Ship to shore
My favorite uncle was a merchant seaman. He died six years ago (can it really be that long?), and I’m his executor. Going through some papers recently, my wife came across a listing of all his berths prepared by the maritime union. It was a strange experience to see someone’s life and whereabouts laid out at length like that and with such terse precision: two sheets of paper that covered 21 years and who knows how many tens of thousands of miles.
Billy had always been a rover. He nearly joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War - not out of only ideological commitment, he explained to me. “Some guys I knew were talking about it, and it sounded like something interesting to do.’’ He’d already been in the Army (where, bless him, he was court-martialed because one Christmas Eve he was on guard duty and, it being the holidays and all, he figured he’d give an overnight furlough to the one prisoner in the stockade). When he tried to reenlist, after Pearl Harbor, he was rejected because of a bad leg. So he joined the Merchant Marine and liked it well enough to stay in once the war ended. He hitched a ride on an Army truck and rode through the ruins of Tokyo just days after the Japanese surrender. Smoked marijuana in Chile. Watched a shipmate in Basra topple over dead with heat stroke. Savored Dover sole that a friendly cook set aside from the captain’s table during a year and a half he spent working on the luxury liner SS America.
In contrast to my uncle, and the 70-plus ships he sailed on, mostly tankers, I’ve stayed on dry land with just one full-time employer in three decades. Bad enough to be such a stick in the mud in this age of workplace mobility. Looking at Billy’s list I feel more like a stick in the cement. My employment history would barely cover two lines, let alone two pages (and forget about all those nautical miles). It’s true that I’ve had several jobs here at the Globe. There have been about nine, by my reckoning. So with the next one (if there’s a next one) I hit double figures. Still, having the same employer for three decades nowadays is so rare it sounds like something out of the 19th century. You’d think I commuted to work by horse and buggy.
Yet the funny thing is maybe I’ll end up following my uncle’s example, after all, only backward. The rover, once he settled down, did so with a vengeance. After developing tuberculosis, in Singapore, in 1965, Billy spent several months recuperating and came back to the States on disability. Returning to the town where he grew up, he never left, other than to move two towns over to senior housing when my aunt got sick. He tended bar and played golf and gladly stayed put. I drove him and his younger brother to Saratoga once, to play the horses, and a couple of times to visit my sister, his favorite niece, just over the border in upstate New York. He also went to Rhode Island for her college graduation, and there were a few day trips to New Hampshire for 18 holes at a course he particularly liked. Other than that, he never crossed the state line, so far as I know, for nearly four decades. He certainly had the time and enough money to travel, but no inclination whatsoever.
I’m a couple of years older now than my uncle was when he came back from Singapore to stay. So just as he wandered and then stayed put, maybe it’s my turn to do the opposite. The Strait of Malacca? Santiago? The Persian Gulf? Tackling a typhoon or two? (Billy, who may have been the most fearless person I’ve known, said the most scared he ever felt - other than in the presence of my grandfather - was sailing through a typhoon off the Philippines shortly after the war.) Such a switch isn’t very likely, of course - or, frankly, desirable. I was seasick once, crossing the Irish Sea, and that was one time too many. Yet even if I continue to stay in one place, Billy and I have this in common: He had the globe for his workplace, and I’ve had the Globe for mine.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 
