An Irresponsible Adult has been rejected by the Boston ageny who represents my friend Lou Ureneck. There were some encouraging words (if you are scraping for compliments) and the explanation that it's a tough market.
In anticipation of this moment, due to the fact that getting an agent is the toughest element in getting published, I had already begun sending query letters to other agents. Given agent response times, if you waited for one to respond, it could be five years before you got a positive answer should one in ten be interested in representing you.
The rejection came before the shoulder surgery, which was accomplished without complications on Friday. Now the left arm is in a device called a SuperSling, a contrapition of straps and hook-and-loop fasteners that incudes a large block of foam on the inside of the forearm to keep it in position below the shoulder.
I finally got a good night of sleep last night with the help of oxycodone. I'm stalling the morning dose because it keeps me sleepy. Equally important at this stage is a heavy dose of endlessly stupid television, which keeps me somewhat distracted from the discomfort which, on the ever-present scale of 1 to 10, where 7 is breathtaking and 9 makes you weep uncontrolably, is about a 3, but annoying.
When I was a kid, I used to refuse novocaine when my teeth were drilled because I wanted to be tough. I've softened with age.

For those of us who like white in the winter, this has been a great year in New Jersey. The latest arrival of snow began before daybreak today, and by the time Thelma and I were headed up the driveway, there was an accumulation of not quite an inch.
Zippy, the cat, was already out. He loves to go along for our walks, but it makes me nervous because of his habit of stopping in the middle of the street, sitting, ears perked, and surveying the landscape.
When we were half way up the driveway, I turned around and there he was, crossing the lawn toward the cupola, stored near the end of the driveway where it waits to be hoisted to the roof. Then he turned and trotted directly for us.
Zippy stands out on a snowy background because he is almost entirely black. Thelma and I turned toward the river when we reached the street, but I kept glancing back, expecting to see Zippy's pointed ears above the groundcover bordering the driveway.
We had made it about 100 feet along the still wet pavement and I had yet to see Zippy's ears when a large township truck with a plow raised in front came roaring up the street. I held my breath, hoping that Zippy wouldn't step out in front of the plow. I hoped he heard it coming.
The plow truck thundered by, and still no sight of Zippy. Good, I thought.
Thelma was her usual thorough self, sniffing every crystal of roadside snow as the new flakes fell softly. They coated the tree branches and filled the cupped, shiny leaves of boxwood shrubs like a confection.
About 200 feet from the river bank, as we walked beside a large property whose owners recently purchased and restored their riverfront mansion, I saw a motion through the trees on their riverfront lawn. A large doe, gray in the early, flat light, bounded from the left across the snow-covered grass. She was followed by two adolescent fawn.
The offspring matched the rhythm of their mother's leaps, tails straight up, until she stopped with a suddenness that suggested alarm. The doe looked directly at Thelma and me, shifted her head from side to side, sought an improved perspective. Beside her, one of the fawn mimicked her, looking in our general direction.
I waved.
The doe looked some more. Then she leaped to the right again and disappeared behind the next riverfront house.
Back where the deer had left their loping tracks across the lawn, a gray squirrel scampered in their path, banking off each tree trunk that he approached.
Thelma, having seen the river once again, turned and headed home. As we came down the driveway, I saw Zippy ahead, rubbing his shoulder against the cupola.
I think the predatory snow plow had scared him back from the street. He is only a little less wild than the doe and her youngsters.

I heard it on the television traffic report early this morning. The draw bridge downstream had just opened for a northbound ship. The upstream drawbridge would open in 20 minutes.
I was, at the moment, harnessing Thelma for her morning walk, and in her old age she walks slowly. That meant there was a chance I'd see the ship pass the end of the street.
I was excited.
I hurried Thelma out the front door.
There was a time when a ship passing on the river was a daily affair, a time when the industry upriver still thrived.
Then, there was a steel mill, a magnet that drew ore ships to its docks. There were coal barges that visited the power plants on the river banks. There was the drywall plant where bulk ships laden with gypsum unloaded mountains of white powder that was pushed about by large bulldozers. There were pipe plants that made huge sewer pipes and a wire rope plant that, in its heyday, provided the cable for the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now, most of the mills and factories have closed. If theiir work is done, it is done elsewhere. Only the power and drywall plants remain, and, with the housing market in shambles, the drywall plant isn't that busy, either.
So the shipping on the Delaware is sparse this far up the river.
An arrival or a departure is a special occasion for those of us drawn to the sea.
I tugged on Thelma's leash, urging her toward the river. It was a gray, drizzling morning, still cold with compacted snow covering most of the ground. Thelma needed to investigate each clump of snow or, in her dotage, stand staring aimlessly, imobile.
I kept an eye down the street, which ends at the river, and no ship had passed before we arrived. Thelma and I left the pavement for the riverside grass and I looked downstream as she sniffed, hoping to see the bow of the ship poke from behind the trees at the next bend, Beverly Point, beyond the green and red buoys. The mist was thick, the riverbank features muted or invisible at the bend, which is nearly two miles away. I saw nothing.
Nor did I hear the thrum of big ship engines.
So we turned back toward home. I tried to see through the trees along the riverbank, see the gray hulk of an approaching bulk carrier or the cranes rising from its deck. Nothing.
Impatient and in need of a nautical fix, I pulled Thelma back toward the river to get a final clear view.
There it was, already well past Beverly Point, making its turn toward us .
But now I had wasted much time. I needed to get home. Monica's bus would be arriving and my job is to driver her there.
As Thelma poked her way back toward home, I walked backward, expectant. But the tide was falling and the ship was steaming against the current.
By the time we turned into our driveway, the ship had not appeared.
Thelma poked some more. Zippy, the cat, who had sought protection from the mist under one of our cars, came up the driveway to greet us, and the three of us headed slowly for the door.
We were on the brick walkway and would be inside the house within a minute when I heard it. Coming from a quarter mile away or more was the deep-throated rumble of those big marine engines, a sound seizmic in nature. My day was starting right.

