Dear Nancy,
On the day of your funeral we drove out of Carmel, through the fields and truck farms just north of the dunes and came to Moss Landing where the Western Flyer is moored. The Captain is a lovely man named Paul Tate who is in his eighties and he loves to read. One entire bunk is laid out with books about your dad and John Steinbeck and the boat they chartered down to Mexico.
He laid out food and opened a bottle of good champagne and we tuned his computer in to a zoom call of your funeral which was held in the Episcopal Church in Sitka, Alaska. I have gone to many funerals there in my forty five years living on that island with the fishermen and Brown Bears. But yours was the only funeral where I drank champagne and ate smoked salmon during the service. It was a first.
Above the galley table was a lovely black and white photograph of your father Ed. For the Western Flyer has apparently become ground zero for Ed-mania. Ed Heads come from all over the world and stand at the dock just to stare at the old boat.
I loved the touches you insisted upon in your funeral: more music than preaching, More love than obedience. More obedience coming through love than from fear. More singing than chest pounding.
The musical choices were perfect. Or at least I think they were for the connection that came through the computer was thin and the tinny microphones had a hard time capturing the wheezing of the organ and the voices cut out periodically as if it were being picked up on a short-wave broadcast. Which I liked actually. I thought of you dancing on top of your father’s shoes to the music on a small radio there on forth street in Pacific Grove. I thought of your dad dancing to Jazz music with all the pretty women who came to his lab. I thought of the pleated pants, strong arms and sturdy legs under silk skirts, cold beer and sandwiches, while the dancers bowed the floor of the lab: the snake in its pen preparing to eat a rat, while people sat in front of the cage smoking cigarettes and taping their feet in anticipation.
Love without restraint is what your father believed in. I’m convinced. Love as a gift to life. Love in the soft growing tissue of the body without apology. Love as ecstasy. Love as biology. Love as attraction and the rhythm of the moon, the stars, and the earth. Love as the tidal cycles, and the soft billowing flesh of the sea anemone when the tide pool becomes ripe with just enough water surging through to encourage life in it’s fullest..
Of course you didn’t say all this in your letter to the priest but it is what I felt as I drank the champagne under your father’s picture on the old boat which has been resurrected. Come back to life. Hauled off the bottom of the ocean, scraped clean and reconstructed. Alive again with it’s keel resting in the mud of it’s shallow mooring there in Moss Landing . A find slab of a boat now, a keel, straight as a carpenter’s rule, fastenings holding tight as you held on to your love of music. To your love of God, right up to the very end of your life here on earth.
Thank you for inviting me to your funeral, it was fun.
For more information about the Western Flyer check out: https://www.westernflyer.org/