This Other Half Week In Not Surfing

1. The Italian twins have asked Jeremy over for dinner to which he responds by bringing dinner. One twin cancels, leaving another Italian in her place along with her English husband. They are all artists. The replacement Italian comes from a Milanese family. She is currently working feverishly to produce a line of new scents for the family business of which she is fast becoming the creative face. One half the original Italian, a painter, is just returning to her work from having to do someone else's work. She complains about commissions. But only so much. The Englishman starts dour, hunkered in the corner staring at a computer screen, but evolves into entertaining stories about trapeze classes. I shuck kale and sauté garlic, jobs I am grateful for but also fill me with anxiety. Sautéing garlic in an Italian's home. Nothing could be more terrifying.

2. A consistent item on the menu of dinner conversations the world over is a bubbling stew called "Tales of Altered States, Homeopathic Remedies and the Upending of Expectation." The recipe rarely loses steam, offers anecdotal hilarity and allows for a soap box moment for every participant.

3. I witness the isolation of the displaced professional athlete. I witness the adulation of fans and the misplacement of hopes. I take four train rides. Up and back. Up and back. The English countryside looks identical three times. The fourth is at night.

4. I buy two books about Italian football. I eat at an Italian restaurant which isn't any good. I finish half my meal, half my glass of wine, pay, and go next door to another Italian restaurant and order a similar dish. I finish half that meal and glass of wine, pay and leave. Afterward I have a stomach ache.

5. I try to read one of the Italian books, an anecdotal history about great Italian soccer players, but it is awful. I have read many great books about the history of soccer, the utterly brilliant Soccer in the Sun and Shadow being my nearest hope for this flaccid drone. But, alas.

6. I travel to two Premier League soccer games on back to back days. The two teams are currently battling it out at the top of the table. Leicester City and Tottenham Hotspur. In both cases I find the palpable excitement of gameday offset by that peculiar English a) overt misery in the case of Spurs and b) blunt resignation in the case of the Foxes. But the cheering, the chanting, the singing and general grandiose chummy appreciation on display in both stadiums make me resigned and miserable to the right degree in the end.

7. At St. Pancras I spill my coffee. At St. Pancras they unpack both my enormous bags completely at the security line. I had expected to travel to India after Paris for another couple weeks of work but the job fell through and my bags have far more gear and varied clothing than I'd ever need for a couple weeks work in dour European winter weather. The security lady cannot understand why I have so many bags within bags full little cables. But I smile at her and she smiles at me and I repack my bags slowly.

8. All the attendants on the train to Paris are tall. The men are tall, the women are tall. The women are very pretty and wear blue uniforms that make them even prettier. The driver who picks me up in Paris was born in Israel and has two children. They are six, three and 11 months. He has a quick gait, wears a long beige trench coat on a sunny day with cool black Ray Bans and is very bad at maths.

At Some Point in the Not So Distant Past This Happened

This Half Week In Not Surfing

1. Five harried travelers ahead of me in the security line one of the greatest right fullbacks in the history of soccer removes his shoes. My heart quickens as I am sure no one around me realizes this. My heart quickens at the thought of nicking a selfie with him. If I can just catch up. If this stupid line can go faster. That oaf hasn't got his laptop out yet. Yes! You have to take your watch off. Yes! The laptop goes in a bin by itself. Somehow, some way I nearly bump into the great player at the top of the escalator. He is fiddling with his phone. It is a moment of real conundrum for me. I take what I believe is the path of pride. The path of respect. "Excuse me. Thank you, thank you for everything you've done." I shake his hand. He smiles warmly, I imagine because he is grateful too. Grateful that I did not ask for a selfie. Will he be grateful if he catches the walking pneumonia I seem to be carrying around with me?

 2. The lady besides me has black leggings. She is tall, from Manchester, covers herself completely with the red courtesy blanket and pulls her beanie over her whole face. When her chrysalis blossoms near the end of the flight, she explains she is heading to the Canary Islands to finish filming a sci-fi T.V. show about the end of the world.

3. I am shut out of a sauna and a banya. The banya has no room. The sauna is on women's day. I visit Isabel who has just made a surfy film with Jamie. We walk and talk from Shoreditch back to Clerkenwell. I tell her about a movie I like. She tells me about a movie she likes. I have included their surfy film here.

