Surfing

Surfing August 25, 2008
We are coastal people. We live on a beach just south of Charleston, South Carolina. We eat shrimp, crab, and grits morning, noon, and night. We tote coolers to the beach loaded with bottled water, Kool-aid, and apples in the daytime. In the night, we sit around illegal campfires with friends drinking beer, reminiscing bygone days of shagging and high school pranks. On some of those evenings we just sit and listen to the waves moving in and out. Good company, peaceful world, summer and winter.

Our waves are small, not like those seen on TV at those beach competitions. We don’t have the large violent, loud crashing waves conducive to sports or thrill-seekers. Our waves are small, perfect for young children and weary adults. While the daytime brings playful laughter and busy families onto the beach and drowns out the noise of the waves, the nighttime is different. The nighttime is quiet and all that can be heard is the sound of the waves.

Our waves come in with small rushing, tumbling noises, end, over end, over end. You can feel something coming toward you like a gentle push backwards. Then you hear a little crash as the wave is played out, grips at the sand and tries to hold on. The water flows back out to the ocean and you, the beachcomber, feels the gentle sucking pull of that wave back out to sea. I often sit on the beach at night just to have the day’s problems solved by this washing of my soul. We do have big waves once in a while; they come with the hurricanes. These waves are big and powerful, ripping sand right off the beach. Dangerous. It is then that the locals turn out with their surfboards to challenge Mother Nature. These waves don’t happen often but we all have boards.

Life is good. We give our address as “On the Beach, South Carolina”. We treat our house as a temporary shelter; since the beach is more home than the house. Our house is a place where we sleep and store our clothes. Otherwise it is just a series of laundry lines and porch railings that are decorated with beach towels and bathing suits. Our lawns are decorated with plastic buckets, shovels, and sand castle molds. There are sand shoes, boat shoes, plastic boots, bathing suits, visors, reed mats, plastic fishing poles and a Wal-mart four-foot pool in the back yard with a layer of sand covering the bottom. The garage is just an extension of the yard except we keep bigger stuff in there like boogie boards, skis, surfboards, fishing poles, shrimpin’ baskets, waders and two boats - one for the ocean, and one for trolling creeks.

Our life and that of our children is so intertwined with the ocean that we were surprised when our daughter decided to go to school in Chicago. Her mind was made up and the school had accepted her long before she told us. Her father and I had four weeks notice that she was leaving, hardly any time to think or to talk her out of it. She is twenty-two, and fully an adult. After graduating high school, she chose to get an undergraduate degree from our local college having lived with us instead of in the dorm. It was a good arrangement – for us and for her. Many of her friends came and stayed with us, adding to the commotion in the house and the excitement of the beach. During her college years, three hurricanes skirted our coast. She and her friends got good on their surfboards. They practiced on the little waves in the days prior to the storm, then rode the gradually increasing hurricane waves for twelve hours, sought refuge in the house for the peak of the storm, then, went back out to the ocean until the waves petered out. In preparation for those hurricanes, my job had been to stock the frig; however those were some starving college surfers. After the storm, I was re-stocking the frig as soon as the grocery store opened back up. Thank goodness, we were never directly hit by the storms, so those times ended up being good times and good memories.

Our daughter was moving to Chicago. We couldn’t talk her out of it, wouldn’t have tried anyway, so we just worried about the little stuff. We worried about how our daughter would survive way out there in the “Great Plains” region - the Midwest. There are no oceans, beaches, or waves. Chicago is on Lake Michigan, and it’s very placid. Chicago’s cooler in the summertime and absolutely freezing in the winter. Our neighbors are from south of Chicago; they moved to South Carolina to get away from the cold. They told us about the wind off the lake and how no winter coat could stop the cold. They told us to have our daughter stock up on sweatshirts, long johns, thick socks, boots with good traction, scarves, gloves, ear-muffs, and hats: None of which are familiar to us here on our beautiful coast. I remember one time when she was in kindergarten and I didn’t even double shirt her for cool days until January. Our neighbors told us about frost bite, occasional brown-outs, and frozen transportation systems. But what got us was the mention of frozen nose hairs and how quickly that could occur to a person standing in a strong blast off the lake. I had nightmares of breathing through icicles. She was going to Chicago, a frozen tundra compared to our beautiful beach. She was leaving everything she knew. We tried to be supportive, but all I could see was disaster for both of us.

