Business and Pleasure

Last night I was having dinner with my dad at the yacht club. (There's a requirement that you eat in the dining room at least once a month, and if you don't you get billed for it anyway. My deadline is the 15th of the month so I was encouraging my dad to eat heavily.) We were having drinks and talking about something, maybe boats, maybe Montana, maybe my latest thoughts about my next job. A man came up to my dad excitedly and said, I need to talk to you -- it's not business, I promise. I gathered he was a customer of my father's.

He sat down with us and with great enthusiasm relayed his recent boat trip to Boston for a gathering of owners of a certain type of boat. He was all smiles when he told us about the awards he'd won and described them to us. He gesticulated and grinned as he described some of the ways the other boats were rigged -- different masts, different sail covers, etc. And then he started to ask my dad questions about the sailcovers he'd seen, why they looked a certain way, and how you might rig one up on his boat. He asked my dad about topping lifts and uppermost battens and told my father he'd taken some pictures of the boat setups he'd seen and wanted my dad to look at them. I listened in, a couple of steps behind, trying to picture this model of boat and understand the nuances of the questions the customer was asking. I watched my dad explaining things, and listening, and saw him thinking about the different gizmos or setups the customer was describing, and responding to how he thought they might work or where you might encounter problems.

It was a seamless and friendly conversation, and after a little while the customer took out some pictures of his dogs and showed them off with the same kind of unabashed delight he'd had describing his boat. He struck me as a genuinely happy man. And pretty soon his son in law came over and talked to me about finding a job that you love. (His job: flying the Brooks & Dunn hot air balloon over their concerts all around the country.) It was a very pleasant conversation -- didn't feel like an interruption at all.

But while I was watching my dad explain the physics of an upper batten to the customer, I was of course aware that although it was pleasure, it was also business. It's my dad's job to help people understand sailing better, to understand what they need from their sails and how they work. It's his business to help people have more fun in their leisure time. So as I vaguely eavesdropped, thinking about sailcovers and top battens and the way a wishbone boom might affect leech tension, I thought too about how my father's leisure and business worlds are so mixed together, and wondered whether I would find such a blending of business and pleasure wonderful or tiring.

Comments

[Bill Altreuter]

It really sounds like you should either find your way into teaching, or find a way to incorporate lecturing on the law into the practice. The latter is particularly nice because it can incorporate travel into the mix. You might consider looking into AIJA-- I think you'd enjoy it. It took me all over the world, and gave me a chance to sit on a number of interesting panels.

Pursue your passion. Then, maybe, you will not distinguish between work and leisure.

[pjm]

I'd never heard of Nonsuches before, but then this weekend we saw one motoring around Cape Small. When I saw the web page, I thought it was just a flavor of cat boat, but the differences are much more obvious when you actually see one. Clearly the work of a dangerous revolutionary. (Or a deranged lunatic, depending on point of view, I guess.)

(I think the only way to get around Cape Small without a motor is to be well off Fuller Rock; those who stay close to shore seem to be often frustrated. I don't know why, since I haven't tried myself.)