Grace and dignity: The beauty within

“It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see,” Henry David Thoreau wrote. He might have been thinking about this vessel. I know I was. And I knew I was looking at something beautiful. Something still beautiful.

Others strolled by, seeing nothing, or stopped, looking surreptitiously, maybe a bit ashamedly, at the gaping wound in her underbelly, as if witnesses to a roadside car accident. A young boy stuck his head in the hole. “Dad,” he said, “look, you can see the engine right through the bottom.”

“Don’t get oil on your hands, Danny. It’s a wreck. Stay away. Let’s go,” the father said.

The scene took me back to Phyllis, our old wooden family sailboat. I wrote of Phyllis years back, but a piece of it bears repeating. Many years ago, and years after Phyllis was sold out of our family, my dad, in his 80s, wanted to find her, go back and see how she was faring under her new owners. And indeed we did find her. Half-shrouded by a faded-blue plastic tarp, and very much out of her element, she sat in a field behind a barn, sunken into her rotted cradle, as if ashamed of her condition. I stepped back a bit, feeling that our very presence must be embarrassing to her. I glanced over at my dad.

He was smiling, moving forward, intently curious. One eye drooped a bit, a remnant of a couple of strokes he’d had nearly a decade before. His old pea-green jacket, faded and ripped by the pockets, clashed with his blue tweed hat, which sat askew on the back of his head. I watched Dad as he shuffled still closer to what remained of the old family boat. So little time was left for either of them now, I remember thinking.

“Can you still see it?” he asked.

“See what, Dad?”

“Even with her keel in the grave, it’s still there.”

“What’s still there?” I asked, shivering in the damp early spring air and beginning to become frustrated. There was a slight edge to my voice. I looked hard, but all I saw was a neglected old boat, down on her luck, and out of her element.

“You need to look for beauty, Dave. And the grace and dignity. There’s still such grace and dignity, despite it all,” he said finally.

Grace and dignity, despite it all.

Something we should all strive to see, as time, invariably, moves everything along.