I am a boat owner. Ten years ago I decided to buy a 19-foot Grady White Tournament for cruising and playing in the intracoastal waterway, sound, and ocean. I envisioned day trips to coastal towns, kids skiing and being pulled on floats, and (though I do not fish) maybe even a little fishing. Indeed there were such times, just not enough of them. There is the old adage that the two best days in a boat owner's life are the day he buys the boat and the day he sells it. I'm selling.
But this is not a thinly-veiled advertisement for my boat but a study of loss. While both my wife and I agree that parting with this boat is a good, economically-wise move, we both had a sense of loss. Dwelling on that emotion, I realize that the loss we sense is not so much that of the boat itself but the memories it carries. The boat, in the end, became more obligation than joy, as in "I guess we need to run the boat a little," uttered with a dutiful sigh, one more possession to steward. The boat is a cultural artifact; the culture, our family. Borrowing from Andy Crouch's book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, we say that these artifacts have, over time, "become part of the framework of the world. . . .," my world, my family's world. That money pit of a boat made possible shared experiences that were unique to it. We ran aground together, puttered around the channel, and, on the best days, lit our for the ocean, a lake of dreams.
While it is certainly prudent to live life holding lightly to our possessions, pruning away the excess by selling or giving away that which threatens to weigh us down, it's also true that not all "things" need finally, in the end, be disposed of. Some have iconic status --- not to be worshipped but to be seen through, as it were, to the memories that form part of who we are.
I can't keep the boat for that reason alone. There are other compelling considerations. A picture will have to do. But seeing through it, I'm warmed by a vision of a family together, at play, leaving memories in our wake, wave upon wave of which will ripple through the years ahead and even, as far as I know, reach a new heaven and earth. Nothing good is ever really lost but, rather, stored up in eternity.
I can't make my children young again, recreate those times when our lives focused almost entirely around each other. They grow up. We do too. A family's culture, after all, matures, pulls up anchor and moves on. Boats find new owners.
But I could buy another boat someday, make new memories.
Oh no, here we go again. . .
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