George finally retired. Not merely FROM his company and his Connecticut commuter train to New York, but TO a substantial year round house in what he called Old Bell Harbor, Maine. That wasn’t the town’s name. His retirement town had an old bell in a church steeple that rang in an intrusive way whenever the wind off the ocean kicked up to a serious degree. He retired thus to an unforeseen and sometimes relentless noise. His wife seemed able to ignore it, found it part of Maine’s ocean side charm, and was fully distracted from it by her new circle of bridge playing summer residents. Their children never heard it, since they had chosen to live in Colorado. Their son George Junior was a ski instructor and their daughter Molly, named for her mother’s mother married a friend of her brother, also a ski bum of sorts. They lived happily off George’s money and seldom phoned. The bell persisted, but only George heard it, or so it seemed to him. He wasn’t a sailor, but he bought a boat. Not a big one, in fact a rather small one that had been owned by the so called Commander of the Sailing Club. The man had directed the races from the bow of his launch with a foghorn at his lips, the wheel in one hand, his other arm waving at the competing kids. The old man dropped dead one afternoon, the boat drifted on to some shore rocks, and George bought it on a whim. He hired a college kid to be its skipper and he sat on a fold up chair in the stern. One day that was seriously windy, George instructed his young and supposedly experienced summer skipper to take him out for a long ride. Straight out to sea, he instructed. His desire was to head out into the wind as far as it would take to where he would no longer hear the Old Bell. He sat back in his chair, in his shorts and colorful retirement shirt, under his large straw hat, and stared ahead at the back of his stand up skipper whose hands gripped the wheel, and drove the old boat at its rather slow but steady pace. He was thinking the words, Full Steam Ahead. At a certain sudden interrupting point George waved both hands and shouted the words “I don’t hear anything ! Only the wind !” Thank God, he whispered, feeling almost religious. The skipper didn’t hear him and kept going straight ahead. George was all right with that. He didn’t get up to stop him.HWM