Tuesday, October 06, 2026

One Boat in the Sea


The other day, waiting for the race to start, I wandered in the rain down along a path I haven’t traveled in a while, when I spotted this boat cutting through the surf. Chrissy Field, as this area is known, is a stretch of bay-front wetlands along the north edge of the old Presidio army base.


Nowadays, it is a national park.

The boat was small in that setting, though through my zoom lens, it appears here as more prominent than it was in fact. Everything and everyone is small when you get far enough away from them. When scientists discovered that the universe is expanding at ever greater rates some years ago, they confounded some of our assumptions about the nature of life.

How could everything be getting further away from everything else?

Unless you work very hard and patiently at it, human society can often seem to be following the same law of the universe. People can seem to be getting further and further away from one another.

Small things lead to cracks in relationships, cracks deepen into huge gaps, and silence eventually is all that remains.

Among the calamitous events that eviscerate our social connectedness are breakups and job losses. For people who invest a lot in their primary relationships, this can be especially true.

I count myself in this category. As I stood alone, shivering in the rain, looking at the boat, I started thinking about my partners, and how every time I tried not only to have a person to live with, but a best friend, and a keeper.

By keeper I mean becoming the keeper of each other’s stories. To me, this is a vital part of life, and this is what long-term partners can do for one another.

There are, of course, other options. Friends can serve as documentarians for you, as you can for them. Family plays an important role, but if your siblings are far away, as is the case with me, you too rarely can get together or even talk to penetrate far below the surface of life’s constantly shifting surface.

Your children are your children. Although you share everything you can with them, it’s not their role to be your best friend. They need you to be their parent, which itself is extraordinarily complex work.

In recent years, I have devoted myself to being the best parent I can be, even to the exclusion of other needs. I don’t regret it, and I hope I won’t regret it, even if it turns out that I end up living alone from here on out.

(This is an excerpt from a much longer essay I published 15 years ago on this date.)

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