David Hays

My Old Man and the Sea by David and Daniel Hays is about a father and son (respectively) and the growth of their love and respect for each other, and perhaps not inconsistently, the flowering of their independence. That in itself is not so unusual, but most fathers and sons don't build 25 ft sailing yachts to sail around Cape Horn.
The tip of South America has probably the worst weather for any kind of sea vessel of any place on earth. It can take months to beat and tack back and forth against the howling winds that sweep unhindered by any land mass around the bottom of the globe. They were not so foolish as to sail from east to west, so they took a short cut through the Canal on to Easter Island then back around from the west via the Horn. Their voyage covered 17,000 miles and lasted 317 days.

They had an interesting system of reefing the sails for various kinds of weather. It was color-coded with a mnemonic system that related to fear levels. "Red for the first reef stands for 'mere general fear.' [fifteen knot wind] If it blows over twenty, one turns green with nauseating terror, and secures the green line, which is the second reef. Next if it's blowing over thirty knots and shock has set in (the blood has left your extremities), you pull the blue line for the third reef. If the wind picks up more than that, you're scared to death. White is appropriate. That makes the sail tiny."

The voyage continues as father and son explore their past and prior relationship. David remembers Dan's constant pranks at boarding school that necessitated a plea to the headmaster for reinstatement. Dan fears his father's age and other inadequacies - cooking is a jointly recognized incompetence of his, only half-jokingly referred to as "time spent in the galley area, after which, the food scraped out of the utensils and off the walls is served."

David speculates why small boat voyages became a British specialty after the war: " ... the cold and damp and bad food on a tiny boat were indistinguishable from home; they didn't realize that they weren't in their living rooms."
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NO OF PAGES: 255 SUB CAT I: Bar/Bat Mitzvah SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: At age 66, theatrical designer Hays coauthor of the best-seller My Old Man and the Sea (with his son Daniel) Decided to study for his bar mitzvah, making up for decades of neglect in his religious education. This charming but slight memoir mixes the author's account of his classroom experiences among a bunch of 12-year-olds he dubs the ""Hormone Hurricanes"" and a rabbi younger than his son with reflections on his family and his own life path. (Trouble at the acclaimed National Theater for the Deaf, which he founded, has left him unmoored.) Hays's deft touch (not to mention his wife's delightful malapropisms) makes the book an easy read, but the narrative can be choppy: for example, a chapter devoted to a heartfelt account of his mother's death is followed by one that includes his musings on the stresses his preteen classmates must face. The sincerity of Hays's quest can't be doubted; for class, he wrote (and here reprints) a thoughtful essay on what might have happened if Anne Frank had lived. However, his classmates aren't that compelling (they're just kids, after all), and there's discontinuity between his life and his religious experience: he notes that he has already written about the themes of ""growing older and lost love"" in a book about stage lighting. Following his bar mitzvah, he has yet to grapple with some of the deeper questions provoked by the Jewish tradition. This book lacks the magic touch of Hays's last one and is unlikely to perform at a commensurate level; his theatrical background, however, should energize his 6-city tour.NOTES: Purchased from Amazon Marketplace. SUBTITLE: The Bar Mitzvah Journey of a Grown Man… (more)