4. Five movies I like : Father Goose. Tampopo. The Castle. Of Time and The City. The Great Beauty. I tell Chris these movies are like jigsaw puzzle pieces inside my heart. Along with my children, my wife, the dogs I have owned, my friends, my anguish, my insecurity, my misconceptions and my memories, these films remind me of who I am. At dinner, over food curried from beneath heat lamps in a section of the restaurant grandly titled "The Carvary," I list this list to Chris.

5. The hotel room in the small Midlands city smells of exhaled smoke and the faint odor of human waste. The paint is chipping. The sheets are stale. There is mold. There is a gap between one wall and the other. Inside the gap is dark. I do not take my clothes off when I sleep. I wish deeply I still smoked so I can light up a cigarette and join in the air.

6. Dev shows us around Leicester. He shows us the house of the rich girl who, after dancing late into the night, would take him and his friends home to play snooker around her father's 12 foot table. He points out the bar where his buddy got hustled by a lady pool shark. He takes us to a Naan joint that is so devoid of any decoration it seems abandoned at first until three middle eastern men pop their heads out of the back room almost simultaneously. He tells us how the first letters of the names of the streets in one part of town spells out the name of the architect who designed the brick tenement housing. He shows us where he met his wife. He tells us about the love song he'd written her. He had studied engineering. He had built pools in France.

7. My trip to India is cancelled. The client balked at our numbers. I have never been to India and was looking forward to going to India. But between the lingering walking pneumonia, the nausea induced by the hotel room odor and the odd responses the goat naan has already produced in my stomach, I find plenty of reason to ignore the disappointment. A good month away from my family might have been a good break for us all. Maybe all of us except the children. And the dog.

8. When Chris cuts our stay at the hotel one night short, the man in the polyester vest asks him why. Chris runs down the litany of reasons. He does not hold back. When he is finished, the blinking man offers an apology to which Chris replies in genuinely the nicest way possible, " Oh you don't need to apologize. This place is awful."

Dictation Pidgin on a Wednesday Night in the Tub

Did you given moment at each given moment at each given moment I had multiple moments at multiple moments you are shamed. The inequities pile up. The small sandpaper the small grit the small the fine grit sandpaper her that his life chafingand chafing running away at your insecurities not rubbing them away button flaming them. Everything feels like a slight everything feels like it wasn't meant like it was meant and and even if it weren't similarities to great he cannot overcome them indignities that we Conger that one conjures that he conjures himself herself. Because in each corner at each step around each corner through that door crawling through that window always looking for the window because who wants to go through the front door that would entail too much honesty. There is no difference between the small things and the big things fine grit and the larger nubbly ones is all sandpaper sometimes it is a flame smoke burns the eyes the smell of burning hairof which he can only smell she can only smellThe indignities the first world problems the indignities The small aching pains the sharp poignant ones like when you stretch out your foot and becomes taught painful unresponsive tight stiff excruciating for a moment and then you please wait and then you place weight on it wait W EEI GH T on it and the pain subsides under the pressure of your body. They are first world problems the pain in the thought that spasm that rigor mortis the first world problem and you live and she lives and he lives in the first world so the problem is a problem. Ending Denny's in dignities our problem made he makes she makes he makes observed observed like a right right R I T E that kind of right. And observance and observance and AN observance they have it but you'll have been Chewalla ritual of the jewel habit habit habit habit she will have a bit she will have the jewel habitual yes habit habit habit. And addiction and AN addiction the small things pinpricks uncomfortable elbows bad bad bad bad Bad bad bad bad bed bed thank you. A bad BDBEDBEDB space East space D space. It is the small things and they heard not because they hurt but because you're experiencing because she experiences them because he experiences them because it is experienced as such pain suffering inconsequential ignored unappreciated besieged guilty very guilty and also terribly unrealistic festively unrealistic fast studious Festus Festus F a D a I ST a I DO US F a STE I DE I O US Festus Festus fast idiots Festivus fast it is fast idiots fast if ES fast odious fast if yes. Fast if yes fasted this. Pain is relative she knows she knows pain is contextual contextual and he experiences it hourly. On purpose with purpose without purpose not on purpose except for the day he decided that he wasn't worth it that no one thought he was worth it though not him early suddenly that no one thought he was worth it and he's never believed it since and he looks across the table at her and sees it in her two together her to TOL TOL TOL 02 they are not worth it he sees it a mirror of himself a mirror that says we are not worth it.

