Jen's Column / Jay's Boat

Hi Everyone! I'm playing catch-up tonight and flowing in my two most-recent columns. The most recent (8/29) column is the "Back to School" column about Bergen. It's below this posting. :), Jen

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Eleven years ago, my new husband and I filled a serving bowl with several small, folded slips of paper. On each was a single word: Piano. Vacation. Camera.

With much fanfare, we blindly drew a folded piece of paper (“Boat”) and taped it to a glass jar. The plan was to save our loose change in the jar until we could afford the dream purchase taped to it. Once we bought the boat, we’d draw another slip of paper.

The piano, vacation and camera? Got it, did it, own it. The glass jar saving our loose change? Sold in a garage sale in ’03.
Last month, Jay finally got his fishing boat.

It wasn’t because I was holding out on him — pre-empting his boat for my piano or my birthday trip to New York City. No, the delay was all his.

Approximately 250 boats (not that I’m counting) have come under his scrutiny in the last four years. He’s fastidiously inspected them, studied them, thumped them like cantaloupes.

Under Jay’s critical examination, not one of these specimens was quite right. They were too old, too new, too costly. They had a dent, a scratch, a spot of mildew. They were the wrong length. They had the wrong hull. Some had too many seats. Some had too few. Some had the wrong kind of seats altogether.

We really couldn’t be more different on this front, my husband and I. Where I’m impatient and impulsive, Jay’s willing to hold out. He knows what he wants — and he’ll wait as long as it takes to find it.

I realize this is a quality that should impress me. In this particular case, however, it just left me hollering, “Buy a boat already!”

But instead of buying a boat, Jay just talked about buying a boat. All day. Every day. And when he wasn’t talking about buying a boat, he was driving to boat dealerships. And when he wasn’t driving to dealerships, he was surfing boat Web sites. And when he wasn’t searching boat Web sites, he was scouring the classifieds.

He had certain non-negotiable criteria that even I learned to rattle off without taking a breath: 16-foot, deep-V hull, captains chairs, rod holders, minimum 25 horse motor, tiller, live well, bilge pump.

It became clear to me that if we didn’t have a boat in the garage this summer, it would be the end of our marriage. I called my dad.

“It is essential to your daughter’s happiness that you find my husband a boat,” I blurted as soon as he picked up the phone.

His puzzled silence didn’t deter me.

“This is Jen. Listen. I NEED Jay to own a boat.”

“I don’t know,” my dad finally answered. “None of the boats I’ve shown him have been right.”

Jay must’ve seen the crazed look in my eyes (or maybe my father called to warn him) because he found a boat — THE boat — on his own that very week.

But it’s not over. Now he’s in the garage every night, practically wiping the thing down with a diaper before bed. He’s drilling things and wiring things and adding mood lights. Last week I caught him staring into the live well, mumbling something about installing a light that would make it shine like an aquarium.

I’ve waved the white flag — or actually, a black one. Last week, in a show of support, I bought Jay a Jolly Roger to fly overhead.