I remember the event as if it happened yesterday. In the early 1950s, George Singleton, my next door neighbor in Nashville, Tennessee, where I grew up, who was 12 years old, told me about his eyewitness account of seeing aliens landing in his back yard. I was eight or nine years old at the time. A large space craft that looked like a saucer hovered over his back yard, then landed, a door opened, and about a dozen creatures came out. I recall his saying that they were only about three of four feet tall and looked a little like chubby giant lizards. Terrified, he jumped backed into bed and tried to go back to sleep. When he woke up the next morning and looked out his window, there was a large black circle of burned grass but no spaceship. I carefully examined the site the next morning and George was exactly right. A large circle in the grass had turned black and was still smoldering. I carefully examined the circle and all the details he had described about the landing site were true.

I did not ask whether his dad had been burning leaves the day before.In a blog post last week, I wrote about seeing mysterious lights in the 1990s following our fleet of four sailboats crossing in the middle of the night from Saint Martins to the British Virgin Islands. And there are many accounts of unexplained UFO sightings on the web. AI lists the ones described below as the most important but there are many dozens more listed on Wikipedia:

• The “Kenneth Arnold Sighting” happened in Mount Rainier, Washington when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine high-speed, disc-shaped objects flying past Mount Rainier. He described their movement as like “a saucer skipping across water.” This event popularized the term “flying saucer”.
  The “Roswell Incident” occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, also in 1947. A rancher discovered debris on a property near Roswell. The U.S. military initially announced they recovered a “flying disc,” but retracted it the next day to claim it was a crashed weather balloon. It remains the most famous alleged UFO crash in history.
• The “Rendlesham Forest Incident” occurred in Suffolk, England in 1980. Often called “Britain’s Roswell,” U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at an RAF base reported seeing a glowing, metallic, triangular craft in the nearby woods over multiple nights. Witnesses recorded unusual lights, and some reported high radiation readings.
• The “Belgian UFO Wave” happened in 1988-1989 when thousands of citizens and police officers reported seeing a large, silent, black triangular craft with bright lights. The Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16 jets, which locked radar onto an object that performed rapid, extreme maneuvers beyond standard aircraft capabilities.Of course, there are more questions than answers, the most important being why we haven’t been able to capture one of these objects or at least been able to make contact with its occupants. Some believers in aliens claim that we have, but governments are keeping the encounters secret.

But aliens and UFOs are not the primary subject of this post. The question of the day is whether advanced life exists anywhere else in the universe besides on the planet Earth (though people could argue about whether “advanced” life really exists here.) The answer to that question is yes. Of course it does. Here are the basic facts:

Scientists tell us that the laws of nature apply everywhere. For life to exist on a planet, it needs to be a rocky planet like Earth and requires these seven conditions:

1. Liquid Water: This acts as a medium to let organic chemicals mix, react, and transport nutrients over time.
2. Energy Source Available: This powers the chemical reactions needed for metabolism, whether from a star via photosynthesis or from geothermal heat (like deep-sea vents).
3. Nutrients and Chemical Elements Present: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur are needed to form complex molecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins.
4. Location in the Habitable Zone (“Goldilocks Zone”): The planet must sit at the right distance from its star, so it is neither too hot nor too cold, allowing water to remain liquid on the surface.
5. A Protective Atmosphere: Traps heat to stabilize surface temperatures (the greenhouse effect) and shields living things from harmful cosmic and solar radiation.
6. A Magnetic Field: Generated by a rotating molten core, it deflects dangerous solar winds and cosmic rays that could strip away the atmosphere.
7. Right Size and Gravity: The planet needs enough mass and gravity to hold down a stable atmosphere, but not so much that it becomes a crushing gas giant with no solid surface.

So there you have it: if a rocky planet is in the goldilocks zone of the star that it is circling, has the basic building blocks in place, is big enough and—I would add—is at least one or two billion years old, there is a very good chance that some form of  life will emerge. It is just a matter of our finding that planet or “them” finding us.

But what about advanced life? If the history of our planet is typical, it takes a very long time, billions of years, for advanced life to happen, and probably involves numerous mass extinctions as has happened here on the planet Earth. And how likely is it that there are other rocky planets about the same size as our planet and are about the same age and that are positioned in the Goldilocks Zone around their star, keeping in mind that there are billions of solar systems in each galaxy and there are believed to be trillions of galaxies? Well, I would guess the odds are high, probably 100 percent.

The challenge of a celestial encounter with advanced life on other planets is distance. Of course, there is life elsewhere in the universe—probably advanced life–but unless we humans can figure out how to exceed the speed of light (by a lot), we will never get there nor are they likely to get to us.

According to AI, astro biological calculation indicates that the odds of humanity being the sole “technological species” in the entire universe are less than one in 10 billion trillion—10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a 1 followed by 22 zeros). In other words, it is close to zero. Surveys also show that a large majority of scientists and astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial life exists.

No brainer, if you ask me. But what does it all mean? Here are some other questions: If there is a heaven, where is it? If God is the creator of the universe, not just our small planet, as most major religions stipulate, what is He up to in other locations? And if scientists agree that the universe will give out of hydrogen and die after a few trillion years, what is eternal life? And what is happening in other universes in the multiverse, if there is a multiverse.

Above our pay grade to figure out or to comprehend. But it should be enough to make us profoundly grateful that we are here on this beautiful blue planet, and how rare planets like the Earth are in this vast universe—or at least how rare we think they are. It should make us thankful that we humans are here now—a situation that in my view falls in the category of a miracle.

And it should put fire in our bellies to cherish and protect what we have. If we humans are not more careful and diligent, we could lose it.

Embry and I are headed to Morocco next Monday for a two-week adventure so the next few posts (including photographs ) will be about our trip. Stay tuned.

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Enough about sailing and back to issues of the day. This post is a serious one and not for the faint of heart.

So, how about AI’s mass extinction of humans that the Tech Bros are warning us about? That is hardly a pleasant topic, and some would argue that for someone at my advanced age—mid 80s—that such a horrendous idea is irrelevant. Yet this is what we are being told by the Tech Bros, who, by the way, are the ones responsible for getting us into this mess. Something like a mass extinction takes a long time so why should we old folks worry? But what about our children and grandchildren? Human life wiped out in 10 years?

What are we to make of all this? The timing may be off but they may have a point.

