pamelagmusings

Musings

Pam's Musings

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

A long time ago or once upon a time, stifled by the desire to get everything right on paper, rendered immobile by my inner and nasty critic, I was encouraged to read Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I have read it numerous times and often wish I could commit it to memory.  Ah, the perfection that comes from the memorized verse.  Lamott strikes out at the need and desire for perfection.  Instead, she pushes me to embrace the messiness of writing, to muse.  She tells me to let go and not worry about destination or the big picture.  She set before me the creed by which my musings are written, by which my inner wild woman craves to live:  “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.  Just dance.”  When I muse, and this is a necessary part of my writing process, I don’t look.  I just write.  I hope you enjoy these musings.  I hope you muse as well.  

On The Dock of the Bay, July & August 2025

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It was 1967, and the story goes that singer-songwriter Otis Redding needed a respite from his fans. A friend offered Otis his houseboat, moored at a dock on a California bay. The calm of the gently rocking boat got into his head. With his guitarist, Steve Cropper, Otis scratched out lyrics and a melody.

The song was recorded that December, just days before Otis Redding was killed, at the age of 26, in a plane crash.

In March of 1968, summer came early to the Chesapeake Bay as well as to the seaside shops and the dunes and waves of Virginia Beach. At Frank W. Cox High School, where the heat beat on the windows too old to crack open for breezes, my friends and I mentally drifted from our academics. We had our high grades. We knew we could sustain them with minimal effort. Besides, that song by Otis Redding was on our radios, and the docks that we sat on in the inlets that housed our families’ boats became a whole new and lulling world.

Otis Redding’s song became our song, we kids who learned to drive outboards before we learned to drive cars, we kids who lived all summer with sand in our hair and the stickiness of ocean salt on our skins. We kids who took for granted the hour or so that we stretched out on sun-grayed wooden docks and hung our heads over the edges to watch the seaweed and mussel packs float rhythmically as if slow dancing, to spy the occasional crab in jerky jettison that suggested no desired destination but the deeper and darker. We flopped our young sun-warmed bodies next to each other, and shut out the details of Mr. Dent’s lectures on Vietnam. Instead, we lazily talked of our futures as we insisted we would have them.

Such irony that summer.  “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” was like a hard-driven lullaby. Had we listened more closely, we would have realized that the song’s persona was not at peace.  He believed he gained nothing as he sat on the dock from the morning sun until the evening’s arrival. He saw nothing to live for, nothing to go his way, nothing but “wasting time.” Nothing that suggested hope. He seemed unaware of the sense of peace that can come from the predictable rhythm of the ocean’s waves’ swelling and crashing, from the regularity of the tides. He had traveled far but had found only a place to sit above the waters of the ‘Frisco bay.

To the contrary, we kids were satisfied on our ocean perches. We had everything to live for and as far as we cared, everything was goin’ our way.

“Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” reached #1 on the Billboard charts in early January 1968. To this day, despite the sad edge of the lyrics, it is my go-to song when I need to gain nothing, to sit for a long spell, to find comfort in rhythm and predictability. Closing my eyes, I am a kid again, on the gray, tide-worn dock, warmed by the sun and smelling the stickiness of the water just below. I am “wasting time” and I delight in Redding’s choice to spread out that word—time!—to its powerful five syllables.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to sit, wasting time in a beautiful way, on what was actually a pier, extending out into Puget Sound from the bustling, picturesque town square in Coupeville, on Washington State’s Whidbey Island. As tourists and islanders wandered to and fro, I found an excellent perch on an enormous ancient beam that ran the partial length of the pier. The salty waters’ scent made the air heavy, and the sun’s rays were strong within the intermittent soft rain. A flock of seagulls rode the swells of the white-capped water just beyond the pilings. Eventually, one gull flew from the group, circled in the blue sky and landed, facing me, on the salt-and weather-blackened railing of the pier. Surely he found peace, as did I, on the sea-surrounded structure that offered the soul the comfort of the tides’ sure ebbs and flows, the solace of the rhythmic lapping of the waves on the smooth-sand shores.

I began murmuring, “Sittin’ on the dock of the bay—”

Tilting his head to the side, one wide eye upon me, he opened his beak and then closed it. I continued to softly sing.

The gull turned his full gaze on me and then wasted no time soaring to the sky, holding his sharp cry of delight for at least five syllables. I would soon leave that island, but I was content in knowing that he would return again and again to this perch, with everything to live for.