My father

This is my bundled up father in my kitchen wearing a sailing ship that we made together. It was for Halloween for my first year of teaching. I had seen the movie Time Bandits and loved the part where the giant walks out of the ocean with the ship on his head. I posed the problem to my father and thus launched another in a long list of things we have done together. We once sailed from Maui to San Francisco on a 32 foot sloop. Over the years much of our relationship has grown from our mutual love of the sea.

The deck he cut from plywood and the masts are wooden dowels. While he was crafting our base, I was snipping the construction paper and making a mermaid to hang onto the stern and a skeleton for the bow.

He had come over Tuesday night to help me put the finishing touches on the "stable" that I was making out of red dogwood twigs for my felted Nativity. We got to talking about our ship hat and he was surprised that I still had it. Surprised? Of course I still have it. It is a symbol of one of the facets of our relationship that I adore, a symbol of the love between us. To me it could not be a more valuable treasure if it was made of gold.