Let’s start off with the Big Picture and how we got to where we are in the first place. This is what we now know, thanks to the Web, Hubble and Kepler telescopes and all the new technology and the legacy of geniuses like Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein:

The universe began with a Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmic dust began to form “planetary systems” with a star in the middle, surrounded by objects called planets. Assisted by gravity, planetary systems began to form galaxies consisting of millions of planetary systems, billions for some galaxies. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to have over 100 billion planetary systems, perhaps as many as 400 billion. Scientists now believe the number of galaxies in the universe number in the trillions. They also believe that eventually the universe will run out of hydrogen and die. But wait! Some scientists also believe that our “universe” is part of a multiverse. These concepts and ideas are where science and religion converge. It is above our paygrade as Homo sapiens on the planet Earth to begin to comprehend fully.

And what about us, the Planet Earth?

Our solar system came into being about 4.5 billion years ago and our star (the sun) is about halfway through its life of about ten billion years. In other words, we only have a few billion years left before the solar system vanishes, but since our sun will become a red giant before it fizzles out, we on the planet Earth have only about a billion years left before life on Earth will vanish due to high temperatures. “Only” a billion years.

And how long have Homo sapiens been around? We are newbies—only about 300,000 years. Hey, that is 

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I admit it, this post is out too soon. It is Monday, not Tuesday. However, there is a reason. In my last post, “The Last Hurrah,” I referred again to my “guardian angel.” Even though it is not Tuesday yet, I felt compelled to respond to the various questions I have received as to how could someone like me, who has been known to describe himself as a soft skeptic, believe in “guardian angels”? The answer, of course, is because they exist. Think of your own life and the mistakes you have made, the reckless things you have done, and the close calls you have had and survived. We all have done stupid things. Yet here we are. How do you explain that? Well, guardian angels, of course.

You may ask this question,” If guardian angels exist, how do I explain all the bad things that happen to good people?” This is an excellent question. I too have been troubled by this from time to time and have done extensive research. (In fact, at Union Seminary where I studied theology from 1965-1968, I took several courses on guardian angels—GA 101, GA 102, and my senior year GA 103, the toughest one.) My answer is that some guardian angels are a whole lot better at what they do than others. And some—many—do not do a good job. It is not clear exactly how guardian angels are appointed for the job or how they are trained or supervised. I read somewhere that at times the really good ones are often promoted to another job. You know, climbing the heavenly ladder. Maybe the selection criteria should be beefed up, or the weak ones should be required to take additional training. My advice to those in charge would be to keep the good ones, fire the bad ones, or at least require them to get counseling or coaching or take more classes. Just think how much better the world would be if all the GAs were doing their jobs. Certainly, Donald J Trump would not be our president.

And to stipulate that guardian angels only take care of members of one faith or one Christian denomination is absurd. God is an equal opportunity employer.

So yes, of course, GAs exist. If you disagree, you tell me why some of us humans have it pretty easy and others have it pretty hard. How do you explain why bad things happen to good people and the reverse? This explains all of it.

The challenge is to get those in charge to a better job in selecting, training and supervising the GAs. And that is where I do not have an answer. “Above my paygrade,” as they say in DC. And though we humans are learning more and more about the vastness and complexity of the universe and the mysteries of creation, no one has been able to come up with an explanation which rings true regarding the nature of good and evil on our small planet. Until now. This explains everything. I am waiting for a Nobel Prize.

The Tuesday post is coming as promised. And that one is the last one about sailing. I promise.

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A note to readers: If you have been following my posts on my photo website, you might want to consider reading my posts on Substack since those posts now include a bunch of photographs. Let me know at joehowell476@gmail.com. if you would lie a link to that venue. 

 

What to do next? I loved the BVIs and was not ready to give them up. I remember hearing someone at Sunsail make a pitch about buying one of their charter boats. It turns out that most charter companies do not own the boats but lease them from people who like to cruise, a sort of sale-leaseback deal. The lease is for five years, and the financing works out so that all an owner has to do is pay the initial deposit. Financing is arranged from a bank so that the debt service on the loan equals the monthly leasing fee you get from Sunsail; and then after five years you sell the boat, pay off the bank loan, and get all your money back, or at least a lot of it. Okay, some of it. In the meantime, you get to sail Sunsail boats all over the world in one of their 90 or so locations at no charge. Hey, was buying a Sunsail charter boat a great idea or what?

I talked about the idea with Embry, who realizing how much this meant to me, agreed to go along with the deal without shaking her head (too much) in despair.

The boat that was available at the time was a Jeanneau 39i, which had been on the market for a while, and the price had just been reduced. I cleaned out my savings account and did the deal. (Embry and I always kept our savings separately.) I named the boat Second Wind, clever name, no? I bought the boat in 2015 and left her in the Sunsail fleet until 2020, when the lease expired and owners were required to move the boat out of the marina. Then not able to sell the boat when the Sunsail lease was up and having no place to put the boat, I paid a couple of Brits to move the boat up to the Chesapeake where Second Wind replaced Carolina Blue (which I sold to one of my crew) and became our last sailing vessel.

I know what you are thinking. This sounds like another disaster story brewing. But no, these Second Wind cruising years were (mostly) just as good as the Dan Look chartering years and, in some ways, even better. The way it worked was that for the five years between 2015 and 2020, I chartered with Sunsail–for free! — at least twice a year. One cruise each year was in the BVIs mainly with two or three good friends mostly from high school and college days or friends from Washington, and a second cruise was in faraway and exotic locations with Embry and two or three other couples. We chartered boats in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, Puget Sound, the Bahamas, Tahiti, and other parts of the Caribbean. Of course, there are stories that go along with each of these cruises, and we did have our share of close calls and challenges but overall the cruises were without serious incidents.

The one exception was an extremely challenging cruise in the Adriatic. Embry and I had completed five days of extraordinary cruising in perfect conditions with two couples who were great friends from planning school days in Chapel Hill. We had reserved a 45-foot Sunsail boat from their base in Croatia. We were warned that toward the end of the week, a “disturbance” was expected to move into the area from the southwest so I decided to sail in that direction so that when the disturbance did arrive, we would have the wind behind us, and it would be easier to get back to the base. Little did we know that in this case the “disturbance” would produce gale force winds.

Toward the end of our week-long cruise, we had docked in a very protected harbor on Viz, the farthest island to the west. We could tell that it was windy on the day we were to depart; but since we were in a protected marina at the base of a steep mountain, we could not tell how strong the wind was. We had two days to get back to the Sunsail base; but since we had 40 miles to cover, I decided that we should leave the marina and venture out. If the wind was too strong, we would return and stay another day.

