Thirty years ago, I was regularly sailing a Bill Shaw‐designed Pearson 32 out of Elliott Bay Marina in Seattle. I was also living in the Belltown neighborhood downtown, so a quick drive up Elliott Avenue was all the effort needed to get to the berth, and, even when not going for a sail, I would make the short drive to the marina on a day off to sit in the sun reading and listening to loose halyards banging on masts, smelling the smells, and watching the heedful movements of boats to and fro inside the breakwater. Today, almost twenty‐five years after shifting the burgee to Shilshole Marina in Ballard and almost twenty years after moving to the suburbs nearly an hour away, lunch at Maggie Bluffs lodged upon the dock apron at the marina on Elliott Bay is a sure winner when we are tossing about suggestions for treating ourselves. The view is impossible to beat, the restaurant is a landmark, and the power of nostalgia is irresistible when entwined in the romance of married senior citizens; we are happy for the occasion to speculate whether a burger or the fish and chips will be best.

Yesterday was a sunny day that chased us out of the house and into the care of the folks at Maggie Bluffs for lunch. This is no dernier cri in our household — I first ate at the restaurant not long after it opened in 1992 (John Howie was the chef then), and it became my habit to conclude a day on the water with dinner there at the end of the gangway. I was relieved as it survived the bankruptcy of its previous owner, and I am still charged with delight when, having reached the top of the stairs descending from the parking lot, I see its al fresco tables in their expected places and its doors open for business. The two of us have been found there together since we have been together, and the decorations on the walls are as familiar to us as knowing the food and service will be good as always.

We both had the fish and chips, then a postprandial stroll about the marina enjoying the time out of doors, where we talked about the houses atop the unstable, sloping landscape opposing the shore and our own ambition to one day live where an annex of the Pacific Ocean may be descried from the porch; the appearance of the city before Denny Hill was sluiced into the bay; and the woman on the lawn dressed in lingerie and holding an infant while posing for photographs being taken by someone with professional‐quality equipment. A passer‐by stopped to compliment me on my shoes. In the cheerful company of my wife, to whom I say each night as we drift toward sleep, I will see you in the morning, I was reminded of a passage from Proust, wherein, as his unrequited interest in a woman he has yearned to court wanes, the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower wishes the woman might condescend to write him a note rekindling his chances and lending him an excuse to reply, By means of which I hoped, he confides, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shewn, and my disagreement with that claim. If old men are sad, it is because they never ventured to write such letters and may only build castles in the air.

We tarried in the sunshine, believing ourselves to be able to feel the heat reflected from the glaciers of Mount Rainier on the horizon, and made indefinite plans to have a day on the water in a boat. Ours is an anxious season of laissez faire et laissez passer when mulling the calendar, with tension from chronicling how scant the years which may remain. We cope by trying to have fun and eat good food.