The Abbreviated EBNY Review : The Reef

Above is a picture, and a link if you click on it, to the NY Times review of Mick Sowry's "The Reef" which played at the 92nd Street Y on February 18th.

I was one who stood and cheered and not just for the orchestra, but for the film itself. Both stunning adventures into the heretofore (to me) unknown.

In the case of the music: a serious live application of classical repertoire and skill to a surf film.

In the case of the film itself: a kind of magical peeling back of the often decrepit cliches that govern the genre.

Sowry's (and Jon Frank's) abstract, probing, and at times sublimely alienating imagery and editing, pushed and pulled my expectations (and thereby emotions) twisting me into a state of constant surprise.

In our conversation after the perfomance/projection, Mick called it a sort of endless surf painting I think -or something to that effect- rather than a surf film per se. And while I think it is an apt sort of shrugging (either humble or something more realistic), it doesn't quite do justice to the fact that this film has opened a new door to surf filmmaking.

All odd ends and interesting bits, forward glances and backward thrusts, The Reef somehow breaks down the form and resets the conversation to some disturbingly entrancing elements.

It is not a perfect film, but one that is indelibly an act of evolution. And an inspiring, tantalizing one at that.

Respect

One of the very first surf magazines I ever owned. At that time Brock Little was all over the mags. He was one of the first surf heroes I knew.

HAPPENING : THE REEF.

"After huge critical acclaim in 2012 and 2013 in Australia Richard Tognetti and crew have ‘revisited’ the original Reef project adding in exciting, new footage and re-invigorating the original score with new works to create an updated version of The Reef for 2016.

This performance is an illuminating and thrilling celebration of surfing, the ocean, landscape, film and music melded together."

This is a singular event. There will not be something like this happening for a long, long time and you'd best be on your toes to witness. Mick Sowry, Richard Tognetti, Jon Frank et al will be in New York showing this incredible sonic and visual collaboration at the 92nd Street Y on February 18th.

"The Reef is a celebration of surfing, film and live music by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

ACO artistic director and lead violin, Richard Tognetti, collaborated with producer/director Mick Sowry and director of photography Jon Frank, to create an evocation of an epic stretch of coastline in the north west of Western Australia. Using a mythic day to symbolise our lives in all their trials and glory, The Reef music consists of twenty one individual compositions, some original, some amongst the greatest works in the classical tradition.

This preview features Vocalise by Rachmaninov and explores heroic failure - a simple yet beautiful representation of the inescapable part of our lives where all does not go to plan, and the honour in trying again and again.

The ACO performs The Reef (Revisited) in Sydney on 12 February before taking off for an USA tour that includes performances in Los Angeles, New York and Richmond, from 16 to 20 February."

The Surfer's Journal have already plugged it, and it ought to be smack in the middle of your radar. I have three tickets for Wifey, Primero and myself (Segundo gets the baby sitter) and we are returning from our winter holiday the morning of, just to make it to the performance.

If you can't get to the New York performance/screening, get there in L.A. or Richmond.

Because this film matters.



"Later in the day a flight across the dunes. A discovery and a near dream, Hypnosis is a new composition by Richard Tognetti for The Reef, with vocals by Satu Vanska and technical assistance by Joseph Nizetti. In performance the entire Australian Chamber Orchestra will add many layers to this already beautiful piece."

Today's Thought

Happening : Katherine Bradford at Canada Gallery

Katherine Bradford at Canada Gallery until February 16.