None of the other cruising boats, however, were leaving the protected harbor.

As soon as we left the lee of the harbor, wham! We were headed to our destination, like it or not. The Adriatic, which the day before was a deep blue, looked like a chocolate milkshake with foam in the air everywhere. I made one feeble attempt to turn around and realized it was impossible. The wind gauge showed gusts up to 45 miles an hour and even higher. The rain was coming down in torrents.

What to do? Well, there was no choice. We could not make any progress if we tried to turn back given the strong winds, so I cheerfully said to the wide-eyed crew, “Well, here we go.”

Because the Adriatic is relatively shallow, you don’t get the giant swells you get in the ocean when there is a storm. You get chop with steep waves that are ten feet high and occasionally even higher. Fortunately, our destination, about 25 miles away, was almost directly downwind. So we never raised the main and sailed only with a mostly rolled up genoa. Even so, the ride was terrifying. Up we would go slowly with the huge chop behind us, then when the crest hit us, we would zoom down the front of the wave like we were on a roller coaster in an amusement park.

The challenge for me was not to jibe unintentionally since the gale force winds were directly behind us. It was not long, however, before three of our friends became seasick. Few words were spoken. Embry said that when I gave the order for everyone to put on life jackets she knew we were in big trouble. When we surfed down the front of the wave, I checked the boat speed and we were surfing at over 14 knots, almost double our normal, maximum boat speed.

The other challenge for me was to stay on course since in such high wind the only direction that the boat could go was almost directly downwind. That meant that if we passed by the protected anchorage that we were supposed to dart in to, we could not turn back to make our destination. The wind would be too strong. We had to get it right. Exactly right.

About two hours into the ordeal, just as I was feeling like I was almost getting the hang of it, directly ahead of us coming out of the mist and pouring rain appeared a giant cargo ship aiming right at us. If we did not change course, it would hit us. I had to jibe (change direction pointing away from the wind, in contrast to “coming about,” pointing into the wind). And I had to do it immediately. The genoa was rolled up so that only a tiny bit of sail was out, but I still did not know how much pressure that would put on the mast when the boom swung around. If we dismasted, it would be curtains.

I hollered “jibe-ho,” turned the wheel, and the boom slammed from one side of the boat to the other. The strong force did not take down the mast. Bravo! Dodged another bullet. The giant ship passed by us, missing us by several boat lengths. Talk about another close call. But what I could not figure out was what were the odds that in such horrid conditions we would get run over by another vessel. We had been battling the storm for over three hours; and in what had been a rather crowded sea the day before, this day we had not seen a single boat of any type—except for the giant freighter.

When we got close to our destination we had to go through a passage only about a hundred yards wide. Then we should be in a protected area and able to turn into the small, protected cove where the marina was. As we got closer to the passage, I could see the spray from the giant waves hitting the shore and going up into the air over a hundred feet. I had never seen anything like it before or since. This had to have been the Adriatic storm of the century.

But we made it, found the marina, and tied up. I finally could relax. Our dear friends, who had been seasick most of the time and never complained, recovered and after a while were talking to me again. This was the first time one couple had ever sailed. And to their credit this was not the end of our friendship.

This was the most sensational experience of our cruising days but not the only close call we had on Sunsail boats in exotic waters. When you cruise as much as we did, you are going to have adventures and some close calls, but if you pay attention and know what you are doing, you will come through them—at least we did. And of the dozen or more bare boat cruising adventures that I had over the years cruising in distant seas, this was the most dramatic and certainly the most dangerous. I was afraid that our good friends would never speak to me again, but thankfully they took it all in stride and we have remained great friends even to this day.

There were many other cruising adventures. Tahiti will go down as my favorite cruise in exotic waters, and I enjoyed all of them, even the Mediterranean, where I sailed with son Andrew and his girlfriend in similar conditions to the Adriatic. And my all-guys cruises with old friends and classmates from high school and college cruising mainly in the BVIs (and also the Grenadines and the Bahamas) will also always be special, and for those experiences I will remain profoundly thankful for as long as I am still kicking. One of my best friends from both high school and college was first mate on almost every one of these cruises and earned the nickname “Defacto,” since the title of “first mate” was reserved for Embry.

In 2015 the father and son Brits delivered Second Wind to Herrington Harbour on the Chesapeake where we had reserved a place for her. We raced and cruised that boat for four more years before selling her in 2024 after the Covid epidemic had passed. In fact, Second Wind was a godsend for us during the Covid years and we cruised with her many times anchoring in secluded coves on the bay far away from the pandemic.

And 2024 marked the end of my sailing career. We sold Second Wind to a young family who moved the boat to a marina on the bay about 30 miles to the south. But that did not keep us from chartering and that happened in 2023 at the tail end of Covid when we went on our final BVI cruise, billed as “The Last Hurrah.”

Stay tuned for that one next—the penultimate —post of the series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I can’t remember the exact date or even the year. I believe it was in the late 1980s when I got a call from Dan Look, a good friend living in Atlanta and who had his own consulting company specializing in providing technical assistance, mainly on food service, to senior living communities. He knew I was a sailor like him and asked me if I would like to be first mate on a week-long, “bareboat,” charter cruise in the BVIs that he was planning. He was going to invite seven or eight friends, all guys, mainly in the not-for-profit, senior living world though without much previous sailing experience. I enthusiastically accepted, had a terrific time, and volunteered to skipper a second boat the following year. It was not long before others learned enough about sailing to able to skipper a boat themselves. The event became an annual happening, and the fleet grew to four or five boats, occasionally even more. These cruises, which were almost always in the late winter or early spring, happened almost every year and went on for at least a decade. I made almost every one of them.

It did not hurt that the BVIs are widely considered to be among the best sailing waters in the world especially during the winter and spring when trade winds from the northeast are steady and consistent at 15-20 knots every day and it hardly ever rains.

A typical Dan Look BVI cruise would go something like this: Eager sailors, all men, from various locations in the United States would arrive on a Saturday. Many were executive staff of not-for-profit, continuing care retirement communities or consultants, bankers, or other professionals in the senior living industry though there also were usually some members of the Atlanta Rowing Club where Dan was a member. A week’s supply of food, which Dan had purchased and packaged the week before in Atlanta, would arrive there about the same time, and with help Dan would distribute the food (mainly for lunches and breakfasts) equally among the boats in the fleet. He would also distribute golf-type shirts for each participant with a special logo on the pocket showing the date of the cruise. The boats were chartered from Sunsail, at the time the world’s largest sailing charter company, and they were mostly identical 40-45 foot Jeanneau boats from France, each equipped with a large dinghy.

