A Boat of a Different Color

Catherine Hawley exhaled an audible sigh and closed the book. It was a silly book really, a gift from Pageant Norris who had some notion that Catherine might be the type of woman to show up in public sporting a ludicrous red hat. Well, she wasn’t that kind of woman – never wanted to be and never would be. Still, the book had been a gift, and Catherine felt some obligation to at least glance at it, briefly thumb through its pages and prepare some fitting comment of appreciation she might offer. Yet something about the lines of that opening poem were haunting her – “I shall make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain and pick the flowers in other people’s gardens. And learn to spit.“ Catherine could think of little more distasteful than spitting, let alone in public, but still the lines troubled her, not because she wanted to do any of those things, but because she didn’t want to, and she felt that realization in a visceral way, like a bursting forth in her heart of some inner seed of regret and longing.

Catherine had been a “good girl’ from the earliest days of her youth, days when her mother said “you’re such a good girl,” with such persistent regularity that the words had come to define who Catherine was. She was a “good girl.” As a child, she didn’t muddy her clothes or steal forbidden cookies or giggle in church during communion. In her teenage years, she was one of the few “good girls” in her class who were waiting for marriage. She never tried smoking and didn’t drink either, not before she was 21. She always did what was expected, as if there was no other choice.

And so why did the words of some second-rate poem and their call to bad behavior fill her with such longing?And what exactly was it she was longing for anyway? She sat in the chair thinking for a long time, turning these questions over in her mind, while the afternoon sky darkened to a wash of deep blue, its light and color reflecting across the blanket of fresh-fallen snow outside her window. Hours drifted by and Catherine remained there in the chair, for it had suddenly dawned on her that the great question of her life was coming into focus. Before she read the lines of that poem, she hadn’t even known there was a question, but now, there seemed to be nothing but questions -- questions without answers. And though she was sure it had nothing to do with donning a red hat or wearing more purple, all she could think was that she had somehow missed her life. She had been so cautious, so determined to be good, that she had given up something very precious.

The silence of the house was broken only by the crackling and popping of unseasoned wood in the fireplace and the rattling of the windows as the chill wind rushed though the bare branches of the trees outside. Catherine sat in the old oak rocker that had been her grandmother’s, its wood creaking with rhythmic regularity as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, thinking.

The moon rose higher in the sky and slipped behind a bank of storm clouds as the night burrowed down into its deepest dark. Still she rocked; she thought, until she finally realized that it wasn’t that there was something wrong with being good, it was that she had confused goodness and perfection. She had acted as if she were perfect, as if her choices were the only right ones, and in this, she had fooled herself. For she was far from perfect, and in fact, there was nothing “good” about feigning perfection. It had robbed her of herself, of her uniqueness, of her humanity, of her life.

This realization came to her with an unexpected feeling of grief, and a tear slipped from her weary eyes, and then another, and another. A sob rose up from that place deep in her heart where the seed of regret and longing had burst, and she began to cry in earnest. A million tears ran down her face and began to form a puddle around the base of her chair. The puddle grew, until it spread across the floor and began to flood the house, its salty waters growing deeper and deeper. Catherine was so lost in her sorrow that she didn’t notice when the rising flood lifted her chair off the ground, floating it higher and higher until it reached the sill of an opened window and sailed out into the world, into the stream of a majestic river. She turned and looked back at the shoreline that receded behind her, a colorless landscape of November grays and lifeless browns, a tiny house where a woman sat rocking at the window.

At last, she turned away and looked toward the opposite shore where her small craft was heading. The shoreline was still a long ways off, so that its details lacked definition, but the brilliance of color there pulled at her with a mighty force that propelled her forward . The wind lifted the sails and blew her hair loose, and later she would remember feeling freer than she had ever felt before.

The gathering clouds above her head released a gentle shower, and the raindrops on her face felt cool and refreshing. It was then that she looked down at her feet, and was alarmed to see that she had set out on this journey and had nothing but a pair of worn-out slippers on her feet.But before she could think another thought, she was startled by a loud clap of thunder in the distance, and her eyes flashed open.

Catherine found herself still there, in the rocking chair by the window. The fire had burned down to embers that glowed in the darkness, and outside the window, the first light of dawn brightened the eastern sky. Pageant’s book lay at her feet, where it had crashed to the floor moments earlier.

In the kitchen, Catherine put on the kettle for coffee, as she did every morning. She leaned against the counter and found herself humming a little tune.There was no denying that today felt different. It was as if a miracle had happened while she slept, and somehow, the pretentious “good girl” existence she had inhabited for so long was beginning to lose its grip.The singular evidence was the feeling that remained as she moved from the dream-world into wakefulness – the memory of that joyful sense of freedom as she sailed away from her old life. Would she be that woman in the window, confined to a small world without color or life? Or would she sail off toward the adventure of an unknown frontier?

Catherine had always believed that It wasn’t “good” to be impulsive, and so she always planned ahead. She always gave adequate thought to the consequences of every decision. She always took the safe route. This morning, she thought about the adventures she had missed because of this, and about the dreams she had dreamed and never expected to actually realize.What came to her then unbidden was a vision of the far-away islands of Hawaii. She had always dreamed half-heartedly of going there, a distant land that suddenly seemed akin to that place of life and color that had beckoned to her from the opposite shore.

Taking her coffee, she walked into her office, turned on her computer and impulsively booked a flight to Hawaii for later that same day. Then she picked up the phone and called her office, leaving a message that, because of a family emergency, she would have to be out for the next few weeks. It wasn’t untrue, for she could think of no greater emergency than the need to start living her own life.

As she closed and locked the front door, she dropped a note into the mailbox for Pageant Norris to thank her for the considerate gift of the book. Walking toward the taxi that waited at the curb, she thought, boats come in many shapes and in many sizes, and with that, she climbed in and sailed away.