What is Celerity?
There’s a black-and-white family photo of my grandfather that we all look on fondly. My great grandmother and great grandfather are standing shoulder to shoulder as they look directly into the camera, and my great uncle—a person who always struck me as being the most ‘Larry’ of Larrys—is standing in front of them. His parents each have a hand on his shoulder, as if to keep the boy in place, as he grins and holds up the family dog. A neat little unit, a family once removed from immigrant status living the 1950s American dream. A foot to the left of their patriarch stands my grandfather, Ron, a teenager sporting khaki slacks and a crew cut. He’s looking off to his own left rather than the camera, squinting against the wind at the farm around them, hands in his pockets.
My mother, his middle child of three, likes to joke that we should have known he was autistic from this photo alone. His eldest was diagnosed with what we’d now call ASD I as a teenager during an era when girls were generally thought to not be capable of being autistic, pointing to a genetic link. Ron himself was a quiet man who had a strict routine and preferred his work bench to socializing. But what we might have called his special interest, the thing he pursued most of his life with zeal, was sailing.
During my lifetime, he pursued his passion on a 30-foot sloop that he named ‘Celerity.’ Latin for swiftness. She was indeed fast, but she was much more than that.
When I visited during the summer, making the long flight from across the country to Connecticut, it was guaranteed that we’d end up on Celerity. As a young child, it was often a family affair. Both my grandparents, my parents, my raucous sister, two or three of our cousins, and their parents, all loaded into the cabin of that boat. My parents did not love that my favorite place to sit was on the bow, away from everyone else, where a less careful child could easily fall. I didn’t love that I’d have to back away, closer to my family, when the jib was unfurled. We were at sea. I wasn’t there to listen to my cousins bicker or my sister cry. I was there to watch the ocean flow by and cormorants emerge from the water alongside us. When I’d gotten my fill of that, the bow was the perfect place to sit with my notebook and let the nature around me inspire my juvenile creative impulse to write.
As the years went by and the children grew older and absorbed with their own interests, Celerity saw fewer crowds. It amazed me how my sister and cousins managed to make friends in the neighborhood during each summer, yet I never managed to interact with anyone outside of the house long enough to remember family names. People were already strange enough back home in California, then Colorado. New England was another beast. I was a quiet person who liked a strict routine and preferred their notebook to socializing. Only decades later would it occur to me to pursue my currently fresh diagnosis of ASD I. I was just a little strange. I just preferred things to not be so loud.
Papa Ron saw in me a kindred spirit. As the eldest grandchild, he started inviting me out onto the boat with just him when we were all visiting when I was around eleven. He taught me the finer points of navigating, how the sails caught the wind, what ropes to pull when we needed to come about. It wasn’t that he never took the other kids out with just him. Any chance he got to share his love of sailing, he grabbed. But each summer, the more we went out as a pair, the more I got the sense that I was a different crewman to him than the others.
When I was a teenager, out on Long Island Sound and observing the mysterious mansions that reminded me of the Craven Estate from my favorite book, nestled in the verdant forests of Fishers Island, I confided in my grandfather that I really liked sailing with just him. Every summer was special. Grandma’s family stories and pies, going to the beach with my cousins, feeling rooted in community. That wasn’t an easy thing for me. People were so strange, and yet I longed to feel connected to them. At least I had my family. And even more than that, I had my grandpa. Someone I could be quiet with and yet still feel I was socializing. Someone whose passion for nature and learning paired nicely with my passion for writing that was spurred by being in nature. Someone who felt drawn to water and all it offered. Someone I could meet on both our own terms on Celerity.
I felt a little bad. I’d told him many times that I loved sailing, but emphasizing ‘just us’ felt selfish. I already had a hard time understanding people, much as I longed to have them around me. Seemed counterproductive to lean into the desire to love limiting my circle. But he didn’t chide me or even brush past what I said. Papa Ron smiled as he kept hold of the wheel. “Me, too. The boys are great on the wheel, but they can get loud. And the girls just wanna sunbathe. You…get it.”
That day on, every chance I got on visits, I asked my papa if it was a good day to sail. When it was, I always came back refreshed and ready to write under a tree. He’d come back ready to sit and read. We would meet, have our time of inspiration and reflection and peace, and then come back to reality ready to face the rest of the day.
In 2015, my grandfather fell and hit his head. He quickly sank into dementia. My uncle sold Celerity not long after, knowing Ron would never sail again. In the fall of 2020, we lost him to COVID.
It’s been nearly fifteen years since the last time I felt the connection and inspiration of sitting on the bow, watching the waves, waiting for my grandpa to call “Ready about!” so I could scramble to grab the jib sheet and pull as he turned the wheel. That quiet, structured, secure connection that left me filled with the desire and strength to create afterward. I’ve longed for it since, struggled to recreate that sense of fulfillment with other people. Writing has remained my passion, and it’s been the one thing that has reliably given me the chance to share and speak with and understand other people in terms that I am comfortable with. As a teacher, I love giving people the opportunity to learn and succeed and grow. As an author, I want to share how dreams can be accomplished through that medium. As a person with autism who identifies as nonbinary, I want to create a space where I and others can gather to do those things in a welcoming, understanding way. I want to be able to look at someone who loves writing and say, “I get it. Let’s do this together.”
And so Celerity is reborn. A place where we get each other. Where we can join together and feel refreshed, learn our craft, be the wind in each others’ sails so we can take each other to the places we want to go. The Celerity Collective is a place where we can join hands, gather ourselves, become the writers we want to be, and then go into the world with our heads held high. We here have always stood a little apart from everyone else, for one reason or another. But we’re still in the picture. We still belong here. And we will pursue our goals and dreams, whatever the weather may bring.
~TJ Willis, founder of the Celerity Collective
