Yes, Ella, old Joe does seem to be emotionally affected by thinking back to his years of rowing. In the prologue:
His voice was reedy, fragile, and attenuated almost to the breaking point. From time to time he faded into silence. Slowly, though, with cautious prompting from his daughter, he began to spin out some of the threads of his life story. Recalling his childhood and his young adulthood during the Great Depression, he spoke haltingly but resolutely about a series of hardships he had endured and obstacles he had overcome, a tale that, as I sat taking notes, at first surprised and then astonished me.
But is wasn't until he began to talk about his rowing career at the University of Washington that he started, from time to time, to cry. He talked about learning the art of rowing, about shells and oars, about tactics and technique. He reminisced about long, cold hours on the water under steel-gray skies, about traveling to Germany and marching under Hitler's eyes into the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and about his crew-mates. None of these recollections brought him to tears, though. It was when he tried to talk about "the boat" that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his bright eyes.
At first I thought he meant the Husky Clipper, the racing shell in which he had rowed his way to glory. Or did he mean his teammates, the improbable assemblage of young men who had pulled off one of rowing's greatest achievements? Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that "the boat" was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both__it was a shared experience__a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.
Again, in Joan K's post, Joe is crying as he is feeling the connection of being a part of a single thing.
" he has learned that he has made the first boat, and they are about to go out together:
"..for a brief fragile moment it seemed to Joe as if all of them were a part of a single thing, something alive with breath and spirit of its own... for the first time since his family had left him, tears filled his eyes"
I suspect it is "the boat" which gives him a sense of family. He lost his mother at such a young age, was abandoned by his father twice, his step mother showed him no love, and for once in a very long time he feels a part of something that feels like a single unit, a sense of acceptance, a sense of family, of belonging......
My treasured moment I have is the day Sr. Myra, the principal of my children's Catholic grade school asked me to teach Catechism classes, knowing I had no college degrees, no teaching degree, and no past Catholic school teaching. She told me I didn't need any of that, because she could see I had the love of the faith, and the teacher's manual will supply me with the rest. A few years later she then asked me to begin the school's technology computer lab. Again, I had no teaching degree, or prior computer skills. She said, I have faith in you Marie, that you can do this, and I will help you. Our K-8 computer lab ended up being one of the best in the Toledo diocese, and I was chosen to teach at a weekend workshop at the University or Bowling Green, to introduce area high school teachers to basic computer skills. Computers to me, is like Joe's "boat" the feeling of being chosen, the feeling of others having faith in you, the feeling of being a part of something you know is bigger than you ever expected to happen in your life, the feeling of belonging......
