This Captain and The Kid were doing laundry in the Marina laundry in Marathon. A troubled looking man was shoving his clothes into the dryer when a child's t-shirt fell to the floor. The Kid picked it up and handed it to the man who had not noticed he had dropped it. He looked at The Kid and then over at me, tossed the shirt into the dryer with his other clothes and asked, "You onna boat out there?"

"Yeah. You?" I replied

"No. Just come here now and then to do my laundry. Just like to hang around with the boats and boaters sometimes. You sail, or what?"

"Sloop. You do any sailing?"

"Not anymore. Now I'm a lost soul...wanted to be a sailor or a pirate...or something like that."

"You mean when you were growing up?"

"No...after I grew up." He laughed but it was more of a wishful type of reaction to what he meant rather than what he said.

"So what happened? What did you become?"

"A father." He turned to look into the dryer. He watched the clothes spin; then opened the door, adjusted a couple of items, closed the door and began the dryer again. "I guess that sounded like I lose father of year again this year."

"Well maybe not. Look at it this way. You're here doing the clothes, you set goals for what you wanna be after you grew up, and you've shown some motherly instincts when it comes to proper dryer balance. Sounds like you're a contender to me."

The Kid invited the man to sit with us while we waited on the laundry. The man told us that this was his escape. He could getaway by talking to cruisers from all over the world. One time he had planned to stow-away on a cruiser that was sitting in Boot Key Harbor waiting on the weather. It was a pretty good plan and it had a fair chance of success except that the day the boat pulled away was pizza night at home and he had promised to pick up two frozen ones from Publix. A fatherly annoyance kicked in and that night it was pizza that tasted like cardboard instead of being on board a yacht heading for a taste of the Caribbean.

"I love my kids" he assured us, "Its just that my hair is greying and going. My sanity is somewhere safe I hope, because I've seemed to've misplaced it. My dreams about getaways and faraways and stayaways, are now just laundrydays."

This Captain watched the man's eyes as he spoke about his slipping off the face of his reality. Escaping isn't really about fantasy, its about getting away and this poor guy was in serious need of escape. Not being a fan of children behaving like children because they think they can getaway with it, I asked him why he doesn't bring the kids to the laundry one time just to see how they take to the boats and boaters. I'm thinking in this way he may be able to escape for awhile with kids in tow without feeling so guilty.

He thought for a long reflective thought. It was unsure to The Kid and me if we had lost him. Maybe sent him off the flat edge of the world just thinking about dragging his fam down to his escape place. His eyes blinked a couple times, his bottom lip quivered and a noise leaked out of his mouth and down his chin, where he wiped it with the back of his hand, and he was back. "Hmm? Kids here? Hmm? But the water..."

He was slipping away again so The Kid threw him a lifeline with, "Water's good for kids. Besides you hear a splash take a quick head count and act accordingly. Everyone escapes that way. You might find this is what might get you to really getaway."

He agreed. Plans began. The downside? He wants this Captain and The Kid there for the first experiment. Now that's reason for us to escape.

The Captain and The Kid