i never defined myself by income or career. i simply kept myself out of debt and, aside from college, above the poverty line.
my lifestyle was never yachting socialite but more yachting socialist. i spent much of my youth boating with parents and friends. i’d help them drink the beer crew neighbors’ boats on the intracoastal or on way to the bahamas. my partner & i used to take his parent’s boat out and pick up complete strangers new friends who were hanging out on seawalls. we were completely nutz and had amazing fun together.
life pretty much went like that until my partner died at 35, when i went from party boy into a few years of deep depression. then the ol’man died, the boats were gone. i lost interest in my other boating friends. mom & i started dealing with her alzheimer’s by ourselves for the first 5-8 years because she wanted to keep her life running as normal as possible. we considered getting a small boat. i asked my sil (who i didn’t get along with at the time) how she saw her family using the new boat so i’d know how to shop. she said to me “we’ll be taking it out every weekend. i don’t know when you’re going to use it but that’s the only time we have.” how odd because i was expecting something like: we’d like to go out for a few days at a time or just some day cruises or something with a lot of shade. so instead of shopping i went back to mom and said “no boat.”
landlocked ever since, i found a cheap little cottage in crack town and settled in, working for once good but later crappy mcfortune5 and working to clean up my town before mom became too much of a responsibility that i had to let go of my civic work. shortly after, my little area would be featured on the front page of the new york times for its transformation. still, mostly an observer by nature, life for me has always been a bit less of what i did and a bit more of where i was. how much money i made was probably one of the most irrelevant parts of my life.
had i been raised in the midwest rather than on the east coast, i would have been just as happy riding a horse or spending my afternoons laying in a field and chewing on a blade of grass. i am that lazy.
in considering where i want to find myself into my early retired future i’m still keeping boats in mind but think i will do land-based travel first. but in the last two years i started going to marinas again to see what’s to be found there. as i seem to happen upon frequent coincidence in life, it was pleasant but not a complete surprise that on my very first dock walk after many years of staying away, i came across one of the boats i used to play on which belonged to a friend when i was in my 20s. it was being renovated and looked like they were doing a beautiful job on an absolutely gorgeous historic vessel now in charter service up north. i just found a picture online.
this is what you can enjoy in life on minimum wage and without even trying, but just by being there, smiling and introducing yourself…