Dan would decide which men sailed on which boat; and while I usually already knew at least one or two people who were assigned to my boat, occasionally I would be assigned three of four guys I had never met. Everyone usually ate out together at the restaurant in the marina the first night. The next morning there would be a skipper’s meeting required by Sunsail for all charter captains and first mates. By late morning we would cast off to sail the islands. The big question was whether to sail the islands in a clockwise or counter clockwise fashion. Most of the time we cruised counter clockwise sailing first to Peter Island to the east, then Beef Island farther north a dozen miles away upwind, then Virgin Gorda, Anegada, Josh van Dyke, Norman Island and back to Tortola. My favorite was Anegada, which was situated by itself to the north, almost 20 miles away from all the other islands and the least populated. Each leg, of course, would often involve a race though those in the boats who arrived well behind the winner would usually argue that they were not racing. But my boat was and we often won.

The boats did not raft up in the BVIs the way they do in the Chesapeake Bay because of the strong winds and crowded anchorages, but at the end of the day, after anchoring or tying up to a mooring everyone would jump in their dinghies and motor over to Dan’s boat for drinks and dinner. Dan was a professional food service consultant, loved to cook for the 15 or so hungry guys, and on many of the cruises was assisted by the owner of a popular steak house chain in Atlanta. I don’t know how he did it, but the dinners were always delicious and always fun. My self-appointed job was bartender, and I got pretty good at making pain killers (black rum, orange and pineapple juice, with coconut milk and spices.) The participants for the most part were not heavy drinkers and anyone who wanted booze was responsible for bringing it on board themselves. As bar tender, however, I was careful to buy enough black rum to mix a pain killer for anyone who wanted one, and there were always takers. On one of the cruises someone presented me with a tee shirt which said, “Drinking Team with a Sailing Problem.”

There was always laughter, storytelling, and never a word about politics. Many of the crew came from faith-based, continuing care retirement communities and were from the South or Midwest so it was understood that we did not want to go there, unsure of their politics. Regardless from where the guys were from or what their politics were, I liked every person who ended up as crew on my boat; and making new friends with people who were not like me was one of the best things about these cruises.

One of the biggest thrills on these cruises was spotting whales. Over the decade that we cruised on the Dan Look cruises we saw several whales, mainly Humpbacks and some up close and personal. Our boat was once cruising alone when we saw a giant whale come out of the water about a hundred yards away, then disappear below the surface. We were all oohing and aahing, then looked down and saw the giant creature swimming just below the surface next to our boat, close enough that we could touch it. The creature, probably an immature Humpback someone said, was longer than our 40-foot boat. Then the animal suddenly disappeared not to be seen again.

The strangest experience that happened was on an overnight crossing from Saint Martins Island to Tortola, the only cruise that we had that did not originate in the BVIs. Four boats were motoring together in a flotilla on a moonless night and calm seas with no sign of any other boats except an occasional large cruise ship passing in the distance. Then around 3:00 AM three large, bright lights in a triangle appeared from nowhere and for a few minutes followed the first boat in our flotilla. The lights were so bright that you could not tell if there was a vessel associated with them or not or how far they were away from us. They appeared to be about six or seven feet above the water. Were they on another boat or on a helicopter?

The strange lights followed the first boat for a few minutes, then moved to the second and the third and finally to our boat. I was asleep at the beginning and awakened by a nervous crew when the lights got closer to our boat. I tried to figure out what might be going on but was stumped. Then suddenly the lights went out, and whatever they were, they were never to be seen again.

As you can imagine, we were all spooked. When we reached the BVIs around eight the next morning we anchored near the customs house; and after the skippers all motored their dinghies into the marina to do the paperwork, we compared notes. No one had a clue. For the next few days, I was haunted by the experience but eventually put it out of my mind though it seems as real today as I write about the account as it did at the time. Go figure.

And those were the days. I am not sure exactly why but after about a decade of these annual BVI cruises, they started to peter out. I always will be grateful to Dan for inviting me to join him that first cruise and for all the cruises that followed. I do not think I missed more than one or two.

But I was hooked and for me the closing of the Dan Look BVI cruises marked the beginning of my sailing experience in exotic waters, not the end. And these ventures included sailing in oceans all around the world. Stay tuned for the next post on the “Second Wind Days and More Sailing in Exotic Seas.”

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So you might conclude that my goal of serious sailing got off to a rocky—or rather, wet—start. What do you do in a situation like this? Owning a sailboat was my dream come true. My father had always wanted a sailboat and talked to me many times about buying one and sailing on Old Hickory Lake near Nashville. But it never happened. At last, I was living out my father’s dream. This was a calling for me. A sacred mission. Throw in the towel and give up the dream, wimp out? Never.

I did not have that much time to think about these profound implications because approximately 24 hours later I had 104 degree temperature and felt like I was dying. All I could think about was the price I paid for trying to keep my head above water in some of the most polluted waters in the country for almost four hours, at least one hour in front of the notorious Blue Plains Sewerage Treatment Plant. After the second day I got enough strength back to call my doctor. I explained my horrible situation to him and waited for a response. There was a pause before he answered.

“Really, a 505? I am a J-boat racer myself and have always admired the 505s. They are the greatest, but I also sail my boat on the Potomac. This could have happened to me! I think I am going to move my boat to Annapolis.

“Not a bad idea, but what about me?

“Well,” he replied,” I hope you can get the boat fixed. Have you thought about taking it to ‘In Harm’s Way’? They specialize in fixing small sailboats.”

“No” I replied, “I am talking about my health! What about my health?”

“Gee, four hours floating near the Blue Plains Sewer Treatment Plant? Could be anything. Drink a lot of liquids, take some aspirin and call me back in a few days.”

“If I am still alive.” I muttered.

“Yeah, you never know about these things. Hours swimming in Blue Plains effluent? Oh my God…”

And that was the end of that. A couple of days later the fever subsided, and I started to feel better. Dodged a bullet, as they say. But what about the 505? The last time I saw the boat was the day of the accident. I had no idea of what had happened to the boat.

