Imagine You Are Drowning

Looking back, maybe everyone was a little nervous when Jim and Barbara started sailing. They weren't water people, never had been, and everything about it seemed out of their league. But nobody said anything, maybe because their nervousness was so tangled up with their jealousy-jealousy that Jim had been able to take early retirement, jealousy that the two of them had enough money to take all those trips to the lakes, to the shore, down to Florida. Even their kids were jealous, maybe because Jim had always worked too hard to have time for anything like this when they were young, or maybe because they knew they were going to have to work equally hard and still might never get the chance to take early retirement and learn to sail for themselves. So Barbara bought a few books and rented instructional videos, Jim walked the docks and talked to boaters, and what started out as the occasional rental of a catamaran soon turned into the ownership of a twenty-eight-foot sailboat.