Last day of winter. As winters go this one was pretty mild. I’m okay with that. I haven’t embraced winter this season like I have in some other seasons. No skiing, no sledding, no ice skating, no winter hiking…. and no complaints. I like all those things and hope to do them all next winter. But this winter, or at least the last 24 hours of it, is just about over.
I hope spring is kind to us.
Tonight I found myself at an industry event networking with a mix of people I’ve never met before and others I’ve known for years. Normally I hold my own in events like this, but tonight I didn’t want to play the game. But I try to be a professional, and professionalism dictated that I needed to participate in the event.
“If you want to do anything in this world, it’s all about creating a vision for others to join.”
Sell the vision. Gain some measure of traction and engagement. Repeat. It’s the life in sales. They say you can tell when a sales person’s heart isn’t into it. Tomorrow is another day, and I plan on being dynamic and compelling in making my case for that vision. But tonight I rest.
March 17th is of course St. Patrick’s Day, and Boston celebrates this day as well as anyone with the parade in South Boston and taverns overflowing with Irish and Irish-for-the-day revelers. But Boston has another reason to celebrate the day that is unique to the city. On March 17, 1776 Boston’s long siege ended as the British evacuated the city and sailed to Halifax. Boston has marked this date forever since as Evacuation Day, and it remains a city holiday to this day.
The siege may have continued on indefinitely had Colonel Henry Knox not pulled off the Herculean task of hauling cannon from Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point to Dorchester Heights. The British had the naval strength to continue controlling the harbor, meaning the siege was an inconvenience but the loyalists and British in Boston wouldn’t starve. It was only when they saw the cannon on Dorchester Heights that they realized the dangerous position that put them in and chose to pull out.
There are many people who roll their eyes at Evacuation Day as a city holiday. They surmise, perhaps correctly, that it’s an excuse to have a day off for the drinking, parade and extracurricular activity of St. Patrick’s Day. But if you’re a history buff it’s a great day to celebrate.
Today is Evacuation Day at home as well, as both kids head back to college. This is bittersweet of course, but ultimately a necessary rite of passage as they both move deeper into adulthood. My hope is that they get safely back to school before the drunks hit the road after a long day of celebratory drinking.
Cheers. Or to your good health. Whatever. “Sláinte” is your typical Gaelic toast when you clink glasses and have a drink with your best friends or your best friends for the moment. So on this St. Patrick’s Day, let me take this moment to say sláinte to you!
Long Island Sound is an estuary between Connecticut and mainland New York on one side and Long Island on the other. This body of water is renowned for its fast currents and shoals, which earned it the nickname The Devil’s Belt. The most famously difficult portion to navigate was the narrow inlet between the East River and Long Island Sound, known appropriately as Hell Gate.
Three early explorers mapped out this region between 1527 and the early 1600’s. Giovanni da Verrazzano was searching for the Northwest Passage after Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe a few years before. He made one of the earliest maps of the North American coast from Florida to Newfoundland. Verrazzano noted the mouth of the Hudson River and the coast of Long Island. He may have sailed into Long Island Sound. More than 80 years later in 1609 Henry Hudson famously sailed up the Hudson River but also explored north to Cape Cod. And a couple of years after that Adriaen Block sailed from the East River into Long Island Sound and up the Connecticut River. Like Verrazzano, he also explored what is now Rhode Island. Block Island is named after him. Block is thought to have named Hell Gate upon sailing through the narrows. He called it “Hellegat”, which in Dutch means “hole from hell”.
Long Island is 118 miles long. Long Island Sound is not quite that long, but pretty close. It’s 21 miles wide at it’s widest point. The mouth of Long Island Sound wasn’t much easier on mariners than Hell Gate was, with The Race, the 3 1/2 miles between Fishers Island and Little Gull Island, being the site of rapid currents as the tides changed and water entered or exited Long Island Sound. The sound is popular with fisherman and sailors alike.
