Blue Boat Home

On yesterday's post, "William Alizio's links to other stories," I left this comment at 9:20 this morning:

The rainbow is another link to 42, since a rainbow has a radius of 42 degrees.

At 10:50, William Wright left this comment (quoted only in part here):

While in the process of playing hymn #172 "In Humility Our Savior", I suddenly realized that the hymnbook was green. Based on your dream, I became curious what the lettering on the spine was like. Sure enough, gold lettering "Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" running down the spine.

[. . .]

Lastly, blue does come into this as well. Hymn #172 is also the tune for a song that was my daughter's favorite for awhile - the song is called "Blue Boat Home" arranged by Peter Mayer (original by Rowland Pritchard back in the 1800s), which likens the Earth to a boat flying through space with all of us as passengers.

I looked up and listened to "Blue Boat Home," which is apparently a Unitarian Universalist hymn. (UUs have a thing for space. I remember them reciting some thing about "the womb of stars" the handful of times I attended their services in Columbus, Ohio.)

It's funny how the same melody can have a completely different feel when the lyrics and instrumentation are changed. "In Humility, Our Savior" is a "sacrament hymn" and thus brings back the smell of white bread and chlorine. Funny how chlorine -- not incense or whatever, but chlorine -- should be a "churchy" smell for me, but sacrament and baptisms were almost the only times I had any exposure to chlorinated water growing up. "Blue Boat Home" evokes no such memories, and I rather like it. Here's the first stanza:

Though below me, I feel no motion standing on these mountains and plains.

Far away from the rolling ocean still my dry land heart can say:

I’ve been sailing all my life now, never harbor or port have I known.

The wide universe is the ocean I travel and the earth is my blue boat home.

Googling the lyrics led me to a blog called Blue Boat Home, and one of the recent posts there caught my eye: "One Night in Cleveland," because of its first paragraph:

In 1996, my sister and her boyfriend had just moved into a new apartment in Pittsburgh, and they invited my family to join them for Christmas. I decided to take the bus there from my college in Grinnell, Iowa, which meant I had layovers in Des Moines, Chicago, and Cleveland. As I recall, the Cleveland layover was from roughly 11pm to 2am.

The year 1996 was an important year in my own life, and I was living in the Cleveland area at that time. (Seeing that year made me think "When will be the next 1996?" -- meaning the next year to have the same calendar. Next year, it turns out.) The mention of "college in Grinnell" also jumped out at me, as I did first grade at Grinnell Elementary School when I lived in New Hampshire.

The post is an anecdote. At the bus terminal in Cleveland, the author met a scruffy-looking man who gave him "a drinking glass that had clearly been stolen from a restaurant." Later, in Oakland, the author runs into a similar-looking person on the sidewalk:

It was a different guy but seemed cut from the same cloth. I opened my backpack and took out the drinking glass. I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I met a friend of yours this morning in Cleveland. He'd want you to have this." I gave him the glass and walked off.

That's the end of the story. I'm not sure what relevance it has, but I have a hunch that it will turn out to have some, so I'm documenting it for future reference. (Tim made Strieber drink something from a glass he had taken from the hotel bathroom, but that's a rather tenuous connection.)

Now for the real syncs.

Shortly after 4:00 this afternoon, I went out for early dinner, as I have classes from 6:00 to 9:30 with no breaks. The Alice Merton song "No Roots" was playing in the restaurant:

The chorus is "I've got no roots, but my home was never on the ground," repeated many times. Compare this to "Blue Boat Home": Although I feel as if I'm on solid ground, in fact "I’ve been sailing all my life now, never harbor or port have I known."

As soon as that song was over, the next song that came on was "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men:

In this song, the repeated line is "Though the truth may vary, this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore" -- a very strong sync with "Blue Boat Home," since both imply that it is only in death that we reach the shore.

I was not familiar with either of these songs before. I made a note of the lyrics I was hearing and looked them up later.

After I'd finished eating, I sat in the restaurant for a while reading The Philosopher's Pupil, by Iris (literally "Rainbow") Murdoch. I turned to page 172 and thought, "Hey, that's the hymn number William Wright mentioned," the hymn that has the same tune as "Blue Boat Home." This is what I read on that page:

His bath was a large boat-shaped affair made of white tiles with blunt ends. . . . the steaming water fell from the taps at a controlled temperature of forty-two degrees Centigrade.

The very first sentence on the next page, 173, is this:

He had not been there [the Methodist church in his hometown] for a long time and felt a weird shock when he recognised the numbers of the hymns.