She packed everything. She said this was more than a move to another college; it was probably going to be her official move away from home. She’d be gone for three years and if things went well she’d probably stay in Chicago and work afterwards. The college had a good placement rate and there were lots of big law firms in the city. So we packed up her bed, desk, and lamps. I re-covered the old loveseat sofa she had studied on while here at school. She would probably need it to study on up there. Dishes went, as did the coffee pot. Things went that we had shared for twenty-two years. It was almost unbearable. I walked away from the packing many times. I went to the garage on those occasions to cry. All that garage stuff was there – boards, boats, buckets.

The packing was finished. She looked around for anything else, but she had got it all. The last act of packing was to sit on her suitcase and zip it up. The truck was in the driveway, mostly loaded. She was going to drive herself to Chicago in one of those rental trucks. I followed her down the stairs and through the garage. She set the suitcase in the last remaining open space in the back of the truck. At the very top of the truck, on top of piles, lay her surfboard.

“Daughter,” I chuckled, “there are no waves where you’re going,” pointing up at the board.

She pulled the rolling door down and locked it. “I know,” she said.

“Then what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“There’s skiing up there.” She pulled her phone out of her purse. “Well…” She said like an announcement for the good-byes to start. I wasn’t finished.

“Wait. Skiing?”

“Yeah. Those people up there ain’t seen nothing yet till they see me surfing down the mountain.”

My baby:)

Topic; Due the week of 9-1-08

SOMETHING PICKED UP (as in physically, not metaphorically "picked up")

Let's stop the whole "due Monday" thing and just say that it's due the week of, since yours and my schedules are now so crazy we can't even talk on the phone most days. :-)

Son: Surfing, 8-27-08

HA! I totally wrote this in English class today.

--------

The beach.

He was leaning back against his board, his feet buried in the sand his his knees drawn up to his chest. The sun was going down, and the silence of human noise -- this moment was shared mostly by lovers and romantics and the lonely hearted -- was punctuated only occasionally by the sounds of an incidental tourists' child or passing cars. Paradisio.

He stroked his surf board lying behind him. It was a relatively new skill he had acquired but found easy. He liked guiding the board across the wave, carefully balancing the forces of the water against gravity, constantly in danger of falling over and introducing his head to one of the many rocks that dotted the coastline.

It fit his personality.

"Margarita, baby?" asked his beautiful Samoan woman -- Keku -- as she stepped over the mini-sand dunes caused by foot traffic and wind. Full hips, large breasts, soft skin, and dialectic English that he found engorging.

They had met on a business trips. He been slumming it one evening -- drab Hawaiian shirt and shorts in a dirty local bar, complete with palm frond ceilings and a 300-lbs Pacific Island bartender. The drinks had been cheap and the lies had come easily.

He was looking to move here, he told people. He didn't work, the yarn went, and he was seeking the sort of personal greatness only the Bohemian crowd around him at the bar that night would appreciate. He was a star, and left with the promise of a job and with Keku on his arm.

That was nine months ago, when he had made $100,000+ a year, had a quaint house in the suburbs of a big city, drove a nice car, had a beautiful wife, and was awaiting twins. He was climbing the corporate structure. But he knew that his past was beginning to catch up with him, and when he got here, he knew it was time and the balancing act at "home" had become too treacherous. So, he left paradise for the suburbs, and immediately set about a plan to fake his own death.

A motorcycle accident. Over 50 people had been killed or seriously injured. His body was missing, and he was listed as "presumed dead." He had watched his own funeral from across the street, and he saw the cops there. They had caught wind, suspicious of who the dead man was and trying desperately to connect him.

But, like so many before, the local cops dropped it as "it doesn't matter, he's dead now." Always so easy, just don't get the FBI involved.

This was the third identity he had taken on; he wondered sometimes what happened to the handful of kids he had fathered and left behind. It was that first one -- Anna -- whom he had loved so much and whose unabashed adoration for him had so embarrassed and scared him, and shamed him into feeling his own humanity -- that made him run. She would be eight now.

Keku's belly was growing, and the questions had begun. He felt the past coming upon him.

The plan would be easier than ever, than any time before. He had been idly working out the details while she walked up and offered him a drink. "Sure thing, darling," he had affected a West Coast accent here. He didn't remember what his original voice sounded like.

