loved us.

And the awful pain left by those who didn't love us well enough or long enough? Well, that falls away, doesn't it? It withers like an immaterial husk, and always reveals something else: a necessary lesson, a lifelong friends.h.i.+p, an unforgettable few months.

I owe my peace to the Bossanova a small steel s.h.i.+p, but also a magic carpet. The joy I felt standing on her bow I will always be able to summon at will, as though I am still right there with the breeze in my hair and the sun on my face. I know now that this moment-like every moment-is within me: still real, very alive, the magnificent now that is also the invisible doorway to whatever comes next.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

t's not hard to know where to start, or where to end, but I'm sure that I'll fail to thank someone who should fall squarely in the middle. So, to you (and you know who you are) as well as to everyone I met along the way that shared I n my adventure, thank you.

John McIninery, first mate extraordinaire and a heck of a human being, words (which I think very highly of ) just won't suffice. I couldn't have done it without you. Call me, you knucklehead!

To Collin Janse van Rensburg for his generous tutoring and crewing, Carol Gordon for her expert insurance help and infectious joie de vivre and all my Chapman cla.s.smates for their camaraderie, thank you so much! Susan Scheer provided friends.h.i.+p and support above and beyond the call of duty, and I can never thank her enough. Captain Bob Swindell, thank you for giving me the confidence to leave the dock and the competence to return. Thanks also to everyone at Hinckley in Stuart for being such friendly hosts, and to everyone at s.h.i.+p Ash.o.r.e in Sag Harbor. Very special thanks to Jeff Poole for his generous spirit and a chivalry that not even lousy weather could dampen. Melville Traber built a magnificent boat that I worked hard to be worthy of, and I'm grateful for his trust. Henry Alford, Terri Costello, Holley Bishop, Leslie Lubchansky, Erika Mansourian, Laurie Mezzalingua, Pat Bates, Isabel Botelho Leal, Vicky Homan, and Frank and Barbara Sain have each provided great friends.h.i.+p and encouragement. Thanks to Eric Lemonides for pilot services and for making me feel completely at home when I came for a week and stayed for six.

Special thanks to Leslie Klotz and the guys for their absurd, yet deeply touching, belief in my abilities. It has meant the world to me. Chris Peterson, thanks for being there, day in and day out. You've been a lifeline. To my beloved Famiglia Grau-Stern, wooooooo-hooooooo! And to Jay "Jay-Lo" Lohmann, thanks for being the sweetest and making even the most ordinary days fun.

Michele Christensen deserves multiple medals-for her delicious cooking, her warm hospitality, her overall generosity and for being the kind of friend that becomes family. In other words, you're stuck with me. I hope. Thanks to David Hirshey for believing in the book and to Nick Trautwein and Kate Hamill for their hard work and helpful insights. Thanks to Gail Ross for having my back and to Kara Baskin for her enthusiasm and perspective.

Heck and Samba can't read (yet), but I still feel the need to publicly thank them for joining me on my adventures. They are the world's most adorable deckhands in every kind of weather. Ma.s.sive love and grat.i.tude, also, to the mighty Bossanova, for safely taking me on the greatest adventure of my life. To Mom, Dad, Paddy and Tom, thank you for everything.

Hosannas to the amazingly lovely and talented Karyn Olivier for being my home. And most of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to Hamilton South whose astounding generosity and love have enriched my life in a million ways.

About the Author.

MARY SOUTH was a founding editor of Riverhead Books and also worked at Houghton Mifflin; Ballantine; Little, Brown & Company; and Rodale. In the course of her career, she edited an eclectic list of award-winning and bestselling books, including The South Beach Diet. When South is not aboard the Bossanova, she lives in New York City.