Painting and swimming share immersion and a certain loss of control that is simultaneously wild and structured. The body in nature; we see ourselves situated in relationship to the deep other. In Bradford’s paintings there is often a clear differentiation between swimmer and water, yet one senses she enjoys painting both equally. Bradford’s swimmers are not lit from some external light source but seem to generate their own brightness. The world seems milky and dreamlike. This comes from the act of painting, the painter breathing light and life into her canvasses. Bradford spends months and sometimes years building up the surfaces of her paintings, slowly changing the paintings through repeated application of thinned out acrylic paint or scuffed on thicker stuff. The fact that this gradual activity creates animation and a floating quality is something close to miraculous. The act of moving a figure a little to the left or right then becomes both the history and the surface of the final painting. 

Bradford often refers to the humor in her paintings. In the past the subject matter pointed more obviously in this direction: UFOs with tractor beams, Superman, Skinny boxers with raised gloves and lonesome ocean liners were used to create a self-depreciating painterly pop encyclopedia. The work in “Fear of Waves” is Bradford’s most figurative thus far and holds pathos and humor in equal measure. A signature painting in the show “Fear of Waves” is a huge canvas bisected by an awesome chevron. On the left side there is a crowd of happy swimmers (including a naked Lady) playing happily while the right holds only the froth and fume left by a set of monstrous waves. This painting holds the key, the delicate balance of joy and fear.

Today's Thought

Today's Thought

Today's Thought

Click the pink hand.

This Week In Not Surfing

1. The airplane deposits me squarely into murky warmth of the Los Angeles midday sun. And into the waiting embrace of an In N' Out protein style, animal style double double. With hand-wrung pink LemonadeArnold Palmer. If by hand wrung we mean shuffling slightly to the left and back to the right, depressing the nozzle and adding a slice of iffy lemon. The enduring nonsensical allure of the In N' Out burger only sends me into a personal moment of reverence for Dick Spady, a man who really knew how to make a burger. In N' Out is good. But not Dick's good. Or for that matter Rainbow Drive-In good.

2. What is it with hotels these days? The Standard in downtown L.A. is a pile of shit. Seriously. Good food. Good enough food. And absolutely shit in everything else. The room service guys are nice, but they screw everything up. There are two foosball tables, but they're both crocked. The front desk people are full of blank stares. The valets, despising ones. There are no towels by the pool. There is no love in the elevators. The Indigo in downtown Nashville has good sounding live music in the bar every night. And the front desk staff are refreshingly quirky with their platinum dyed blonde heads and only slightly make-up'd lip heather. She studiously walks you to the elevator. But the waiters are a sad, uninterested bunch and somehow they've figured out how to make a whole hotel uncomfortable. Usually it's just the beds in the rooms that are lumpy.

3. I would blame it all on the Millennials. Everyone tells me Millenials are lazy, know-everything, prematurely disenchanted know-nothings. Which just sounds like what every old person has ever said about a young person. But I swear all the Millenials I know are peaches. I think. I'm not sure what a Millenial is.

4. A quick, true story: Sitting in a bar with Jamie and Pascal walks up. He offers to take us to Nobu Malibu but has locked his keys in his car. We drink scotch and sodas until Pascal extracts his keys, a feat he accomplishes with the Triple A guy standing at arm's length while he has one final crack. At Nobu I see the real-life son of the 80's family sitcom dad who recently made a music video full of naked women dancing in front of a nude background. The son not the father. We sit a table over from a famous Malibu surfer and his date, who has a lovely accent. The date not the surfer. I drink more scotch and soda. Later we all (except the singer) find ourselves back up at the bar in the hinterlands. Everyone is incredibly genial. Pascal steps in for a round on the drums with the house band. When he comes back to the bar, I lie and tell him he played terribly. I don't know why. He plays pretty good. And he took me to Nobu and was super funny on top of it all. And he plays pretty good.

5. I surf Zuma for two mornings on a Wavestorm softtop. Everyone on the beach and in the water knows Jamie. Everyone on the beach and in the water is handsome and good natured and rip and are ready to accept me because I know Jamie. Two days spent west of Rome are two days spent in an effervescent muddle of comfort and confusion.

6. This morning it snowed in Tennessee. I shot a film about a furniture maker who makes furniture in a converted ancient general store on a 100 year old farm. I filmed some cows. They were scared of me.

