Let me see. How to explain it? My mother's father sailed on an ocean tugboat ferrying barges to Cuba during the depression. before that he also worked as part of the road crew on the road that runs from Bangor to Bar Harbor, Maine. He met my grandmother while driving around Maine installing gas lights in farmhouses. Later he taught himself math and surveying and became a surveyor in Connecticut. He rebuild boats and sailed them in Long Island Sound.

My father's father was a boat builder in Clinton, Connecticut. Dad remembers him repairing boats that had been stitched with machine gun fire during Prohibition. He became a mailman and suffered a heart attack while walking his route. They forced him to retire and he went back to building boats and working as a commercial lobsterman in Long Island Sound. He would build a boat over the winter, fish it all summer and then sell it and build another over the winter. He quit that after he built Pot Luck the boat I remember helping him with on my summer vacations in Connecticut.

There are lots of stories about those two men. My uncles are the same way, except Uncle Bob who married into the family. We won't go there except to point out one his kids was the only one of us to die in prison.

I just don't feel like I measure up and there is too little time to try.