She reclined back on the board, she was not skinny by American standards, and her stomach had begun the pooch of a pregnant woman. He ran a single finger across her stomach and down her legs.

"I love you," she said.

He grunted. This was the hard moment, when he realized, too, that he loved her and would have to give this us. "They say hurricane season will be rough this year -- good waves, starting any day now."

"We'll invite my sister and her kids -- you can show them how to surf. They just adore you."

He signed and laid his head down on ehr stomach, ear down as if listening. She entwined her fingers into his hair affectionately. For a moment, he was comfortable, and he thought, here, here at last he would stay, and screw whatever may come. He wanted so bad, then, to just be here for ever here in paradisio.

"Papa," she whispered, dreamily.

Or not.

----
I had problems with writing this one, so I thought I'd share the list of "free association" words I wrote down while I tried to brainstorm ideas: Surfing. Channel surfing. Television. Couch potato. Starches. Carbohydrates. Fat. Obesity. Diabetes. Loss of Feet. Foot-less. Footloose. What a feeling. 1980s. Bad hair. One-sie. Bikini. Minnie Driver is Preggers. OBGYN. Planned Parenthood.

Just so you see where the idea came from. :-) Literally, this is the sixth or seventh attempt at writing this; the rest were blah. Interestingly enough, I even went on Urban Dictionary and tried for two definitions they have there for Surf: 1) Stuck-Up, Rich F*ck; and 2) vomiting out a window of a moving car while drunk.

Neither of them did much for me.

Mom: Shakespeare

Shakespeare August 18, 2008

The old woman came in quietly on the arm of her daughter. She wore beige capris, a white button-down and sturdy moccasins. Her hair was curly and thinning at the forehead and temples. Her eyes were the most distinctive of all: They were the eyes of the un-dead, seeing but not caring. There was no response as I greeted her and motioned to a chair. She stood still until her daughter moved her toward the chair. I asked the old woman how she was. She just looked through me. I looked at the daughter and asked her to tell me again what had happened that brought them to my office.

She began.

The daughter had arrived home from work two days ago to find Mother sitting in the swivel chair in her office, distracted and repeating a phrase as though she were a stuck record – “A horse.” In fact, Mother was pulling on a piece of thread and swiveling slowly back and forth repeating “a horse” while staring out the window. She didn’t respond to the daughter’s greeting. Daughter tried to get Mother’s attention by swiveling the chair around and away from her focus on the window. But to no avail, Mother just swiveled it back and stared out the window. The daughter feared some kind of stroke. She called EMS and Mother was transported to the hospital. Mother’s response was to cooperate, but she spoke not a word. She responded in a stiff, almost unnoticing manner. She hadn’t had a stroke. No problem could be diagnosed, so she was released from the hospital. The attending physician had recommended a psychologist for an evaluation and the daughter called, i.e. the appointment we were now having.

Mother didn’t respond to my questions. “A horse.” She sat stiff, looking out the window and whispered “a horse.” So I interviewed the daughter. Her mother was a writer with three books to her credit – romance novels by literary classification, but not young romance. They were romances for the elderly. According to her daughter these novels were not Fabio-Harlequin romances but funny, down-to-earth stories of love among the elderly. It was a fairly undeveloped field as most readers think romance belongs to the young. Mother’s main characters were elderly, sexual, hungry, and viable; loving life in ways not available to the young. I have to admit Mother’s topic made me a little uncomfortable as a picture of my own grandmother came into mind. I pushed it out: The idea of my gran naked, sexual, and on the prowl. Mother made a living with this topic. However, the daughter said that recently Mother had stopped typing. Her computer was on but the white screen remained blank. Twice Mother forgot to plug in the power cord and the daughter had come home, only to spend the evening re-booting the machine.

“A horse.” Mother had turned her head to look at the wall. The only things there were theatre posters and licenses.