The next day I was feeling almost back to normal. I decided to go back to the marina where the boat had ended up and found the hull of the 505 lying on the ground, next to an Oak tree with a big sign that read “Fire hazard, must be moved immediately.” The sail, mast and boom were propped up on the tree.

As I was trying to figure out what to do, I felt a tap on my shoulder and a big burly guy with tattoos and a gruff voice growled, “This pile of junk yours?”

I sheepishly nodded yes and then shook my head in dismay.

“You got 24 hours to get it outta here or I am calling the cops. It’s been here almost a week. You are gonna be fined big time, maybe arrested.”

I could not get the idea out of my head that maybe the boat could be saved. I returned home and immediately called the number given to me by my doctor to contact the sailing store, “In Harm’s Way.” I desperately told the person answering about my situation. He answered, “Wow, a 505! You own a 505? I have always wanted to work on a 505, the world’s fastest racing dinghy. Fabulous, bring her in! There is no sailboat I can’t get back on her feet.”

Euphoria! Hope at last. A tiny fire started to burn in my brain. Other people might have caved, given up, thrown in the towel. Not me. Hope at the end of the tunnel. I would prevail after all.

The next day I got the boat’s trailer from the marina where the ordeal began, drove it to the marina where the boat rested, and with help from the big burly guy managed to push and pull the pitiful boat onto it, stuffing the sails, mast and boom into the bottom of the boat’s hull. I then drove the boat to the sailing store in Alexandria. Smiling with anticipation, I walked into a small, empty store, introduced myself to the person behind the counter whom I presumed was the person I had talked to on the phone, and then the two of us walked out to the parking lot behind the store where my car carrying the trailer and boat were. I could tell he was excited to be working on a 505. As we got closer to the boat, I noticed that his smile began to disappear. He did not say a word as a frown began to emerge and we circled the boat two or three times.

Still silent we walked back into the store. Without saying a word, he went behind the counter, then pulled out an ice pick and some scotch tape. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and placed a $1 bill on the counter. He then looked me straight in the eye and in a soft but definitive tone said with a slight grin, “Take this scotch tape and ice pick. Then tape this dollar bill to the hull of the boat and put as many holes as you can in the boat’s bottom and deep six this piece of shit.”

I was stunned, blurting out, “But I thought you said you could fix anything and that you loved the 505s. I don’t understand….”

“Just do as I say and deep six it. It is beyond saving.”

“That’s it? You mean the situation is hopeless?”

“You got it.”

I left the store dejected, kept the scotch tape and dollar bill but left the ice pick. I had no idea about why he gave me the tape and the dollar bill or where he expected me to sink the boat but was too stunned to ask any more questions. I returned home to give Embry the news, then called my friend and co-owner, Scott, to fill him in.

Scott responded, “Well, Joe, I am sorry this happened, especially since I have sailed the boat only twice, but I guess you will have to sell it. Maybe we could get our money back that way. Hopefully we will get what we paid for it. Anyway, don’t go below the $800 we paid for it. Plus, $100 for the trailer.”

That afternoon I posted the following classified ad in the Washington Post to appear in the Sunday edition: “For Sale, 505, world’s fastest sailing dinghy, your ticket to freedom. Needs work, $800 or best offer.” Clever wording, I thought. That should capture attention.

At 8:30 the phone rang. The speaker was exuberant, “Wow, a 505! Fabulous! Great price. Where is the boat located?”

I gave him detailed instructions and warned that it was not in the best of shape. He hung up and said “I’m on my way right now. Don’t sell it to anyone until you hear from me. I am taking my checkbook with me.”

Five minutes later the phone rang again, and the speaker was even more enthusiastic. Then again. In fact, I stopped counting the calls and telephoned Scott to let him know there was a lot of interest. At around 10:30 that morning the phone mysteriously stopped ringing, then around two in the afternoon, telephone calls and voicemail messages started up again in earnest, with the callers all expressing outrage and threatening to sue me for false advertising and ruining their Sunday day off. I apologized when I could and tried to explain that this was my first boat, and I was doing the best I could. By five that afternoon the irate calls had stopped and the phone was mercifully silent. I called Scott to give him the bad news. Then he reminded me that in a couple of months we would have to pay $250 rent to the marina. His last words were “Your problem now. I quit. Do what you want to with the boat but do not ever, ever ask me to buy a boat with you again!”

What to do next? I just wanted to forget that the entire ordeal had happened. I did not notify the marina or pay them $250 rent. In fact, I did not venture back to the marina. They could do what they wanted to with the boat and the trailer. I pretended the entire episode had never happened and assumed that owning a sailboat and living out my father’s dreams was not in the cards. Good try but hopeless.

One week passed. Then another. Then I got a call from a guy asking if the 505 had been sold. I almost broke down into tears, explaining the whole ordeal and how everyone who had seen the boat was upset that I had wasted their time. I told him not to bother to look at it.

“Well,” he said, “I am pretty good with fiberglass and would like at least to take a look.”

“Ok, I will give you the address if you promise not to get mad at me. You are forewarned.”

Later that afternoon the phone rang again. I could tell from the voice that it was the prospective buyer and burst out with an apology.

“I warned you, I told you so. You can’t get mad at me.”

He answered, “Fifty dollars.”

“What do you mean fifty dollars?”

“I will buy the boat and trailer for fifty dollars.”

“Miracle from heaven,” I muttered.

And the deal was done. He stopped by our house with a check that afternoon. At last, I could put it behind me and move on. We did not exactly get our $800 back but at least the boat was going to be someone else’s problem.

Happy ending.

That should be the end of the story, but there is more….

A year passed. Then another year. Then in the winter of 1976, almost two years after the unfortunate incident, I was in an ice skating store watching my six year old son, Andrew, get fitted with a pair of ice skates. The young man fitting him kept giving me funny looks and suddenly stopped fitting Andrew, pointed his finger directly at me and exclaimed, “It is you! I know you. You are the one. You are the guy who sold me that beat up old 505 two years ago.”

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “I apologize. I warned you and I am really, really sorry….”

“Sorry?” he replied smiling, “I fixed that boat up, redid the fiberglass and sold her the next spring for $1,200. I should be the one thanking you!”

And of course, this incident did not deter me from pursuing my dream. Only a few weeks after the 505 experience finally ended, I got another call, this time from another friend who had a sailboat he wanted to sell.

Stay tuned for the Saturday post.

