In the marine environment into which I was born and raised the word cranky primarily described and implicated certain boats.
Implicated? Yes indeed: It was ethically, even morally reprehensible to own such a conveyance. And even more so to lend it out without fair warning.
“Don’t ever borrow Jack Denney’s punt”, neighbours would caution with lowered voices, “not fit to talk about.”
Nothing precisely had been said about said boat, and nothing else needed saying; John Denney owned and was always eager to lend out his beloved self-built cranky boat, and one could see from his self-built bungalow that if ever it went to sea it would be as cranky as his punt.
The absence of roads, and I warrant you Gleeville was a long way from being Venice or Amsterdam, this absence of roads compelled dories, punts, and putt-putt motorboats to be, in the early 1940s, aside from walking, the major conveyance from one outport to another, or locally from up-town Tickles Bridge to down-town Barred Island; or, for Social Use, merely across-town for High Tea with Aunt Floss and Uncle Si in Logan’s Cove. Aunt Floss had long ago publicly condemned both her son’s boat and his house.
Thus cranky had almost no connection whatever with the way I, or anyone out-of-sorts might be feeling, but everything to do with the fear and anxiety engendered, if Mother, holding me in her arms, passed me into father’s waiting arms, with him already standing, or even already seated in Uncle J. D’s GD cranky boat. The unstable, unpredictable wobble that could follow was hair-raising, (even for father with his thinning hair), ((even for a somewhat bald three-year-old)), and became all the more dangerous if I added to it with flailing limbs, and terror-filled squalls.
And so it was that I quietly absorbed the word cranky right along with the imprinted smell of salt in the air, and the sound of high-tide waters slapping gently at the posts that supported Grandmother Denney’s house on its granite boulders in our sheltered little cove. Along with that absorption came a life-long aversion to becoming, or wallowing in any expression of willfulness or instability of emotions. Crankiness and stability have always seemed to me, like boats, to be conveyance options of choice.
fillière 