2

I would be lying if I told you I was an innocent man.

               I grew up in the small town of Witchgum, Pennsylvania. My father was a sailor, and my mother a homemaker, as it was not a time where everyone had the right to choose their path; men were the breadmakers, and women were the housekeepers. Children had no say and the most exciting part of your younger years was getting a beagle puppy or learning to ride your bike. Life beyond school and home was nonexistent.

               It would be an exaggeration to say we were poor. But I often remember the ferocity my mother washed dishes with when my father came home and scrutinized the bills in the mail. I never really understood why he furrowed his brow and tilted his glasses as I did, and never grasped the concept of finite money. Why should he have to worry? I thought. He has a job, so he has money. It wasn’t something I chose to ever concern myself with, and would quickly tire of wondering why my parents had been so constantly tense. Playing ball with Jimmy next door, or riding my bike up and down the street seemed like a much better use of my time.

               Needless to say, my early years were the easiest. I did not concern myself with worldly matters, nor did I prioritize my schoolwork. I often found myself skipping homework assignments to ride bikes or play a game of football with my friends. The first time I skipped school, I was thirteen. The same day, I tried my first beer. I hated it, and wondered how anyone could stomach a whole bottle of it. My friends at the time had come from much more troubled homes, and were merely amused by my astonishment.

               My teenage years were not unlike anyone else’s.  I felt uncomfortable and out of place the majority of the time, had misplaced infatuations, and experimented more with drugs and alcohol. However, I maintained a B average in school, and never got myself into any trouble, despite the friends I had. I did what I was told, and had my own “hobbies” on the side. My parents continued to struggle with money, but I still did not grasp their desperation. I brushed their frustration aside to cater to myself.

               I was sixteen when my father died. His ship wrecked at sea. The crew was missing for days, but after two weeks, the search was called off. I’d never seen my mother so broken than in that moment, and it pained me to see the woman I’d looked up to my whole life crushed, and even more so, to find that my father figure was nonexistent. I recall the sorrow that hung in the air for weeks after his death, like a cold cloud that filled our home and made it feel like a stranger’s. On the nights that I could not sleep, I heard the muffled grieving that came from my mother’s room every night. “I will never remarry,” she had insisted. “Your father was the only man who could keep my world straight.” I swore she’d fall into things that a woman had no place falling into. She began to swear more than my father ever had, and went through bottles of vodka faster than she ever had. But she did not resort to the things I assumed she would, and held onto the remains of her dignity.

               My mother was not a strong woman. She could not exist as her own person. Her life revolved around making my father’s life perfect, and she exceeded at this. Despite the constant financial struggles, she managed to ease my father’s stress and put a smile on his face at least once before bed. In the time before my father’s death, she was a very shallow person, but good company, and her love for my father was sincere. I could never gauge her opinion or feelings towards myself. Of course, as her son, I was entitled to a sliver of unconditional love, but I never felt as if I lived up to the expectations she had for me.

               It is amazing how a person can change into everything that they are not within a matter of days. My mother had never taken a liking to alcohol before, and now she made it a ritual to mourn my father’s death, then drown her sorrows in vodka and yell at me when I got home from school. She told me to call her by her name, Florence, and constantly muttered curses to herself. The dishes piled up and her youthful, rosy face wilted quickly. Her cooking was often burnt, and what genuine conversations we did have were lengthy and more in-depth than any school assignment I had ever been given. She seemed to begin to recognize me as a person rather than a child, and even though she was constantly throwing stones in a glass house, she knew when to stop.

               So no, I did not completely hate the person she had become. I often longed for the joy she used to fill the house with, and did feel suffocated by her bitterness about my father’s death. In order to escape the emotional toil she placed on our household, I took up a job on the docks selling fish for a friend of my father’s, a man called Klaus. It was uninteresting work to yell at people that we had the finest mackerel and the juiciest tuna, but I needed the time to myself, outside of the sorrowful hole I called home. Besides, selling fish led to my employment as one of the fishermen on Klaus’s boat. It was my first time on a boat, in fact, and the earliest part of my apprenticeship was intimidating. I knew nothing about boats or fishing, but I tried my best to act confident and secure in my knowledge, which I clearly was not. But this boat was my future. I graduated high school and continued to work on the boat, now as a first mate, until the Klaus turned 68 and decided he no longer could captain the boat, and that was when I became captain at the tender age of nineteen.

               My life was the same, with few ups or downs or twists or turns, for the next two years.