In May, 1981, I placed an ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer seeking information about my father, who died when I was ten. I had recently married my late husband John aboard Phaedrus, an old fifty-foot, fifty-ton Norwegian wood sailboat that we lived on in Stamford, Connecticut. Huge red, yellow, and purple paper flowers flew from the rigging, and we dreamed of sailing away someday. I had gained the confidence (or foolhardiness) to start my own market research business, after years of working for others. My life was blooming, opening up, and I longed for my dad to see how well I'd done. He wouldn't have thought much of my brief, ill-fated first marriage to my college boyfriend, but he would have loved John's sense of adventure.
In working on my new book about growing up in Cleveland without Dad, I'm trying to understand how I came to feel so alone after he died, losing my family, my sense of home, even ties to Judaism. I feel compassion towards my young thirty-something self, desperately seeking connection to my father. I wanted to hear stories about him from those who loved him, too. My mother, brother, and sister were unreliable narrators.
If you want to learn more about my three-year sailing adventure with my husband and young daughter when we left everything behind to follow John's lifelong dream and sail away, go here to find Holding Fast: A Memoir of Sailing, Love, and Loss.