Forty years of sailing

The image evokes illegality; some scheme about to be discovered, a clever man's plans going under and cleared up just in time. Hunched over a shredder I am feeding piles and piles of bank receipts and informaiton into the tired metal teeth; tax info from twelve years ago, customer addresses, all go in only to be poured into a twenty-cent trash bag and hand delivered to the dumpster. I estimate about fifty of these bags have been so well cared for these past few months. Twenty years of information at least have fed the small beast I attend.

In a way the image of a crook making a break for it is oddly appropriate - the sailmaker himself gives off an aura of thievery. He is not a sleezy man, or one who would ever take anything without a long discourse on permission beforehand. In fact he is a man whose charisma is somewhat larger than his six-foot frame, who has the ability to become your best friend in a manner of minutes by discovering the one detail you are most proud of. No, the thieving he does is in his trade - he believes he is getting away with robbing a bank by making a living as he does. He also believes the customer is getting away with a prize ruby for practically nothing by buying one of his sails. This man is a craftsman, a character, a sailor who believes in the wind enough to buy his groceries from it.

While standing in front of me, systematically throwing away folder by folder a pile of tax returns from 1977 (which I was sacrificing to a small metal monster a few minutes ago) he stops and looks at a file before throwing it on a pile on the desk. "Um Sun, what a man," he says, shaking his head, "he was a major general in the Cambodian Army, gentlest man who ever walked in here. He went on to work in a grocery store after being an engineer for thirty years, used to come in and tell me stories about the battles he fought. 'Those men are gruesome', he would say, 'in the jungle, men eat babies.' "

This man knows your uncle. I will bet you money. And you have an elementary school teacher who once bought sails from him back in 80-something and he was a nice guy with an Olsson 30, or a Columbia or a Beneteau, and he was glad to help him. No joke this man remembers every customer. And will keep every scrap of paper surrounding the job he did, put it in a pile, and forget the paper but not the man.