[Public-List] Here's a good one...

[Gordon Laco]

Hi Jonathan, 

Needless to say I didn’t know about the oversized, wrong profiled hole until the other day.    I used butyl resin from a tube because it’s thick, and LifeCaulk’s ‘Life Seal’ to butter up the flange inside and out.

Next winter I’m going to close the hole with cloth and epoxy… sand it smooth then start again with the correctly sized hole. 

I’m thinking unkind thoughts about my friend who did the installation.  He was a fellow who had crewed for me when I ran the historic schooner gunboat at the local historic site and become a friend… a very nice guy whose life seemed to suddenly fall apart on him.   He was out of work and literally on the street so I hired him to do some fitting out jobs on SURPRISE.   That’s when I had a shock.   When I asked him if he’d take the list on as a paid job, he looked skyward, spread his arms palms upward and shouted ’THANK YOU JESUS!’.  (What?)

It transpired he’d fallen into the grips of an evangelical entrepreneur who’d advised him he needed to change his life.  This involved leaving his wife, handing over all his money to the congregation and quitting his job.  These acts of abasement would effectively lay him out flat, for Jesus to pick up.   The idea was that he needed to wipe his slate clean in order to be remolded and have his life rebuilt, confirming his faith.

My comment at the time was ‘Gee Doug, it’s not The Lord who’s hiring you to install my new head and knot meter, it’s your buddy Gord who wants to help you'.   Well to him that was the Lord’s work through me.  So be it, thought I.

So away he went working and got the job done.  We fed him meals during the project, during which he’d tell my wife and I we were going to hell along with our two sons because we didn’t go to his evangelical congregation with him.   I have to say his descriptions of people in raptures and sweating shouting matches 'speaking in tongues' didn’t much appeal to us.   One time my wife said to him ‘does it not occur to you that you’re throwing God’s gift of intelligence back in his face’.  He didn’t see it that way, but told her that God made women to be a tool for the devil… 

On days he wasn’t there his wife would come by and weep while telling us how she’d tried to help him but failed.

That was a long time ago and we’re not in touch anymore.  We fell out of communication when he told us about a year later he’d met a new girlfriend at the church he belonged to and wanted to marry her.  We congratulated him.  Then he told us his pastor told him before he remarried, he needed to go back to his ex-wife and make an attempt to make up with her and re-marry HER.   Hmmm, said I, do you really want to do that?  He said he didn’t, absolutely not, but because he’d been told he had to by the evangelist, he was going to.   Needless to say his ex-wife told him to #&%$-off and he happily married the new one.

So what’s the point of all this retrospective?  I’m tempted to look him up and ask him if he knew the poem read to professional engineers when they’re graduated and given their iron rings. It’s called ’The Sons of Martha’ by Rudyard Kipling. It’s about responsibility when one is being relied upon to do a good job….   Part of it goes:

“They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His pity allows them to leave their job when they damn-well choose.”

So Doug, that through hull installation was a slow booby-trap you left me.  If that thing had let go while making a passage somewhere, like we do every year, you might have killed me and my wife and my sons.  Perhaps God might have delivered us somehow with a miracle to keep the boat afloat… perhaps somehow a divine force induced me to change that transducer the other day while I was in my slip at the club and there was a full service marina just next door that was still open for business…. was it a test of my faith?   I don’t think so, not yet Doug, wherever you are.   But I think I’d like to talk to you about it.


Gord
426 Surprise
705-527-9612



> On May 18, 2023, at 2:55 PM, Jonathan Bresler via Public-List <public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:
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