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Dear readers,

I started posting blogs on my josephhowellphotography.com website over 15 years ago, around 2010, and according to the stats on the photography website, the number of blogs posted so far totals over 700. Glancing over the posts I would estimate that about 20 percent have been about travel (including the fabulous 2014 trip with Embry around the world without flying), about 30 percent about politics, about 20 percent about spirituality and the meaning of life, about 20 percent about my life story including several posts which I called “Gullible’s Travels,” documenting that, yes, I am an idiot, and the final 10 percent about miscellaneous topics of whatever I was interested in at the time. I added Substack about a year ago as an alternative venue, but the same stories appear there as are posted on the photo website.

Good heavens! Why on Earth have I been doing this for so long? Am I nuts? Don’t I have a better way to spend my time?

The sad fact is that for me writing is a form of recreation and has become an obsession. I confess that I love the process though it is not always easy, and I admit not always good writing. But, hey, it is what it is, and I intend to keep at it as long as I can though at age of 84, I am surely running my last lap.

The post today is part of a series I am calling “The Sailing Life.”

The Sailing Life 1: “505”

Those who know me know that sailing for me has been a bit of an obsession. Embry and I have owned six sailboats over a 50-year period starting in 1972 and ending sadly a few years ago when we sold our last boat, Second Wind. The first boat was a Sunfish, which we sailed on Lake Norman near Davidson NC where her parents had a lake house when we were both graduate students in Chapel Hill. We never gave that boat a name other than “the green Sunfish” but loved the boat, which we sailed on summer weekends and vacations for decades. That was followed by a 505, which I purchased with a coworker in 1974, also never named, and which is the first subject of the Sailing Life series. Then came Mother Courage,a Wayfarer, a 16-foot daysailer, which we owned from 1975-1990, followed by Amazing Grace, an Alberg 30, which I bought in 1990 from a good friend and sold in the early 2000s to be replaced by a genuine racing boat, a J-30, which I named Carolina Blue because of its bright, sky blue hull and raced her seriously for over a decade, and, last but not least, Second Wind, a Jeanneau 39, formerly part of the Sunsail charter fleet, which I paid two Brits to sail up to the Chesapeake from the British Virgin Islands in 2016. We sold that boat in 2020.

The 505

In the early 1970s when I and another friend purchased the boat from a mutual friend for around $800, the 505 was considered the world’s fastest racing dinghy. Someone told me it lost out to the Flying Dutchman from being accepted for the 1968 Summer Olympics only because it was considered too difficult to keep from capsizing. The boat was sleek, light and elegant, about 18 feet long, and had a trapeze to allow the crew to hang out over the water to keep the boat from capsizing, but my friend, the seller, had warned us that this particular 505 with no name, needed some work. That was an understatement. The boat was a dismal wreck. But what do you expect for $800? And besides I was so anxious to begin serious sailing that my friend, Scott, and I decided to take our chances and bought the boat.

The boats demise happened about three months later on the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July 1974 was a beautiful day, low humidity, sunny skies, temperatures in the mid 80s and a perfect 10-15 knot breeze from the south. Embry and I and Naomi, a good friend, had a fabulous time hanging out over the side of the boat using the trapeze, speeding past other boats and experiencing the euphoria that happens when a sailboat planes and doubles its speed. We assumed all the other sailboats that we passed on that day were looking at us with awe and envy—and there were lot of other sailboats that beautiful July Fourth on the Potomac. And for the first time sailing the 505 there had been no problems. That is, not until we brought her back in so that we could meet other friends and see the fireworks. The sail got stuck coming down causing us to end up about 50 feet downwind from where we needed to be to get into the marina. Hey, no problem. Naomi scampered up a piling, walked the several hundred yards to the marina and thirty minutes later returned riding aboard a huge 2-story houseboat with rock music blaring over a loudspeaker and filled with middle aged couples with big bellies and skinny legs, chugging beer and throwing the empty cans over the side.

“This was the best I could do!” Naomi shouted over the roar of the motor.

All eyes of the 20 or 30 people were on us. The captain threw us a line and then returned to the wheel. “Let me know when you got it secured!” he hollered.

I nodded that everything was secure and heard him yell over the loud motor. “Let her rip, Charlie!”

The boat’s motor roared. The houseboat lurched forward as if it were trying to pull water-skiers out of the water. The 505 was yanked out of the water for a moment, then turned sideways and capsized with contents of our cooler and everything in the boat going into the drink. Embry and I had on life jackets so we were not fearful of drowning but were dumbfounded that the boat owner would use full throttle to tow us.

“Was that too fast for you?” The captain shouted. “I ain’t never rescued no boat before.”

“Well, yes.” I shouted back. “Very, very slow next time.”

I can’t remember how many next times he tried, but each one ended the way the first attempt did and by this time our cooler and everything we had in it and on the boat had drifted away.

Then the captain yelled, “Is that woman pregnant? Your friend says she is five or six months pregnant and the Potomac is filthy! If she is pregnant, she is in danger!”

“Yes!” I shouted back. “She is pregnant!”

“Save the pregnant woman! Save the pregnant woman!” he yelled to his crew as Embry, who was about five months pregnant, started to swim to the enormous boat. The partying continued with people throwing beer cans off the boat, loud rock music blaring, and staring at us with amusement and disbelief. Someone on board offered Embry a hand. She boarded and the boat charged off leaving me alone in the water as motorboats whizzed by without offering any help.

This all happened between 4:00 and 4:30 PM. Over four hours later at 8:45 PM, about a half hour before the fireworks were to begin, I was still in the water with the mostly submerged 505, having drifted several miles up stream due to a rising tide and strong tailwinds. Attempts to rescue me and the 505 had been made by the DC Marine Police, The Maryland Marine Police, The Virginia Marine Police and the U.S. Coast Guard. All had failed. As soon as they started to tow the boat forward, it would capsize due to the hull being almost completely submerged. By this time 505 was directly in front of the Blue Plains Sewage Treatment Plant, noted for being out of date, inadequate, and the major polluter of the Potomac River.

At 8:45 just as it was starting to get dark, the DC Marine police suddenly roared in (for the second or third time) and paused in front of me. “You still here, owner? The fireworks are about to start. We are gonna take you in and your goddamn piece of shit boat and drag you in. They ordered me to unattach the sails, boom and mast so that they would fall to the bottom, freeing the boat from capsizing because with the mast up, the boat could not stay upright. Two or three times when the sail got caught in the prop of the outboard motor, the two furious cops yelled obscenities at me. Finally, totally exhausted I got everything unclipped and watched as the sails, mast and boom ingloriously sank below the surface. I muttered something like “good riddance.” I had suffered enough. Maybe sailing was not going to be my thing after all.

