A pirate's daughter looks at 40

I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't bad at all. I was a bit introspective, especially since my unexpected early retirement five months ago turned my life upside down before it settled into something calm and wonderful. I was so numbed to corporate helldom toward the end of my last position that I forgot who I was at heart:

Whatever else I am, I will always be a girl from a sleepy beach town in North Carolina (see here and here).

My daddy's life is a Jimmy Buffett song. From his first album in the 70s when Jimmy Buffett songs were about the water, not the liquor, colorful shirts and parties of the Parrot-Head Nation. I grew to hate this culture as I waited tables at his shows at the amphitheater in Raleigh when I was young and poor or when I go home and hang out at my old bar on the beach and listen to party-Buffett playing on a loop for the tourists.

No matter where I roam, from London to New York to Amsterdam, I will always be that girl from Shallotte, as will my sister, the former gutter punk-squatter and current Earth Mother, hippy, Vermont resident.

Jill and I were both home in Shallotte last week, a meet-up that only happens maybe once a year. My Sainted Southern Mother has retired from cooking, so my Good Old Boy Daddy does all of it now. And he prepared two entrees: Jill's request for shrimp Creole and my request for country-style steak.

Jill and I left her boys with their grandparents and went out riding around in Jill's car. We intentionally averted our eyes as we drove, with the windows down and an 80s radio station blaring, past the golf courses and McMansions for New York's and New Jersey's rudest retirees that have sprung up, consuming the woods where we'd ride our our mini-bike and the marsh ponds where we'd watch for alligators.

We ended up at Shallotte Point, on the intracoastal waterway, where our daddy used to set the boat out for our adventures. The marina wasn't like we remembered it; what used to be a divey local seafood restaurant had gone all upscale with waterfront deck seating, and it was around dinner time.

We walked out onto the floating docks together for the first time in well over a decade. Jill handed me her disposable camera and I took shots of her next to a seagull and crouching by the aft of a boat branded "Shallotte Point, NC."

Then Jill sat down on the dock and dangled her feet into the water. I was starting to get self-conscious about the dinner-people on the deck looking at us: Jill with her tattoos and dreadlocks and me with no makeup. "You have to come here and remember," she encouraged me, "No water in the world feels like this."

So I joined her. I put my feet in that warm, salt water and felt the safeness we felt as little girls when our daddy docked the boat, carried us out on his shoulders and taught us to swim.

Jill and I sat there for a good, long while with our feet in the water, taking in the brackish smell, feeling the intracoastal breeze on our faces and looking over at Mother Mother Ocean. And it helped us forget the word we'd heard earlier when our parents sat us down together to tell us about Daddy's most recent doctor appointment.

Cancer.







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