Kagan, bring the dory home

I spent this afternoon sailing on the Charles. It was marvelous.

I'd never been sailing before in any sense that involved active participation, and I am pleased to report that I only got smacked in the head with the boom once and we never capsized. This was courtesy of Shlomo, who does not have a livejournal, but who does have access to the boathouse at MIT; we took out a dinghy and zigzagged back and forth between the Longfellow and Harvard Bridges. The wind died each time one of us commented on it, but mostly the weather was fine so long as we stayed away from it conversationally. ("In zer old country, zer scenery is psychotropic . . .") There were windsurfers and duck tours and other sailboats, even a gondola out on the water. The riverbanks look different from in between, so that even this familiar stretch might have been somewhere else. I know now what a halyard is; I was right about which side is starboard and which side is port. I should like very much to do this more often.

Most of Gordon Bok's "Peter Kagan and the Wind" makes much more sense now.