I asked the daughter questions that might have indicated a possibility of Alzheimer’s. But the daughter seemed to believe that Mother’s condition was too sudden. I asked about any other recent events in Mother’s life. The daughter had to think. Nothing suddenly she said, but some things that had caused a change in Mother’s lifestyle. I asked what. Mother’s husband, daughter’s dad, was still alive, but suffered from cancer and arthritis. He recently went through chemo which had been unsuccessful and his body was now advancing toward death, with a lot of pain and need. The bills were mounting for his care. The daughter lived with them to help take care of Daddy and Mother and she had been a help, but the daughter had a son who recently came for a visit. He did drugs and to pay for his habit stole from his grandmother. The pearl and sapphire brooch her husband had given her on their 25th anniversary was gone. The loss was never discussed out loud. The son, grandson, disappeared. Then, Mother had gone to the bank for a loan to help with the mounting expenses. She was a long time customer of this bank; they only gave her a thousand dollar loan. Only enough to make the late payments on the medical equipment she had rented to care for her husband. But she had been robbed coming out of the grocery store. The thousand was gone, along with the few groceries she had managed to purchase.

Mother was now staring at one particular poster on the office wall. “A horse?” she said.
I looked at the daughter, “A horse?” I asked.
The daughter shrugged her shoulders.
“A horse.” Mother repeated, getting out of the chair slowly, her focus on the one poster. It was a poster of a play that I had enjoyed in my student days, a Shakespeare play – Richard III, about a king who possibly killed his brother and two nephews – rightful kings of England - to gain the throne for himself and started a civil war.

The office was deafeningly silent. I looked up at the poster, then back at the old woman and her words suddenly made sense. She was telling us all the time what the problem was in those fateful words: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”

Topic: due 8-25-08

SURFING

An addenda from from mom as she told me on the phone: Just because we're from Charleston doesn't mean it has to be about the immediate kind of surfing you're thinking about. Not necessarily about waves and boards and stuff.

Response to the addenda from son: Methinks you have an idea about something that doesn't refer to literal surfing.

Son: Shakespeare

Where did we go wrong?

As she peered slyly over the edge of her book in which she was reading The Taming of the Shrew, she had seen his brief moment of sadness.

Their conversation had been perfunctory. He had barely sat down before he started, "It's not you, it's me." It was a disgustingly typical line, and she quietly hated him for playing it off as a real conversation starter.

Less than two minutes later, he was up and out the door of the coffeehouse, laughing and joking and catcalling with his buddies on their way down the street.

With him, though, she had learned to watch for the private moments where he thought no one was looking. She had caught it, a brief downward glance at his shoes where he had unexpectedly communicated his loneliness. The look was not meant for anyone, especially not for her.

It had all been very romantic, the kind of love story they make teenage romantic comedies out of. She hated men, and he loved a lot of women. He was on half a dozen sports teams; she read poetry. Yet, through a blinding and absurd series of events, they had met, flirted, and had a romantic prom night kiss. Perhaps, for that night, even fallen in love.

It was the set-up for a beautiful thing.

Except it hadn't been. In fact, the apex of their relationship was the peak and everything else was just a slow tumble down.

The glow fades, the novelty dies, and then you have to settle into a the strange and bizarre world known as dating. They settled into the great Now what.

They were from different worlds, and their attempts at being together had failed gloriously. She brought books to his games, while he snored loudly in the lobby of her art galleries. They had tried to have sex, but it turned into glorified, naked cuddling that left them both with the hangover of failure the next morning.

They hadn't spoken to each other for a week after that attempt.

She was attracted to him, in some way, but it seeemed they couldn't adjust enough or correctly to fit into each other's lives.

Which left her here, at the coffeehouse, single again, and watching him steal a quick glance at his shoes and expressing more than he would ever say.

She tried to cry, even a little, shed a little tear for the discarded relationship. But it was the now open feelings that she had observed that touched her more. She flipped another page in her Collected Works of William Shakespeare, having somehow forgotten to read the last couple lines -- common, she was convinced of most people attempting to read the Bard. No one understood 90% of what he wrote these days, anyways.

Rather, she pondered her own situation and wondered where the two of them had gone wrong, and was found wanting for an answer.

Mom: Bucket List

His wife died while he was in class giving a lecture.

“The ramifications of the Lord Admiral’s decision to go forward with the plan for the Gallipoli campaign were to create a crisis of confidence in the leadership of the Lord Admiral and his cronies who directed all naval campaigns. The public-darling’s political career was stalled until the 1940s when memory and world peace was lost in a holocaust of horror, disillusionment, and death.”

