Beowulf and Ships' Day

The man in the hat chose a rattan boater in celebration of Ships’ Day, which was observed ever seven years. He couldn’t help but confederate Ships’ Day with the rise and fly of the Locust, or cicada, and the high-tonal staccato that was rivaled only by racing car engines and old people coughing. His great grandfather suffered from the whooping, as his mother called it, and was forever clearing his throat and woofing like a Beowulf dog. His great grandmother, unable to assuage her husbands coughing, took to plugging her ears with candle wax or sitting in the attic away from her husband’s whooping, which reminded her of a hunter’s call or a man on the precipice of death, one rail away from expiration, an ungodly way to meet death, so she thought.

Thus Ships’ Day began, no ordinary day but a day just the same. It could very well have been Jurymast Day or Halyard Day, or the day that precedes Ships’ Day when Junkers and rowboats and dory’s arrive in port, moored to pig-stumps with cinch-ropes, one-legged salts and rigging-monkeys, some with lancet scars, others just plain ugly, jumping ship, sailor’s hats in hand, eyes trained on the plank-board lest they loose their balance and fall willy-nilly into the drink. The man in the hat had never sailed a ship, nor rowed a dory for that matter, or driven a car faster than fifty miles per hour even though he knew he could, blindfolded and with no hands if he wanted, which he didn’t, so didn’t bother to think otherwise.