“Okay, owner, you can hop aboard.”

As I climbed up the boarding later, one asked, “Owner, you drink?” and when I nodded yes, he muttered “thank God,” and offered me the last can of what had started off as close to a full case of beer with the empty can holders scattered about. I was amazed that they were able to do as well as they did, since I concluded that they must have consumed at least a couple of six packs each. We all downed our beer, poked the empty cans with ice picks and threw them overboard. The captain’s assistant sheepishly smiled and said, “Hey owner, happy Fourth of July!”

The sun had set and it was starting to get dark but at last I could relax, thankful that finally, finally after four hours of torture and exhaustion I had been rescued. I did not realize that the ultimate humiliation was yet to come.

The fireworks were about to start, and the police pulled the partially submerged boat into the marina where hundreds of people–mainly families with children running helter-skelter–were anxiously waiting for them to begin, bored and looking for amusement. I was to be their amusement.

When I saw people pointing at us and laughing, I was determined to avoid eye contact and to escape from the ridicule so I hopped off the boat when it reached the marina and quickly moved to the back of the crowd of what must have been several hundred people, mainly families with kids. All around me people were gawking and uttering things like “idiot,” “pitiful boat,” “piece of shit,” “didn’t know what he was doing.” Pretending to be just another one of the restless crowed, I found myself uttering the same things, hoping no one would recognize me, until I heard the bellowing voice of the police captain shout, “owner, owner come here now!”

Miraculously as the boat was being hoisted out of the water, one shroud (wire) was still attached and at the end of the shroud came the mast, the boom and the sail. The crowd, which by this time had doubled in size—roared as if a touchdown had just happened. The mast and sails were all saved! A miracle! Maybe I did not have to give up my sailing dream after all. I pushed my way through the anxious crowd watching people stare at me with open mouths and wide eyes, then did a swan dive into the water and rescued the sails and mast.

I headed grimly toward the picnic where Embry and several friends were gathered just as the fireworks were to begin, answered their anxious questions and silently watched the fireworks wondering if my sailing days had ended abruptly.

But that was not the end of the story. What happened next will be the subject of the next post—on Tuesday.

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First, thank you. I know who some of you are but not very many and there are now around 500 viewers on average for most of my posts. The one on old age got over 1,000 clicks. I am both honored and amazed. I love posting these and find blogging to be a kind of therapy. Cheaper than seeing a shrink in these stressful times, to be sure.

I also realize that I have been overdoing it a bit; and taking Embry’s suggestion to heart to give my readers a break, I have decided to keep future posts down to two per week. I will try to post every Tuesday and every Saturday so as not to bombard you with too much. I hope you will stay tuned and stick with me and remain grateful for your interest and perseverance in reading about what is on my mind. And feel free to weigh in. Your comments are always welcomed!

Thank you again and look for my next post on Saturday.

Joe

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Back to Politics.

The first question for today is this: what has Donald J Trump done to destroy our nation during the first year and a half of his second term?

Let me count the ways:

1. He has eviscerated foreign assistance to struggling countries. He has eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and drastically cut back on foreign aid including PEPFAR, the successful Bush 2 initiative that saved the lives of over 25 million people with AIDS, mainly in developing nations. Public health tracking models and independent research estimate that between 600,000 and 760,000 people have died globally due to the abrupt shutdown and deep funding cuts to USAID with roughly two-thirds of those victims being children.

2. He has ripped apart the social safety net in the U.S., including cutting SNAP (food stamps) to needy families and has imposed stiff work requirements for food stamp recipients. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities as of April 2026 4.5 million people had lost their food stamps due to Trump’s orders and the number is increasing every day.

3. He has initiated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols, which have arrested thousands of undocumented immigrants, many living here on expired visas. ICE assaults have resulted in deaths of three U.S. citizens. ICE arrests totaled some 400,000 before July 2026 and have averaged almost 1,700 a day since then. In July of this year 51,000 immigrants were arrested with the vast majority ending up in so called detention centers. At least 52 people died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Trump’s presidency. This marks a sharp surge in fatalities, resulting in the highest annual mortality rate recorded in immigration detention in 20 years.

4. He has initiated the funding and construction of massive concentration camps run by private prison companies to house thousands of immigrants with hundreds more to follow and is trying to eliminate birthright citizenship. Currently there at least 225 detention centers with many more in the pipeline. Daily capacity is now about 70,000 detainees per day projected to increase to over 90,000 by the end of the year.

5. He has allowed the subsidies of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to expire, which will cause millions of lower income Americans to lose their health care—estimated by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities to affect 15 million people, mainly lower income Americans.

6. He has ended effective strategies for addressing homelessness that pair rental assistance with supportive services. I serve on a board of a nonprofit group that provides these services and our budget has been slashed, our staff reduced by almost half and the case load for our social workers expanded. Clients have lost their housing vouchers and do not receive the supportive services they need.

7. He has tried by executive order to eliminate the Department of Education. Most experts see this as hurting low income people. Student aid and Pell grants are being reduced.

8. He has given huge tax cuts to the wealthiest households and weakened the estate tax. Donald Trump’s tax cuts—originating from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and extended or expanded through subsequent legislation like the reconciliation acts of this year—provide a disproportionate share of their financial benefits to high-earning individuals, wealthy families, and large corporations. Nonpartisan analyses indicate that the top 1% of earners will receive the largest monetary reductions, while lower- and middle-income households see only modest gains, if any.

9. He has reduced the federal work force eliminating over 200,000 jobs with more massive cuts to follow, mostly to people who know what they are doing. Sycophants are replacing dedicated public servants.

10. He has enacted broad, disruptive across-the-board tariffs that have fueled inflation, strained supply chains, and created economic hardships. President Trump’s sweeping tariffs have increased consumer costs, averaging a tax increase of roughly $900 to $1,000 per U.S. household per year, kept inflation going, and shifted global supply chains as legal battles continue.

11. He has issued pardons to all involved in the January 6 takeover of the Capitol and has attempted to provide reparations to them.

12. He has used federal agencies to investigate political rivals and critical media organizations. Objects of his wrath include James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Adam Schiff, Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, and Elissa Slotkin, most of whom have had to hire expensive lawyers to defend themselves.