The publication date for Eight Survived: The Harrowing Story of the U.S.S. Flier and the Only Downed World War II Submariners to Survive and Evade Capture will be October 5, 2010. That's the day by which copies of the book should have been delivered to bookstores.
The publisher is in the midst of selecting which black-and-white photographs will be included in the book. My editor, Keith, is supposed to be making sure we have permission to use each of the pictures. If we don't then that is the last thing I will have to accomplish.
Next to last is getting a portrait of myself to go on the book. At Monica's suggestion, I asked our friend, Gene Smith ( genesmithstudio.com ,) to take the picture. He has agreed.
The G-Man, as we call him, is a superior professional photographer. His work has illustrated the outsides of the boxes of a certain international toymaker, for example. He is also a sailor of long standing. His "rod" is a Pearson 323.
Gene wanted a specific costume for the shoot. "I'd like to get one of you in one of those great Hemmingway/Sub-mariner wool turtlenecks," he wrote in an email.
Honesty requires me to say that vanity compelled me to reject his suggestion. I think they left out a vertebrae or two when they built my body. The result is a short torso which, I think, makes a turtleneck look absurd.
So we're working on the wardrobe. Who knew this would be so difficult? I think the publisher would have been happy if Monica had snapped a quick one with her digital camera.

Robin was fine when I visited her today. Her deck was blanketed by a foot of old snow, kept cold by a two-inch-thick layer of ice lying on the teak beneath the snow.
John Morrison, who risks his life every time he accompanies me, joined me for the drive to Cambridge, Md., where Robin floats on one side of a dock and his boat, Chautauqua, on the opposite side. He brought with him a red plastic shovel with an aluminum three-piece handle kept together with shock cord.
John began shoveling his deck and I, who was not so well prepared, went to look for something resembling a shovel. Near the marina office, I found a spatula/wire brush hanging from a propane grill. The spatula part seemed close to a shovel, so I brought it back to Robin and began emptying the foot of sloping snow from the cockpit.
In time, I thought of an alternative means of excavating the snow. Inside Robin's cabin, I found a sturdy white plastic dust pan. Soon, the snow was mostly removed. But in the same span, the northwesterly wind, which was in the process of blowing the water out of the Chesapeake Bay, had increased.
I was done with my work before John finished, and I stood on his finger pier, buffeted by the wind as I looked across the dock to Robin, thinking of all the improvements and maintenance she needs. She looked sturdy as she strained at her dock lines. But I knew about the leaking ports, the substandard electrical wiring, the ancient mast in need of painting, the split caprail, damaged by a piling in an earlier storm.
In Robin, I could understand how boats become derelict. Some times it may be a result of carelessness. Other times, it may be a lack of resources. But at some point, a boat -- like an untended garden or a love ignored -- can be beyond restoration.
When the snow melts and my battered shoulder is healing, I will focus my energies on bringing Robin back from however far she has slipped. With all of her history, she deserves it.

It is snowing again on the east bank of the Delaware River. When I left for a walk with Thelma to the river's edge, the sun was setting behind clouds. When we turned around to come home, I could see snowflakes falling 100 feet ahead. We walked into the swirling flurries before we got home.
This is not supposed to be a big storm -- maybe 2 to 6 inches. In years past, the television weather people would have called that amount a blizzard. They've become more nonchalant after a winter of three feet or more of snow.
The earlier storms have pruned most of the white pines in the region. There are large limbs littering much of the countryside, their yellow-white wood ripped jagged from tree trunks, their needles providing nice habitat for all the little birds wintering in these parts.
I'm reminded of the soft sound of snow falling in a pine forest. A wind piling the fallen snow in drifts whispers through the pine needles. Footsteps swish through the accumulated flakes or, when they grow deep, thwump quietly as you wade ahead.
Standing under spreading pine boughs laden with snow, you keep your neck covered or risk a cold attack of flakes sifting under your collar from their perch. Walking in the open, where the wind is stronger, flakes invade your nostrils, freezing your sinuses.
You might stop under a particularly large pine whose branches provide a protective canopy. This would be the time to snap off dead lower branches, pile them in a pyramid and, with a hand full of dried, brown needles, strike a match and start a small fire. The smoke curls up, the pine wood crackles when it heats. It is difficult to find a place where the smoke doesn't drift into your eyes.
But you settle down into the snow that you've flattened with your snowshoes and listen . . . to the hush, to the quiet.
This is the essence of tranquility.