7. Our Uber driver to the hot-chicken shack is a jazz clarinetist and music theory professor at Fisk University.

8. People believe in Donald Trump because he tells the truth. It is the secret of his success. It isn't truthiness, it's truth. The truth that comes out of his brain and through mouth. Folks love truth. Folks want to be told the truth. Truth like Donald Trump's truth however, not Bernie Sanders' truth. Two different truths.

9. As we descend into New Orleans, that harbinger of acknowledgement flits through the aqueous and Vitreous humors to be baked by my noodley bits. There is something about the color of the south, the further south really, the tropics, that lets one know one's whereabouts instantly. It is, I think, the unmistakable hue cement takes on in this climate. Something warm and mildly green. I wonder if it is a fungus that creeps between the sand and stone that gives it this particular color, or maybe it just has a peculiar peaked suntan. In any event, the Big Easy has an enchanting take on the definition of tropical and accepts me as one of its own immediately. A practice I'm sure is well-worn itself.

10. It snowed in NYC and I'm stuck in NOLA. The artist I interviewed yesterday mentioned, as we sat in her half of a southern craftsman house, "You'll find the walls in New Orleans are a little thin." The hotel at which I'm living for the moment, the Old 77, has comfortable beds, thoughtful room design, good food, helpful staff and thin walls.

11. It is currently 27˚ in New York City and the surf is clean, perfect, double overhead and 42˚. I am grateful I am not in New York. Not because of the hardship of shoveling snow, but of being relieved the onus of putting on a public charade, pretending to bemoan the fact that my snowed-in car doesn't have four wheel drive which sadly precludes a paddle out. "Surphy's Law!" I'd yelp. Oh my performance would be almost believable, I just know it.

12. I can feel the skin on my face crinkling like filo dough convection-baked in the furnace of age. I look in the mirror and laugh at my once youthful pining for the world-wariness bespoken by crow's feet, those glorious wadis of wisdom etched into smooth sands, so momentarily of lacquered context, crevices turning from pebble to boulder, dry creek beds turning dead rivers then rock strewn canyons. Like the confident widow's peak of the impossibly, but ephemerally, full-haired dandy whose wave-perfect flickish mop is like a wake from the prow of a ship perfectly angled atop the face, until, drifting further and further back over time, nothing is left but a solitary dome of has-been beauty.

13. And the ass sags. Forever am I haunted by the episode of Sex and the City where the loose blonde gasps at her older lover's sagging and pock-marked bottom wagging away from their bed, realizing the affair is over then and there.

14. The approach to the city carries us directly over Long Beach with Rockaway in the distance. For the first time in 16 years, I can make out surfers in the water from the airplane window. I see the amazing contours of the sets and hope I luck into a take off but witness only paddling. Still, my belly loosens and my chest tightens and I know soon I'll be surfing those frigid waves as well.

15. Stepping off the gang-plank there are arrows each way, left and right, to the baggage claim. I ask the attractive attendant which way to go. "You can go right and catch a shuttle, which is probably running behind, or go left and walk a mile and a half." I walk a mile. Just before I call a car, a sub-continental gentleman asks to borrow my phone, getting no service himself. He needs to call someone to pick him up. I oblige and then wait five minutes while he speaks rapid fire curious language, getting caught up on what I can only assume are a vast array of familial politics. Finally I wave to him and ask him to hurry, but he thinks I'm asking for a ride from his brother as well. My sign language is apparently provincial.

Notes On A Surfing Holiday

"If I had to move away from the coast I would live in the desert," I hear myself opine while driving down long dusty avenues buffeted by verdant golfing greens and swaying palm trees. An empty statement, in retrospect. I technically live on the coast by dint of the fact that I live on an island, but that's just a technicality. In reality, I live in a city far away from the surf. I could probably live in the desert, a couple hours from a surf spot and surf more than I do now. The qualitative differences of living by a coast in a city and partaking of the coast in a desert is so stark as to call into question the whole definition of coastal. This reality hit me square between the eyes while visiting my mother in the desert for the first part of our holidays.

"Coffee people." That's the voice I hear inside her head when she thinks of us. "Oh, they're coffee people." My mother doesn't drink coffee. Or tea. She does drink nonfat decaf vanilla iced lattes, which I don't think anyone can refer to as coffee. Even non coffee people. That's more like vanilla flavored iced milk with a hint of bitter, once the slightly melted thing is delivered. And she sends us Starbucks gift cards for Christmas every year which makes me think she must really like those lattes quite a bit.

