The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

glass castle

“I wouldn’t want to be in a club that didn’t want me.”

Joop was a puppy to the last year of his life. He had always been with us and he represented the best part of us, the part that could love without recompense or expectation.

Then the bad season came upon my family, the deadly season when the river betrayed us

a cold like we had never known before.

The sea was barren.

we learned that crabbing, like everything else, had its own native beauty, its own properties of dance.

She would not let us tell anyone, not even our grandparents, of the seriousness of our dilemma. The frissons of her unalterable pride

Coaches wanted you to hurt the man carrying the football, but help carry him from the field, then write him a get-well letter in the hospital with all the grammar correct.

Why was it, I wondered, that I was most passionate talking about books I had loved? In the dream it was easy. Those books honored me; those books changed me.

My life did not really begin until I summoned the power to forgive my father for making my childhood a long march of terror.

only when I left his house that the long state of siege was ended.

the realization that he couldn’t help who he was.

He was more a force of nature than he ever was a father and there were always hurricane warnings

He never learned a single thing from his mistakes.

parents had no close friends.

Shrimping always involves a tireless worship of numerology

I’m burning up with schemes. Sometimes I wake up

bipolar dad

Here my father was most comfortable and relaxed. Only on the river were we safe to visit with him. He never hit us

But on the river, Henry Wingo was in harmony with the planet and the shrimp seemed to come to his nets singing

If you grow up in the house of a man who both loves and mistreats you, and who does not grasp the paradox of his behavior, you become, out of self-defense, a tenacious student of his habits,

Both of them became adept at killing off the best qualities of the other.

him a real tiger sitting beside the pumps? Wingo Esso.

studying my parents when they were reposed and peaceful in their home.

a writers job is to study people

story of their first meeting in Atlanta, when my father was a young lieutenant visiting the town for the first time on leave and my mother was selling children’s clothing in Davison’s

A photographic history of Auschwitz. Of course, you think this is a normal family.”

putting a wheel on his cross.

I’ve tasted a little bit of heaven in my life and a little bit of hell and I’ll take hell every time. But what you say is true, Tom. He is a mighty fine man.”

“I think you’re the only success our family has produced, Tolitha,” Savannah said. “I really do. You’re the only reason I know I can escape from

all

white porpoise break through the waves as she made her way toward us.

I was ten when I first saw the white porpoise known as Carolina Snow

like being touched by a recognition that the sea would never forfeit its power to create and astonish.

She approached us always as a symbol, monarch, and gift; she approached us always alone, banished,

In dreams, the porpoise remains in memory’s waters, a pale divinity who nourishes the fire and deepest cold of all the black waters of my

part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God.

I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise.

“A prince,” Savannah said, hugging Luke and kissing him on the lips. “My redneck linebacking prince.”

My grandfather knew nothing about the theater of the absurd, but he managed to invent it for himself year after year.

Nothing made me more edgy or neurotic than the silent hostility of people who loved each other.

Herbert does not allow conversation at dinner.”

absolutely wrong parents.

series of false assumptions and wrong moves. You set yourself up for catastrophe. You find yourself in danger and peril because of the choices you’ve made. Then you discover that fate is also busily working to set you up, to lead you into regions that no one should be required to enter. When you realize all this, you are thirty-five years old and the worst is behind you. No, that’s not true. The worst is ahead of you because now you know the horror of the past.

world. I walked through this world burning with the love of strange women

as my mother’s cold “no.” I took my mother to bed with me every night of my life and I could not help it.

she was the disclosure of the unutterable beauty and generosity of God among us, the proof of magic, and the ecstasy of art. The white porpoise was something worthy to fight for. The

“Then how did I get a hundred pounds of tomatoes on the deck of my boat?” the captain had asked. And in a laconic reply that was well received in each Colleton household, the sheriff had answered, “It’s tomato season, Captain. Those damn things will grow anywhere.”

check for a thousand dollars as a reward for his assistance.