Modeling life
Above, the author peering in the forward hatch of the model of Phyllis. David Roper photo.
June 2024
By David Roper
I remember leaning over the forward hatch of his model of Phyllis, peering down, saying good night to him at day’s end when leaving my office. I knew he was there – some of him, anyway – inside a silver thimble that served as an urn and sat on a bunk in the miniature forward cabin of the model sailboat he’d built. When he had finally finished it, having worked in painstaking detail over the three years while Mom was bedridden and dwindling to nothing, he’d said to me: “Don’t know about what your mother wants, but I put a tiny thimble down there in the forepeak for me. Put a few of my ashes in it after I’m gone, will you, pal? It’s a finishing touch that I can’t possibly do.” And then he laughed, in spite of it all.
In the three years while my elderly dad had cared for my bedridden mom at home, he was pretty much house-bound. So he thought, “I’ll make a model of Phyllis, the family boat . . . the boat we spent our honeymoon on over 50 years ago . . . the boat the three boys were raised on . . . the boat we learned a lot about life on.” It didn’t matter that he hadn’t built an intricate model boat before. He just began with seven blocks of wood stacked up and, like life, he worked his way through it. It gave him purpose at a time when his one care, my mom, was at the end of the line. While he shaped and hollowed out the hull, and built from scratch every piece you see here – down to the tiny red towels monogrammed with “Phyllis” – his memories of life on the real Phyllis floated back.
I remember my first time going down to his basement workshop. I remember the smells, a blend of sweet-smelling wood chips, a bit of furnace oil, and the evocative scent of old sailing gear from our beloved family boat: a ball of tarred yacht marlin, manila docking lines, faded kapok life jackets. And I remember watching him, an 85-year-old still focused on building something, and doing so with care. “How are you going to make a model of a fully rigged sailboat from a pile of scrap pine boards, Dad?” I asked. He just winked at me. “It’ll take forever, even if you figure out how to do it,” I added. He just smiled.
Somehow, in the end, he had perfectly hand-fashioned every part: a miniature anchor, tiny clock and barometer, coal stove, winches and rigging, and a forward hatch. “You went aboard through that hatch in August of 1950 as a newborn, wedged into the forepeak in a basket,” he said. “You may not remember. But I do.” His attachment, and now mine, to Phyllis, are reasons I don’t question. Dad had learned the ropes of life by then. Part of that, I guess, was not letting go of what is good and true, but rather, celebrating those things by continuing to build something, and by doing so, rekindling and creating more memories, including this one for me: that of an elderly dad and his middle-aged son standing shoulder to shoulder in a basement workshop, each temporarily forgetting the knots of their lives, each drifting back in time, while they built something new. It was bit by bit, tiny piece by tiny piece as the model took shape, that we shared the missing pieces of who we really were, of what we always should have shared, of what we meant to each other. For a time, and sometimes for all their time, fathers and sons hold back much from each other, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of pride, perhaps out of cowardice or shame. But always there comes a point when the sands of time have almost drained from the glass, when there’s little chance left to share what really matters, and, like the lines of a well-drawn hull, what is really true. That time had finally come.
David Roper’s new novel, “The Ghosts of Gadus Island: A Story of Young Love, Loss, and the Order of Nature,” is now available. Dave is the author of the three-time bestseller “Watching for Mermaids,” as well as the sequel “Beyond Mermaids” and the novel “Rounding the Bend.” Buy them at Amazon.com or roperbooks.com.
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