Parochial schools are usually not the most likely places to foster grand schemes of blue-water voyaging. And a parochial school buried on the dry, wind-swept prairie of north-western North Dakota is an especially unlikely place to foster ideas of sailing. But all is not as it seems, I remember the parochial school library, full of steel tables with that kind of spatter gray paint - spatter-gray paint that must have been designed for day-dreaming. And some of us used those gray tables as a launching pad for later dreams.

Still, those spatter gray tables of the high school library did confine me to the books from time to time. And I recall that behind the librarian's desk, there was a small stack of books or shelves that contained one dusty, old book that I checked out several times. It was a little-known yarn about a boat named Spray that had sailed around the world -- something like 60 years before. I recall reading the book, and reading how the solo skipper had visited the South Pacific and gone on to see many strange and wonderful things.

Over the years, I picked up tidbits of information about sailing here and there; adding the accounts of Chichester, Hayden, Tangvald, the Roths, Cornell, Colvin, Moitessier and the Pardeys as well as many designers such as Herreshoff, Benford, Buehler and Perry to my perpetually growing nautical collection. During my career in the military, I had opportunity to begin seriously to putter around with boats. I had no sailing boat in those days except being occasionally invited to do the foredeckman's gorilla work (that photo is a much, much younger me with my thirty-minutes of glory on the helm of a Morgan MKII off the coast of Wilmington, NC -- 1970s); however, my little office at Fort Bragg was festooned with blue-water nautical charts on several walls... I had drawn courses, and marked off distances from one island to the next. My body was hopelessly aground, but my heart was at sea.

With only a few years before military retirement, I moved aboard a sailboat in Washington, DC. It was a sizable 42 foot ketch that I envisioned taking me far and wide. It was not to be. The boat was great for living aboard at the dock; however, what was supposed to be an enjoyable pastime became an unwelcome logistical challenge -- just to drift around the Chesapeake. Eventually, I choked, the dream seemed to fade away, and eventually was no more. The 42 foot behemoth was sold, I moved back to shore, changed course in a major way and sped on with my life.

But so long as we humans are still moving oxygen without assistance, life is not totally wrapped up. You see, way back there in that North Dakota parochial school, there had been a very special girl who had caught my eye. And this story, without that special girl, would be no story at all!

Both of us being rather shy creatures, we probably didn't say two words the whole time we were in high school -- it was to be 40 years later when she entered my life and stirred it, putting a keel under me and a rudder behind me. It's wonderfully peculiar, how the particular person at the proper time can make a seemingly inconsequential observation (or least one that seems only minor at the moment), and rekindle faded dreams, forgotten fantasies -- re-energizing that which was once cast aside.

That special girl, Deanna, became a part of my life slowly at first - after all, 40 years later we lived half a continent apart. We pecked out e-mails, eventually exchanged a picture or two, and got reacquainted -- truthfully we were getting acquainted for the first time, because as high school students we'd known little about each other.

Over the course of several months, during our getting (re)acquainted moments, I had remarked that I had once had a dream of blue-water sailing, but had put it aside. Deanna, in her own quiet way, remarked, "You should not let your dreams die." It was just a quiet, simple statement; however, suddenly I had permission to dream dreams again. And as it later was to turn out, I had someone wonderfully special to share those dreams with.