With sixty pounds of scuba gear strapped to my body, I groaned as I pulled myself up a slimy wooden ladder to the dock. I murmured, “I must be getting old. Twenty years ago I could do this with ease.” As my head popped above the dock, I saw a blonde-headed boy sitting directly in front of me on a tall wooden storage chest, leaning against a shed. He sat with his hands tucked under his legs as he kicked them back and forth. He watched me intently. “Are you a deep-sea diver, mister?”
“That I am.” I climbed up to the dock and removed my gear.
Without another word, the boy wiggled to the edge of the chest, jumped down, and ran off. The next day he was there again. His look told me he wanted to ask something.
“Got something on your mind, kid?”
“Can you tell me a sea story, mister?”
In my decades of diving, that boy was the first to appear genuinely interested in my adventures. Up to this point, when I responded to questions about my diving, most people nodded and said, “Oh, that’s interesting,” as their minds wandered off.
“Tell me a sea story” goes beyond passive interest. I sighed, scratched my chin, and selected one that, to the boy, would scare the hebeejeezees out of him. I leaned toward him and said in a low, gravelly voice, “Come here, kid.” He drew near. I put my nose close to his. “Want to hear about the giant green moray eel I came across in the deep?” The boy sat up alertly and rapidly nodded his head. “It found me as I swam through a dark cargo hold on a freighter resting on its side, 110 feet below in the eerie black and grey of late afternoon.” I pointed my eyes to my wiggling thumb. The boy looked down at it. “That beast had already taken the thumb of an unsuspecting diver,” I said in a low voice to bring the boy closer. I then thundered, “And it suddenly lunged from the darkness to take a bite of mine.” The boy jolted back, pulled his legs up to his chest, and flattened himself against the shed. I raised an eyebrow and looked at his thumbs. He quickly hid them behind his back. There, that oughta do it, I thought as I began to go about by business.
“Tell me another, mister. Tell me another sea story. Please.”
The boy became a weekend regular, perched on the wooden chest waiting for another sea story. He was what I saw first when returning from the Planet Ocean. As I climbed the ladder, my thoughts turned to crafting a new tale. My exaggerated stories blended a little truth with a lot of made-up reality. His enthusiasm tested my memory of times long gone. I needed to dig into my old dive logs for new material.
That boy’s inquiries made me feel less like a day-to-day person with just another humdrum life. Without uttering a word, he unsuspectingly convinced me that I had a story to tell.
I had long planned to take my journals and dive logs to the attic of my old age to spend my immobile future reliving and reveling in stories of my deep-sea diving days. That way, I reasoned, I would be less burdensome to others. After I was gone, someone would find them and discover that the old man in the attic wasn’t the Clark Kent side of Superman. Until that boy came into my life, the stories embedded in my logs remained dormant, unknown to the world, forgotten by me.
“Tell me another, mister” echoed in the empty chambers of my mind as even my children lost track of where I had gone or understood how my adventures forged the father I eventually became. That boy’s innocence and authenticity awakened my spirit to write Long Time No Sea.
One foggy Saturday morning I climbed the ladder poised with another breath-taking, spine-tingling sea story. But Kevin wasn’t there. I never saw him again. He’d be a fully grown man now. I wonder if he ever muses about that crusty old diver on the dock. He was an angel in my life… you know, someone who suddenly pops in and changes your life forever with a well-placed look or a smile. Since then, I have amassed another thousand dives – enough for a second book, and it will be titled, Tell Me a Sea Story, Mister.