In the summer of 1951 an adventurous young man named George Post sailed out of Shinnecock Yacht Club in a 16 1/2 foot SS 114 to do something audacious. George decided to sail around Long Island, but in typical George Post style, he planned stops along the way at Long Island parties. George was something of a Great Gatsby with his adventurous and fun-loving spirit. He had friends meet him with a tuxedo to change into for the party, and then the next morning it was back to sailing.
George sailed northeast out of Shinnecock Bay, rounded Montauk, past Orient Point and down Long Island Sound towards New York City. He had friends drop beer and food in floating packs from a plane. George sailed past Rikers Island, and into the East River and Hell Gate, dodging floating debris and barge traffic in the East River until he finally got past Manhattan. I can imagine what he thought when he sailed past the Statue of Liberty, rounded Brooklyn and sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean. And I can imagine what everyone else was thinking when this 20 year old kid sailing a small boat floated past them.
George made it back to Shinnecock, called his mother to pick him up, and got back to being a young adult on Long Island. He was the older brother of my step-father John, and I’d had the opportunity to meet him on a few occasions over the years. I wish I’d been more familiar with this story then, and I wish I’d asked him a few questions about it before he passed away. He was every bit the adventurous spirit that Verrazzano, Hudson and Block were, and his younger brother is, and it would have been fun to learn more about that side of him.
That’s the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. The question is who are the grandchildren mentioned in The Beatles’ When I’m 64. Vera, Chuck and Dave. Once you know it you don’t forget it, and you hear the names every time you hear the song. And I find that to be the case with many things. Some things you learn and hold onto for a period of your life – like the subject matter for a quiz you took in school. Most of it disappears into the gray matter of your brain.
But then there are things you remember forever. I’m not talking about the life moment stuff like the birth of a child or your wedding day, but the minutia of like that somehow holds enough meaning to stay locked in your memory bank ready to pull out at a moments notice. Vera, Chuck and Dave are just that – trivial bits of information that stay with you once you learn them in a different way.
This goes for visual memories as well. I’ll never forget flying through the air in slow motion when I was hit by a car at the age of 10, or the expressions of the driver and his wife as I made my way to their windshield. I was lucky to survive that flight, and I won’t forget it. Nor should I – for better or worse, that was a highlight moment for all the wrong reasons. What’s more interesting to me are the little, seemingly insignificant moments that I remember vividly years later, while things I wish I’d remember better disappear never to return again.
Life is funny that way. You can sing the lyrics of a song you haven’t heard in years, but you can’t remember what you said in your wedding vows. I can remember a hundred other things from the day I got married, but I couldn’t tell you what I said in front of my bride and a couple of hundred friends and relatives. But even though I can’t remember the words I’m certainly trying to live the vows anyway.
One of the biggest heroes for the American Colonists in the Revolutionary War in 1776 was a fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts. Actually, he was more than a fisherman, he was also a cordwainer (shoemaker), rum trader, merchant and notably, the first Captain (of the Hannah) in the Continental Navy a later in the war he commanded forces at Saratoga and served with distinction there as well. But it was and as the Commander of a brigade known as the “Amphibious Regiment” that John Glover became a legend in the history of the American Revolution.
Glover’s group of fishermen and merchants saved the Continental Army twice in New York with strategic evacuations from Brooklyn and later from Manhattan. These two evacuations saved the Continental Army from certain defeat against far superior numbers. These weren’t the battle hardened troops of later in the war, these were undisciplined troops led by Generals, including George Washington, who were being outmaneuvered by the British Generals. Glover’s fleet of small boats shuttled the entire army across the Hudson River to Manhattan and then to New Jersey in the cover of darkness.
In December of 1776, Glover’s Marblehead men once again became heroes in shuttling the Continental Army across the frigid Delaware River to Trenton, and then back again with 900 Hessian POW’s. Glover’s fleet pulled off some of the most impressive amphibious maneuvers of the war, equalling the British invasion of Long Island in seamanship, and perhaps surpassing the British with their sheer audacity.