The view from the top of Sugarbush Mt. on race day, Feb. 5, was spectacular. Standing in the starting gate, I could see two downhill gates straight ahead before the trail dropped out of sight. Above, the sky was its buest hue and the landscape as far as you could see was a patchwork of white farmland and gray forests.
I had skied the day before in Massachusetts to see whether I was sufficiently impaired by my January injury to back out of the downhill race. I took my first ride up the chairlift and fell within 150 yards of getting off. I fell on my right side, so no harm was done to my damaged left arm. I recognized right away that the only reason I had fallen was because I was skiing too slowy, too timidly. My mind wasn't focused on the activity at hand.
So I skied the rest of the day at speed, and everything went well. The trail I was using -- a decent single black diamond -- often was mine alone, so I could open up a bit. I felt in control most of the time. At two o'clock in the afternoon, I recognized I was getting sloppy and I quit for the day.
Monica rode with me to Vermont early the next morning. I was in time to make a few inspection runs along the trails that have the downhill course.
It seemed to me that the course had been set more open than in the previous two years, and my reaction was surprising. I had spent the last 12 months visualizing the course as I knew it. When I now suspected it would be faster, I was frightened.
There was a practice run, and when I got in the starting gate, trying to focus on carving my turns with my shins jamming into the boot fronts and my weight on the downhill ski, I vowed to go all out. I don't know what my time was for that run, but when it was over, I knew I hadn't skied well at all. In fact, I hadn't remembered to do any of the things I'd spent the last year visualizing.
But the fear was removed in that run, I thought, and when I got in the starting gate for the actual race, I was fairly relaxed.
The race takes you south along a trail that straddles the top of a ridge. There are about seven or eight gates that lead you to the right, left, right, left and right before a set of three gates take you in a long sweeping turn to the left, onto another broad trail that sends you east down the fall line.
I had passed the fourth and fifth gates and was headed to the right at some speed when suddenly I felt my left ski tracking straight down the mountain, as if it had a mind of its own.
I managed to recover control of the ski and make it to the bottom of the mountain in one piece. But after I saw my time -- six seconds slower than my best time last year -- I realized what had been going on with my left ski up in the third turn.
I had been skiing like a rank beginner.
My weight had been on my uphill ski. There was no way I could turn because the left -- or downhill -- ski had no weight on it. And as I reconstructed this miserable run, I came to understand that at every point along the course, my form had been flawed.
It was a repetition of my failures in each of the two prior years.
I had allowed fear -- lurking fear that I almost didn't recognize -- to steal my courage and my chance of making a decent race out of it.
I was disappointed in myself. I acknowledged the character flaw that prevented me from excelling. The very presence of gates -- flags mounted on poles driven into the snow -- had shut down my brain. Instead of forcing myself down the steepest, fastest course, I had reared back, avoiding gravity, allowing timidity to choose my technique.
For a few hours, I pondered the notion that good sense should dictate no more downhill raciing -- and perhaps no more skiing -- for me.
By the next day, I was trying to think of a way to get back north and back into races.
But that will have to wait another year. I have turned 68, and there may not be that many years left to do the things I wish to accomplish. But for now, I have to get the torn rotator cuff in my left shoulder repaired and rehabilitated. I'm told this will take several months.
At present, even the act of typing on a keyboard is painful, so sailing -- and perhaps even writing -- may be restrained, too.
But by summer, if all goes well, I should be back on Robin and, I hope, working on a new book project.
The good news out of all of these experiences is that I seem still capable of learning, and that is the best news of all.

Here's my review of Overboard! by Michael Tougais.
You might read this book in one sitting. The story pulls you along that well.
If you go offshore, or if you think you might ever go offshore, you would be served well to read Overboard! There are many lessons in its 200 pages, but here's a warning.
Don't let the story of these three boats dissuade you from blue water voyages. Remember: Almost everyone survives.
Tougais has a couple of writing habits that gnaw at my ankles, even though my mind brushes them aside because I want to know what happens next. For my taste, he reminds the reader too often -- and often with the same adjectives -- just how enormous the waves are out there. And he goes into some minute details about the folks onboard that I don't think help the narrative. He is to be excused because clearly he became friends with many if not all of the sailors whom he interviewed and, I guess, has difficulty distinguishing between facts that an uninvolved reader needs and ones that close relatives might find important.
But these are mostly stylistic issues, and you may not be bothered by them. As I said, I'm sure you will be enthralled by the story. Get a copy when Overboard! is published.