Not Wooden Ships – the Other Kind

There are wooden ships and steel ships, Bob Nagel liked to observe, but there is no ship like friendship. Bob’s old chestnut came to mind this week as Jan and I were favoured with a visit from bosom buddies Carole and Garth. The friendship goes back only seven years but in truth it feels as though we have burgeoned and reveled in one another’s company for far longer than that.

If I shovel out the outhouse and whipper-snip the tall grass meridian of the road to the cabin, if Jan and I combine to produce a first-evening feast comprising her best lobster chowder and my most pungently impressive Caesar salad, you can safely surmise that we are particularly ardent that arriving friends shall feel royally welcomed.

But in my tiny mind the proof of friendship is neither the shoveled-out privy nor the four-star chowder but something else: let’s call it the R factor. If Relaxed is the best descriptor of a gathering of friends, you know you’re on to something good. With G & C we do not fret that our friends must cope without running water, wide-screen TV, or a guest suite featuring king-sized bed and step-in Jacuzzi. We relax.

He has seen it before but Garth’s first 2018 sighting of Kelly’s Mountain and the Great Bras d’Or from the vantage point of the screened porch inspired a question: Do you know how lucky you are? Oh yes, indeed I do.

Good ol’ Bobby Nagel had a sign on his kitchen wall – These are the Good Old Days – that was a constant reminder we should always endeavour to appreciate the Here and Now. Hanging out with G & C, I seem never more present in the moment, never more grateful for my current-time good fortune. Which is not to say that any facsimile of a three-ring circus characterizes a visit with G & C. We make do with simple pleasures: wide-ranging conversation, recollections of past adventures, the sight of gannets dive-bombing for seafood right in front of the cabin, Venus resplendent in the evening’s western sky.

On Tuesday we moved the old kitchen table to the porch and spent three happy hours playing bridge. Only one of us, Jan, is an accomplished player but the rest of us like the game a lot, want to get better at it, and revel in the play of a hand in which we do nothing remarkably stupid. Typically the men square off against the women and that generally means that the men always lose, luck being a smaller element in bridge than it is in any other card game I can think of, but this time, wonder of wonders, the men prevailed. Holy doodle.

The days were blistering – sunny and hot from Monday through Wednesday. The route to the swimming hole can be a bit of a challenge for folks not blessed with the dexterity and surefootedness of a mountain goat. Carole decided to let discretion prevail over valour and stayed in the relative cool of the porch but Garth decided that a bracing dip in the Great Bras d’Or was worth the small challenge of getting there.

After a summer at Big Bras d’Or my pal Mike Whitney likes to inquire whether the season featured any new and exciting skinny-dipping developments. Mike will not be impressed with what I have to report on this front for the summer of 2018 to date. On Tuesday, while the women folk went off to Hank’s Farm for local produce, Garth and I decided to cool off au naturel. Before getting down to birthday suits, we looked around to ensure no one was within sightlines. We did so not out of bashfulness or sense of decency but out of a desire not to appall innocent bystanders with the sight of what happens to the human body by its eighth decade.

Jan abides by a hard-and-fast rule when it comes to accepting the hospitality of friends. Like fish, she maintains, company goes bad after three days. The rule has a corollary: Leave them wanting more. It is a rule we live by on our visits with Garth and Carole at Amherst Shore on Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Strait. Nonetheless, I hoped that I might find some way to persuade our friends that in this case the exception should apply, not the rule. Alas, it was not to be. After two nights and parts of three days our buddies took their leave. Garth’s departing words told all: leave them wanting more. Dammit.