"Someday My Ship Will Come"

My great great grandfather was a pioneer for his day; he built grain elevators and flour mills which made life easier for others moving west. It also made him a very successful man. Moving west was a gamble, a very dangerous thing, which was attested to by the several train wrecks my great great grandfather endured. My grandfather had invested his fortune in the bank. Unfortunately, the 1929 market crash left him with nothing but his house for every other penny was gone. Making house payments became a very difficult thing and my great great grandfather was often found saying “Someday my ship will come”.

If it wasn’t for great aunt Edna, the house may have been lost. However, the money she made tinting and retouching old film with a lead pencil helped keep them afloat. To my grandfather, Edna was a second mother who showed him the world. Her brother, and my great grandfather, followed in his father’s footsteps building flour mills. In fact, he built the Spokane flour mill. Even so, during the tie of the depression, it wasn’t unusual to find my great grandfather uttering “Someday my ship will come”.

My grandfather, now 85, was the first in his family to go to college. His father wept begging him to stay because it was tradition for the children to care for their elders. But what great aunt Edna had placed in him- this itching to know the world better- could not be erased. A year later, upon my grandfather’s return from his freshman year at Eugene, Oregon, his father saw a change in him and told him that he had become a man. He had begun to think like an individual.

Today, there sits a painting over my grandfather’s dining room table. It shows a younger version of my grandfather sailing out to see on a pirate ship. There is something glowing eerily from within my grandfather’s chest. When I asked about the painting my grandpa told me that he paid a man for the painting to depict a valuable lesson he had learned in life.  He told me “There is no such thing as your ship coming in, Alyssa. The ship sails from within you- it is you going out into the world and sharing yourself. Life is about living instead of waiting for a ship to come to your rescue.”