They call the day after Christmas "Boxing Day" in the Commonwealth. It is the day the Rich English give boxes full of the cruddy stuff they got for Christmas for which there isn't a return receipt to the Poor English. They give to them in boxes. Ergo Boxing Day. In Palm Desert the only place to get tea or coffee early in the morning on Boxing Day is Starbucks. My mother was ecstatic for her wishy vanilla milk winking-at-coffee drink.

"Is it crowded?" she asks. This is a real stumper for me. How crowded can a Starbucks get in Palm Desert at 7 AM on Boxing Day? I can't imagine it gets crowded on any day. But metrics are different in the desert. You can drive for a few miles only seeing a few other cars. Maybe driving a mile and seeing ten cars is "traffic" here. So I answer "Yes it was packed." This satisfies her.

Basketball is the most boring game. I didn't used to feel this way. I used to love basketball. I played with avid consistency. But something happened... they moved the SuperSonics out of Seattle, I stopped watching in protest, and now, when I try to go back, I just don't have the love anymore. It's just flat boring. So how is it that the best parts of the Amy Schumer vehicle "Trainwreck" are the ones with LeBron in them? Not that Amy Schumer isn't funny. She's genuinely funny. Funnier than most. But something about LeBron. He was even funnier.

In Hawaii there seems to be one team: the Seattle Seahawks. There are so many Seahawks jerseys and t-shirts it takes me by surprise. It is equally a surprising bit of comfort. I think to myself "Hey! If I get into a little trouble, I'll just bring up that I once served Steve Largent dinner and he complimented me on keeping his water glass filled!"

Waikiki is a great place to shoot guns. If you're looking for a gun holiday, head to Waikiki, soak up some rays, peruse the boutiques, drink some mai tais and squeeze off a few rounds in one of the numerous indoor firing ranges just steps from the the beach.

The drive through the middle of Oahu to the North Shore from Honolulu is surprisingly short. Forty five minutes about. We start by visiting a little coffee shop in the Ward part of town. A Vietnamese man is behind the counter, next to his Vietnamese cousin in the kitchen. He asks us if we're tourists. He has been on the island for 15 years, by way of Chicago. I ask him why Chicago, he says "work!" The Vietnamese Coffee he makes is very very good. I order iced tea, but I openly covet my wife's Vietnamese Coffee.

Is there something magical about the North Shore? Yes. Seven Mile Miracle? Sure. I've always been intimidated by the idea of surfing on the North Shore. When I finally see it face to face, it seems entirely doable. There seems to be plenty of places to paddle out and not get in the way and get a few messy rides. It is characteristically (characteristically of all fêted but truly hallowed places) modest when first experienced. "This is it? This stretch of two lane road and that bit of rock and sand?" But this is expected and I don't let the mildness of an hour spent squinting my eyes fool me. All of Hawaii has an abnormal vibe. The North Shore feels particularly charismatic.

Waimea Bay is truly beautiful.

We stop at the Kuhuku Superette per instruction. I order a plastic container full of poke. A Poke Bowl. We eat it outside Tita's walk-up under the shade of a bus stop. All four of us: woman and man and two children taking turns slurping down the alternately chewy and satin fish. We gobble at the onions and rice. Carnivorous familial bliss.

Along the way I see someone I follow on Instagram and he stops by the side of the road and we chat for a moment. It is as awkward as you might think, stopping to chat on the side of the road with someone you only know vaguely from social media. But he is generous, offering me a board to paddle out and a t-shirt souvenir. My wife rolls her eyes at me, my older son is shy, younger son squirms in the sun.

As I said, I stay no more than an hour on this liminal holy land. The humility of a husband on unexpected holiday with children in tow. Another piece of evidence in the case against my surfing bone-fides, a legal matter forever being wrangled in an esoteric court.

We play in the sand near the President of the United States. He does not throw me a shaka. I do not catch him bodysurfing. Instead, in town, I buy new flowery swim trunks that fit me snuggly. My wife says they make me look less fat than the baggy ones I had been sporting. I wonder aloud if I wore speedos if I wouldn't look slimmer still. She says she wouldn't go to the beach with me if I did that. We order another Poke Bowl from another grocery. The fish is even more slippery and we gobble with even more enthusiasm.

