Especially if it was "nine days old!"

Okay, I'll get into this one. My father was always a puritanical, straight-laced tee-totaler. An atheist who went to church regularly because he enjoyed singing in the choir, and then would argue with the preacher afterwards. I was 12 years old before I heard him swear. He bashed his head viciously on a metal rod and said "Damn!" Shocked me. You get the picture.

In the early 1950s, I was living in a houseboat on Portage Bay in Seattle, enjoying a wild, "bohemian" life (we didn't have hippies back then). I met a merchant seaman who mentioned that he had shipped one year with the Coast and Geodetic Survey to the Alieutians. "What ship," I asked. "The Explorer," he replied. "My God," I said, that's a coincidence. My father was the Exec on that ship." "No shit!" he cried, "'Mother Paton' was your father?"

Turns out I had remembered Dad complaining about what a drunken crew he had to deal with that year. After putting into one of the island ports (Kodiak Island?) he said he could get no work out of the crew for days afterward, as they were all suffering from terrible hangovers. So he went through the lockers and confiscated all the booze; through it over the rail. Some kind of a miracle that he ever made it back to Seattle!

Well, he may not have been a sweet, hymn-singing grandmother, but he did manage to become a legend of a sort among the roughnecks of the Seattle waterfront.

In two weeks, I'll be heading down to Virginia Beach to help the old guy celebrate his 100th birthday. He wants to hang on another year, so he will be able to say he lived in three centuries (he was born, obviously, in 1899).

Sandy