Julia awoke this morning with a question on her mind that became pretty evident when she handed me a coffee and asked, “What if we were to build our own boat?” My head was still a little foggy and I must have looked pretty stupid for a few seconds because she started laughing. She then asked again, “What if we build our own boat?”
I finally registered the question this time and responded, “Anything is possible I guess. Yeah… We could probably do that.”
She then asked, “Why not design our own? Or, simply take something that already has a manufactured hull, like a rowboat, and retrofit it two our own needs?”
I thought about it before answering, “Retrofitting a rowboat might be cheaper and easier than building a sailboat from the ground up. Yeah. That would be doable.”
Julia then asked rather slyly, “You’ve already thought about how to convert a rowboat to sailboat once before, haven’t you?” I nodded before saying, “A long time ago.”
She then asked, “How come you gave up on the whole boat building thing? I mean… I get that you couldn’t do the drafting part yourself. But you can create models of what you see in your head, can’t you?”
I nodded again saying, “I’m not all that great at it though. Making accurate cuts in any kind of a material is a real bitch for me and…” She finished the sentence by saying, “And it’s frustrating when you know you’re attempting to model something someone else will need to interpret accurately. I get that.”
She then said, “But there is one possibility with regard to the accurate modeling of what you want.” I asked, “And that is?”
She then slipped an arm around me as we sat on our love seat drinking coffee in the bedroom saying, “You are assuming that you’d be making the model for someone who can’t see your vision. But, if you were making a model for someone who was already a draftsman experienced in marine engineering… Well… Given the high standard you hold yourself to… They’d have no problem understanding your concept even if ‘you’ didn’t feel the model was a perfect rendition.”
She then took my coffee cup, which still had coffee in it and set it down on the small table next to her end of the love seat saying, “You don’t have to build the perfect model to share your ideas for the perfect boat, or anything else. And… Even if you do screw the pooch on the first few attempts at it… Well… Practice does make perfect, or at least a rendition close enough to it.”
And… At the close of that statement she kissed me deeply, pulling me into her as she did so. The girl’s got strong arms for sure. “Gentle, but strong!”
From that point on, I could swear she was trying to help me break my addiction to coffee by getting me addicted to her instead. We moved from the love seat to the bed before heading into the shower together. Funny thing about our coffees. “They never did get finished and we didn’t miss them for the rest of the day, either!”