He used big words, spoke in complex sentences, and implied a huge disaster. But he droned, making it hard to take notes and harder still to maintain one’s attention. I’m sure there was excitement at one time in the information he was sharing, but it wasn’t there that day and hadn’t been there all semester.

The arrival of the departmental chair was a welcomed relief to the vocal monotony. I had already begun watching the clock on the wall where time seemed to have stood still. Another professor followed the departmental chair into the room. I recognized both – one taught the African history classes, the other the Latin American classes.

The chair stood in the doorway. My teacher looked up from his notes, noted the direction of the class’s attention and looked over at the doorway. The chair apologized to the class for the interruption, then asked my teacher if he might have a word with him and pointed into the hallway. I watched the little conference. The noise in the classroom was typical of student attention – rustling papers, closing books, whispers. The little conference took a turn as my teacher slumped against the wall and put a hand to his forehead. The second professor – the one that taught Latin American history - entered the classroom and dismissed us.

We gathered up our things and dropped our weekly assignment on the table next to the podium. The Latin American teacher was writing on the board that class was cancelled and to watch for an e-mail regarding the next class and assignment. We filed out of the room, past my professor who now appeared frail. I was one of the last one to exit the room; and as I exited the three professors entered the room. I walked up the stairs and out of the building, around the front, passing the windows that looked down into my classroom. My professor stood there alone, a piece of paper in his hands. He looked at it, tore it up and threw it on the floor. He went to the podium and collected his notes, walked through the pieces of paper and exited the room. Moments later he passed by, not seeing me.

I went back into the classroom and picked up the eight pieces of paper and put them back together. It was a little slip of a paper that had been folded and folded. It had been torn from one of those tiny top wired notepads and showed age. It was dated 10 years earlier and it certainly looked 10 years weathered. It was a list; a list of things to do and see. There was written ‘clean out garage,’ ‘visit Magnolia Gardens,’ ‘find her sister,’ ‘make will,’ ‘visit Washington DC’….and so forth. Twenty items, all but one had been crossed off.

My class was cancelled the next week, but my professor was back in the podium the following. No life in him, but lecturing again.

“A bipolar world is a world of exact opposites in which no sides agree except to prevent the other from expanding. And while they never directly touch each other in violence, they do touch each other through other countries like Korea and Vietnam. It is…” He droned on and I found myself watching the clock – thirty minutes more - big words, complex sentences and another huge disaster.

Students tell teachers when the end of class is approaching and today was no different. My teacher heard the rustling, looked up, and concluded with a rapid line about trade sanctions and our next assignment. I waited to be last to leave. I cleared my throat and my teacher looked up.

“Yes?” he said.

“Professor.” I stood near my desk. I pulled the now-taped piece of paper from my bag and handed it to him. His face turned an angry red and his brow knitted in question. I said, “I saw…” and pointed to the paper. “This list?” I handed it to him.

He looked at it and said, “Well, what about it?”

“I noticed it’s unfinished.” I said.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Harper, Carolyn Harper. I sit front seat, there.” I pointed to my book bag still on my desk.

“Well, Miss Harper. I can’t see what business this is of yours?” And he flicked a finger at the paper in his hand.

“Professor. Your list… it has one more thing on it to do.” I cleared my throat and started again. “John, I’m her sister.”

Topic: due 8-11-08 (ish)

Topic: Shakespeare

I don't know what I'm going to write about this one... Came up randomly after reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -- Barry

Son: Bucket List, 8-7-08

Simplicity
and its willful pursuit --
rather than the ongoing worship of false gods --
Finding a means to an end of happiness rather than accumulation.

To love and put people first,
Stressing more the gifts other bring into your life rather than your needs they fill,
Chastise priorities of fun nights and choose, instead, great times and meaning.

Accomplishment,
in your own right,
Rather than those things to be talked about at high school reunions and family get togethers,
Even now,
Identify that you want this so you can feel better than everyone else.

Strive for "you look happy"
OR
"you sound happy"
OR, better,
"I am happy,"
instead of the awful and ill fated wow factor that comes with the creation of want.

A covetless life,
not to want,
but to succeed in self.

Abandon suffering and learn meaning,
Relieve evil and do good,
Express everything and hide nothing.
Accept and rejoice,
Move on and pass awy.

Make no plan for death,
or a to-do list for the end,
but
Make it matter to yourself that you live.