13. He has appointed inept rogues to head up federal agencies and other leadership roles like Pete Hegthseth, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche and others and has surrounded himself with sycophants. The guardrails that were present in his first term have disappeared.

14. He has championed the coal industry, embraced fossil fuels and attacked efforts to expand wind farms and solar energy operations and remains a diehard climate change denier, taking the U.S. out of the Paris Accords.

15. He has continued his relationships with buddy-buddy authoritarian leaders like Erdoğan and Kim Jong Un, waivered on his support for Ukraine and supported Netanyahu and other rogues.

16. His net worth has more than doubled during his second term, surging from an estimated $2.3 billion in early 2024 to approximately $6.5 billion in 2026. This represents an increase of roughly $4 billion in less than 18 months. This does not include the vast increases to the fortunes of his sons and son in law. He has been described by many as the most corrupt president in U.S. history with no one else coming close.

17. He has trashed the nation’s capital. Several thousand armed national guard troops patrol the streets every day, intimidating residents and giving Washington the feeling of a police state. He has spent a fortune tearing down the East Wing of the White House to be replaced by a massive banquet hall that dwarfs the White House, and which will cost over $600 million, half of which will be on the US taxpayer. The $300 million raised from “private donors” comes with strings attached and favors granted. (These efforts have been temporarily halted by a judge’s ruling, but a very large, ugly hole remains.) Trump has closed the Kennedy Center and is in an ongoing dispute regarding its name change to the Trump Kennedy Center. The National Symphony Orchestra is on the verge of bankruptcy. The Reflecting Pool fiasco has already cost more than $16 million, all on the taxpayers, and the algae problem is still not fixed. Trump is persisting in his effort to build the world’s largest arch dwarfing the Arc de Triumph in Paris and is estimated to cost more than $100 million, all on the taxpayers, of course. Homeless encampments have mostly disappeared, but no one knows what has happened to the homeless “campers.”

In summary, Trump’s Washington is a complete mess.

18. And finally, Trump has gotten the U.S. into what dangerously looks like another unnecessary “forever war,” this time against Iran. Trump’s reckless thoughtlessness regarding the War with Iran has already cost the U.S. over $37 billion, depleted a substantial portion of our rocket, missile, and drone arsenals, lost lives including over a hundred innocent Iranian children and 18 U.S. soldiers, and it is a war which the U.S. is not likely to win. The closing of the Straight of Hormuz has disrupted world trade, increased the cost of fuel, and created an international crisis, and there is no telling how this movie—this horror show—will end.

Isn’t this enough for the American people to say enough is enough, to impeach this man, who clearly is showing increasing signs of dementia, and move on? Any one of these atrocities would be enough to get a normal president impeached but not Trump. To his base he is feared and worshipped.

Trump should be impeached, even though it would mean we would get Vance, who may not be much better.

And the second question of the day is what will it take to get a Republican senator or congressman to oppose Trump on any of his outrageous initiatives that I have just listed. What is wrong with these people? Don’t they have any courage to oppose Trump on policies that they must know are wrong and hurt people who are suffering? Don’t they know that most of his ideas make no sense? Don’t they realize that Trump’s actions could bring down the country?

Critical times, these times, and the stakes are so high. Pray that we come through it.

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So the question for today is why do we humans treat each other so badly. Philosophers and theologians have struggled with this question for as long as we Homo sapiens have been able to ask this question. Psychologists, historians and scientists of all types have weighed in, and if you think about it, just about every human being at one time or another has thought about it since it is part of our human nature to try to figure things out.

However, the answer is not all that hard. We humans are animals and all animals struggle for survival. When we feel threatened, we fight back, just like the lowly fly or annoying bumble bee. Darwin got it right—“survival of the fittest.” Not only are we humans animals, we are herd animals, who instinctively follow our leader, even if that leader happens to be named Adolph, Mao, Atilla or Donald. You are right if you protest, “Not everybody follows a bad leader,” but enough do so that a bad leader can and often does do great harm. Conversely, an enlightened and kind leader can make a huge positive difference. But none of us humans get a free ride. We all have hurt others and have been hurt. And part of what causes us to act the way we do is how we were brought up and the difficulties we faced. In other words it is not necessarily all our fault. That is just the way it is on the planet Earth.

I would also argue that the question of why humans treat one another the way we do is at the heart of all the great religions of the world. It is certainly the heart of the Christian faith, which proclaims that one person was all good. That person, of course, was Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians believe was the one and only exception to flawed human nature and for that reason was declared in the creeds to be fully human and fully divine. That message resonated over the centuries and today almost a quarter of the humans living on the planet Earth—some two billion people–answer on Pew surveys that they are Christians. That does not mean that Christianity has got it all right and that the rest of the world has got it all wrong, but it does mean, I think, that Christianity is on to something and that the answer to taming our flawed human instincts is love, not romantic love, but selfless love or agape, as the Greeks called it.

But this still leaves many unanswered questions. I spent three years studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in an effort to figure out the mystery behind Christianity, religious faith, and the meaning of life. Like many of my classmates, I graduated with more questions than answers. That was in 1968, a turbulent time when a majority of us seminarians headed for other careers. I headed to Chapel Hill where I got a masters in city planning. Others went to law school, medical school, business school or to get PhDs to pursue academic careers.

Unlike some of my Union classmates, however, I did not throw in the towel on Christianity and have remained a loyal Episcopalian. Embry deserves much of the credit for this (even though she was brought up as a Presbyterian) in part because she loves singing in the choir. But I confess that I continue to have as many questions as answers. Episcopalians tend have more wiggle room than other denominations with regard to what you believe even though we maintain the ancient liturgy and creeds. And for me our involvement in our neighborhood church for decades is also due to the benefits that come from being part of a loving community.

Yes, we humans are part of the animal kingdom, and, yes, like all living creatures, we are programmed to survive, and, yes, this causes us to hurt others knowingly and unknowingly, and, yes, selfless love—treating others the way you want to be treated—is or at least should be—a guiding principle, but what happens beyond life remains a mystery and beyond my pay grade to fully understand. That is where faith comes in and where I confess that I struggle. But that does not keep me from celebrating and giving thanks for all the blessings that I have received—and I have received many, starting with a strong marriage to an extraordinary partner, wonderful children and grandchildren, good friends, and a fulfilling career– and for the gift of my relatively long life on the planet Earth.

You can’t ask for more.

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