Remembering The Captain

Some years ago I took a professional development course and was recalling the instructor being quite an interesting character. He came in to the classroom wearing a captains hat, which he politely removed. He had a gray beard and hair. He wore a belt ringed wth the flags that sailor's use to signal one another, Sperry topsiders deck shoes, of course, and a red and white, wide horizontally striped shirt. He lived full time on a sailboat down on Clear Lake. Occaisonally when he laughed he chuckled like Popeye the sailor man. I am sure that he rehearsed this laugh often, because it sounded very authentic. I will always remember him as "The Captain", whom, considering this was a course in modern technology, was a living anachronism.

I imagined The Captain in a bar down on the wharf, drinking rum with his pals the Gorton's Fisherman, Captain Morgan, and Long John Silver. After getting really good and liquored up while telling tall tales of adventure on the high seas, they stumble down the pier, singing sea chanties, accompanied by the low bellow of a foghorn and the bright clang of a ships bell, disappearing into the sea-misty darkness.

The Captain impressed me so because his identity was so simply crystal clear and larger than life, lacking the vagary and ambiguity so often ssociated with outward appearances. The business executive hiding a larcenous heart behind a double- reasted suit. The person you see once as a girl, but after looking a second time seems to be a boy. The woman who looks beautiful in a real and earthy way sans high heels, a wonder bra and makeup, takes on a super human, other worldly cosmopolitan sheen after an hour or so of preening.

I waited by the door for a short time that day after class because I was curious about one last detail. The Captain soon came out the back door, pulling his cap neatly on his head, reaching into his pocket and producing a pipe, lighting it with a quatrain of vigorous pulls to get the tobacco burning hot. Just as I had expected! What did I learn from the class? The universe, in perfect order, is most certainly immaculate after all.