The Tender

Mashal: lemah hadavar domeh? A parable: what circumstance does the situation resemble?

The charts contained our people's everything. They told us where it was possible to go and how to get there. Ancient and difficult to read, they were bound into large folio volumes that we spent years learning to decipher. The very stars, beckoning brightly, were written into those thick books. We would drill each other on the finer points of navigation, hoping to reach a degree of mastery that might allow us to go to sea.

But how to sail, when there were no ship's quarters for us, when there never had been? It was practically only yesterday that we were even permitted to hold the folios in our own hands, to pore over the charts for ourselves instead of being told what was in them. Our mothers had not been able to touch the volumes or to learn the notation in which they were written. Gazing up at the stars in the sky and then poring over the charts in the books should have been enough for our generation. Maybe somebody would eventually put out to sea, but not yet.

Determined to sail, some of us lugged our books to the pier and waited. We had faith: surely our ship would come in.

The books in our valises were very heavy. We stood on the docks, hoping and joking and trading tidbits of what we had learned of them so far. We dreamed about the nights to come, when we would fix our eyes on the stars, consult our charts, and plot a course. Frigates and clippers put in at port; so did barges, yachts, and capacious liners. None of them were for us.

Waiting by the docks eventually got tiresome. Impractical. We had lives to live, after all. We felt foolish lingering there, spurned. We drifted away from the pier and found other pursuits and tried to approximate sailing. Many of us sought work within view of the waterfront, with its hubbub of ships coming in and going out to sea, all the would-be sailors carting the same heavy books to lead them by way of the stars. We could just make out a new generation huddled at the pier.

Years passed. Stories reached us. One woman had gone out in a launch on her own. Another had inherited a sloop from her father, with lessons on how to maneuver it. A third had jerry-rigged a raft; nobody knew yet whether it would be seaworthy. Working at our dockside jobs, we heard the news: our ship had come in at last and taken aboard the small group of those who stood ready at the pier. They would be sailing the seas together.

We had missed the boat.

We saw one another seldom, but when we caught each other's eyes, we fought back tears. We were thrilled for those setting out to sea, and at the same time, envious that we were not to be among them. We had wanted to sail so badly.

Imagine our joy when word reached us that the ship was sending back a tender to ferry us. That is what the dear little boat is called: a tender! They had never meant to leave us behind, just as we would not have wanted to leave behind our mothers. We erupted in whoops and full-throated sobs of joy. We hoisted our valises hastily and skipped to the pier. Or maybe we walked in more stately fashion because we were older now, beyond skipping age. But our hearts skipped.

It happened so suddenly. Just like that, we were aboard, and while the years of distracted waiting were not quite erased, the pain of them receded with the dry land. We were skimming over the sea, together.

We went to our staterooms to unpack; after all, we would need our charts handy. Opening the valises we had lugged, we found a surprise. We had never noticed that the big, heavy tomes were nestled in soft wadding that varied in color, texture, and thickness. Some of the stuffing looked bright and new...