At some point I’ll update this post with pictures of John Glover’s statue in Boston and his home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. For now, I’m taking a moment to appreciate this war hero, rum trader, merchant, fisherman and yes, cordwainer. Glover is one of the legends of the American Revolution and should be more widely known today.
I’m trying to establish better habits – nothing new there, I’ve written about it before. When I’m home, my morning habit starts with helping Bodhi get up and outside for a little relief. I drink a pint of water and brew coffee while he’s outside, and read a little. Simple start-the-engines stuff.
I take stock of things. Then read a bit of Daily Stoic, and a bit of Seth Godin. Today, both had lines that stuck with me:
“One day it will all make sense.” – Ryan Holiday
“Whenever you find yourself blaming providence, turn it around in your mind and you will see that what has happened is in keeping with reason.” – Epictetus
“We get what we remember, and we remember what we focus on.” – Seth Godin
About the time I was reading the Seth blog I recognized that Bodhi had been out for awhile and it was time to help him up the stairs. Walking outside, I heard the loud, rapid fire rap of a pileated woodpecker in the woods. As if in response, I heard a second pileated woodpecker (they travel in pairs) making the same loud, rapid fire rap in response. This repeated a couple of times before I went back inside, grateful for the reminder that not everything that matters is happening in my own head.
In the Southeastern corner of Brooklyn, New York is an oddly-named village named Gravesend. The definitive origin of the name is lost to history, but it’s generally agreed that it comes from the Dutch phrase “Count’s Beach”. This was part of New Amsterdam in the 17th century, and it remains one of the only place names in Metro New York that still holds a Dutch-origin name. Go up the Hudson River and you’ll find plenty more.
Gravesend is [sort of] famous for two things. First, it’s the location of Coney Island Amusement Park, home of the gag-reflex hot dog eating contest every 4th of July. Given the date this event happens there’s some irony in the second reason for Gravesend’s fame. It was the site of the British landing in the summer of 1776 when the British and Hessian forces swept across Long Island and Manhattan and gained control of the critical New York Harbor and the lower Hudson River.
On the morning of August 23rd, 1776 the British invaded America at Gravesend Bay. By noon of that morning more than 15,000 British troops made an amphibious landing on the beaches there, and brought with them 40 artillery pieces. They quickly moved into the interior of Brooklyn and taught General George Washington and the colonial army a lesson in strategic military moves. Washington looked around days later and realized that there was no hope and evacuated his troops from Long Island. That evacuation is a story for another day, but needless to say, the defense of the American colonies hadn’t gone as planned. So on the 4th of July, when strange people consume massive quantities of hot dogs dipped in milk, think about American hopes for a brighter future being dashed in Gravesend in the summer of 1776. It’s okay to look away when they show it.
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day – if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”
– Charles T. Munger
I’ve heard this quote a few times over the last few years, and try to live by this rule of consistent, incremental improvement over time. But especially now. Now I’m past the halfway mark on my hundred year odyssey. I figure if family genes have anything to do with it I may suffer from some dementia at some point in my senior years. I’m hoping that continuous learning combined with medical advancements in memory care multiplied by vibrant life experience will fend off the worst of it until I hit triple digits. But hell, you just don’t know in this world do you?
So every day I read. Mostly non-fiction history or business books, but I mix in page-turner fictional novels along the way, and the occasional classic. I read a daily dose of stoicism from Ryan Holiday. I read a few articles in The Athletic or Sports Illustrated. And God help me I keep an increasingly reluctant finger on the pulse of politics.
And every day I write. I journal a bit, but blog a bit more. Life observations, history, conservationist ramblings, stoicism and hopefully some self-depreciating humor along the way. Perhaps this will extend my memory and serve as a reminder should it falter someday. Perhaps it will serve as the foundation for a book someday. Time will tell.
What I don’t do every day, but try to do most days, is to anchor my days in vibrant life experiences. I’d be a fool if I said every day was vibrant, but every day offers experiences. And I’m trying to suck the marrow out of each of them. Hopefully I’ll remember most of it when I hit the century mark.
