Here’s an intriguing excerpt from a story in today’s (June 18) Los Angeles Times (I get it on line).

Eight years ago, Dave Dixon set himself some lofty goals, especially for an unemployed, twice-divorced middle-aged man with no savings. He wanted to live on the water in Newport Beach. (CA). He didn’t care to work too much. And he aspired to play golf and tennis several times a week.

Today, Dixon, 60, is living his dream, albeit with some compromises. He lives aboard a weathered, beat-up 37-foot mahogany boat he bought on a credit card for $10,000. Lacking a permanent mooring, he often is forced to anchor in the open sea off Corona del Mar, and for hot showers he uses the Orange County Harbor Patrol’s guest facilities.

To get around on land, he owns a battered car with more than 300,000 miles on it.

Yet he works only about 15 hours a week, singing at private parties and two Orange County restaurants to cover his lean $565 in monthly expenses (not including food). He gets out on the tennis court or links almost every day, enough to whittle down his golf handicap to seven and his weight by 40 pounds. And he is rocked to sleep each night by the rhythm of the water, surrounded by multimillion-dollar views of the bay.

All in all, he considers himself one of the richest residents of this pricey beach town.
• *End excerpt*

Sometime around 1959-60, Jay and I took a bus to Cos Cob, Connecticut to look at a 40-foot motor-sailer named the Talisu. Its owner was selling it for $2,000. Well, yes, it needed work. Jay’s dream, which became mine, too, was to live on it, perhaps mooring it at the 79th Street Boat Basin in Manhattan. When we saw it, it was stuck in the sand in a shallow part off the coast and we walked to it. The truth was we didn’t have $2,000 so the dream went a-foundering. It’s probably just as well, because, considering Jay’s lack of money ethic, we would probably have turned homeless at some point. The other part is that New York’s sometimes bitterly cold winters (and on the water, yet) would have made life on the boat somewhat rigorous.

Jay told me that living thus would require a certain amount of no-clutter discipline but that we could have a small piano. Oh, joy. And can you imagine how long a piano would last on salt water without temperature/humidity control? Ed and I live on a back bay of Charlotte Harbor, only yards from the seawall. My piano man warned us never to open up our house in good-weather days because no matter how apparently low the humidity, it would be disastrous to my 6’ 2” Mason-Hamlin (1919).

Actually life on a boat, near the city but not in it, appealed to me enormously but, given who we were, we probably couldn’t have made it work. Still I remember with a great deal of wonder and warmth the days when all things seemed possible in the company of a boon companion.

xx, Teal

Comments:

Living on a boat sounds better than it probably would
have been in the real life day to day grind,
(loved jon's description!) but I'm
sorry you and J didn't get to try it.

Freedom comes in all kinds of packages and it sounds like Dixon has achieved it.

comment by jondude on June 18, 2008 5:33 AM ()

Dixon is apparently happy with living on a shoestring. Not many
of us are. My Mason-Hamlin could sound the way it did when it
was built, with a rebuild. When we can manage it, Ed says we'll
have it done. Civilians can't tell but I (probably you too)
can tell the difference. Yet it still sounds better than any
of the pianos I play at various times in the local piano
showrooms and that includes the Steinways.

Boat living (I am thinking Greek tycoon yachts) could be okay if
you have the money. Sigh.

reply by tealstar on June 18, 2008 4:11 PM ()