There is a moment during my time on Oahu when I nearly break down. It is our last day and I want to surf. There is, and there isn't, enough time. I am ready to mutiny and I nearly catapult into the sort of fit reserved for my sons. Just as I shudder into apoplexy, my age takes hold and I remember my single New Year's resolution, a one-word mantra : elegance. I accept my fate.

In fact I was able to surf a few times on this little accidental family vacation. Ala Moana all, Rockpiles and Bowls and In Betweens. Maybe Kaiser's. The spots seem to mush together in my haole mind. There is an odd south island swell happening our first two days. I luck into four foot fun. Hawaiian waves do have the push.

Just paddling out into the water in Hawaii makes you feel like a champion surfer. It doesn't matter if it's three foot (Hawaiian) semi-mush. I mean, it didn't feel like mush to me, the wave jacking up for a fun moment then lining up for a mini stand up wall before closing out into the next reef. But to a Hawaiian surfer it was probably junk and I felt like a champ.

My son paddles out for a couple sessions. He does not let me help him. He paddles well and knows what he's doing. He still lacks the voracious appetite for surfing. Even after all we've been through, after all he's seen. He still decides whether he will paddle out. The calm, safe confines of the hotel pool still hold strong appeal. I wonder what surfing will become for him. I wonder if he will do to me what I did to my father with skiing. I can see it. But my father had three children and one of them still skis, perhaps saving for me a bit of acceptance in the old man's heart. Perhaps I should be more grateful to that brother. And to tell the truth, I adore my first son so intensely, I worry he can do no wrong in my eyes. Please do not let him know, who needs that headache?

On my last wave of my last session I lose my board and swim to retrieve it. I forget how shallow the reef is and my hand brushes an urchin leaving me with spiny black needles sticking out of my left middle finger. When I return my board to the shop, a real live son of a real Waikiki beach boy is hanging around the shop unnerving the demure Japanese expat shopgirl standing uneasily behind the counter. He is talking story to her and she is nodding her head and approving nervously. He has clear light eyes and the sharp features of waterman. I ask him about my urchin pins and he says "Pee on it! Something about your pee drives the urchin out. If you don't they live in there. They're living and will grow inside you." The intensity of his gaze makes me stick around for a while to talk to him about his fathers and grandfathers. He tells me about earning his first board by riding it in without falling off on his first try. Eventually, his intensity drives me away.

I pee on my finger religiously. Still.

We buy macadamia nuts. We drink POG. We hold our breath under water. We do not get sunburnt. I try the hotel's various versions of mai tais but end up preferring the local beer. Our last night, an asian man gets so drunk in the room next door, a friend has to come and get him bleating out in that curious asian-man-drunk-tenor. I've only heard that sound in the movies. But now I've heard it in real life. It is at turns fascinating, comical and deeply annoying. That last turn being the thing one is left holding.

In Carlsbad, I pull out a real board. By real, I mean a hard one, not a softtop. But I also pull out a softtop. I strap both to the top of the Nissan Pea economical rental car and surf Cardiff Reef and Swami's. On the softtop. I don't know if I can go back to a real board. My degenerated ankle is so grateful for the squish. My degenerated ego is so grateful for the reduced expectations. The waves are small, clean. The water is so clear I feel like I'm back on Waikiki. Where the water was actually not so clear. But such is the magical mnemonic spell Hawaii must conjure.

I have a hard time watching movies on plane rides. It feels better to read. But every time I scan the movie list on the seat-back video station for a Japanese movie about a single lady living a solitary, nearly monastic life and the goodness she spreads around her while she struggles with a hidden inner torment. This is a real genre in Japanese filmmaking I've noticed and if I'm lucky, I happen upon one. In the last six months I've watched two films about older single ladies with coffee roasters perched on cliffs overlooking the sea and a film about a single lady who makes beautiful dresses but refuse to mass produce them despite the attentions of a young handsome suitor who works for a department store. These types of films hold my attention just fine.

Today's Thought

Via Smriti Keshari