My Thanksgiving

This year I traveled to Cleveland for Thanksgiving to meet my new friend's family and friends. My friend used to be in a rock band, playing lead guitar. The band-leader/song-writer was Kevin McMahon, who went on to form other bands, including one called Prick (yeah, I know). In this video he's the guy singing and swinging on the perch, wearing the black bird suit. We spent half a day in his studio, listening to old cuts from the original band and jamming. (Well, I didn't jam, I listened and bopped around a bit).

Can I just say that this is kind of different than participating in an ecumenical Thanksgiving service at a local main-line church?

(Technical difficulties prevented me from posting the video itself -- the link should work).

Waves

Whenever I go to the ocean and spend a few hours diving in the waves, as I did last week, I am reminded of how much they have taught me.   Occasionally you see somebody out in the surf who is clearly a newcomer to waves.   Again and again they stand in the way of them and get smacked down.  Now, if getting hit in the chest and head and back by powerful walls of frothy salt water is your thing, then go right on standing there and getting smacked.  There are certainly worse ways to spend a day.  

Personally, I prefer to face waves in a few other ways:  diving over, diving under, moving out beyond them or riding them in.  Of course, each way holds its own life lessons.  

Diving over is tricky and only works if you catch it just before the big break.  You have to know your wave and decide whether you have the traction on the sand shifting beneath you to make the leap.    This way involves risk and quick judgement and the willingness to get a huge faceful of froth.  But done right, it can result in a very pleasant floating, flopping ride to the other side.

Diving under is the easiest thing.  Just put your arms over your head and face the wave and plunge straight in the the heart of it.   But if you've never done it before, it looks scary.  It's only once you've tried it that you understand that the quietest place in the surf is directly underneath the biggest waves.  Ah yes, the old "there's no way out but through" philosophy. 

Getting out beyond the waves usually means putting yourself rather far out into the ocean, which only works if you like being in the ocean over your head and trust that you have the strength to swim back in, even if a rip tide is pulling you farther out.  To get beyond the waves you have to take a few in the face first, or try the diving under and over techniques often enough to get good at both.  Beyond the waves can be choppy or peaceful and you are never guaranteed a wave-free existence, but what a place to hang out and enjoy the vastness of the universe. The risk is in straying too far from shore, but the pay-off is excellent.   

Riding them in is the most fun of all but requires a willingness to eat some sand, scrape your knees on shells and occasionally feel as if you may be ripped apart.   It also requires great patience in finding just the right wave to ride and catching it at just the right moment as the wall of water tips forward, but before the actual crest.   But when you catch a great body surfing rise -- ah!   What a rush!   

Home Sweet Home

Arrived home last night, spent this afternoon and evening at my mom's where my two brothers are visiting, along with families. Tonight we celebrated Dad's 80th birthday. He was confused, as usual, but happy to have us all there. Tomorrow we all go white-water rafting. Well, not Dad, but the rest of us.

DC trip was all about my son and his friends and obsessions (another post), but it was fun. The highlight for me came Saturday a.m. when we metroed down to the American Indian museum for DC's little version of Live Earth. I got to see AL!!! I was so excited. The short version is that when arranging all the Live Earth concerts around the world, organizers naturally wanted a DC presence. But they got blocked. No to the capital lawn. No to the mall. No to all the monuments. So they just gave up. Then the American Indian museum said, "You can have our lawn." How's that for irony? Unfortunately, their lawn is slightly larger than a postage stamp and it was a typical July day in DC (mid-90s by 10 a.m.), and the sound system sucked because it was facing the museum building and nobody could see the stage. But, whatever. I was there and I was proud. Whoohoo! (Didn't last long in the crowd and the heat with the boy, I must confess).

Nice to be home again and in my own bedroom.

Vacation Thoughts, part two

When I think of the beach, my internal vision is of this beach: the one in NC where I’ve been coming since childhood. Most summers of my childhood we would rent a beach-front cottage for a week with a family of cousins and hang out, body-surfing in the waves or floating in inner-tubes out beyond the waves, for hours on end. We got blistering burns every year, but it never kept us out of the sun the following year. This was long before the day of SPF 50. The pier where we would take our dripping ice-cream cones, longest pier on the East Coast, is now gone, the victim of one of the more recent hurricanes.

When not swimming or searching for shells or digging in the sand, we played cards and put together jigsaw puzzles. No TV, ipods, DVDs or video games back then. We ate sandy sandwiches for lunch and one night of the week we’d go to Jone’s Seafood Restaurant where every year of my childhood I ordered fried flounder with all the hush puppies I could eat. Which was a fair number. My dad always got the deviled crab or fried oysters.

The beach had no amusement parks, no arcades, no boardwalks, no high-rises. Just ticky-tack cottages, affordable to families like ours, one restaurant, one over-priced grocery store and one putt-putt course. We got to play there on the night we ate out. Now, of course, there are more and bigger of everything, though the beach-front itself remains relatively undeveloped. The houses are bigger and fancier, but still no high-rises.

The strand is wide, with soft sand, the dunes are gentle, with the occasional turtle nest protected by orange tape. The waves are big enough for body surfing, but not too big for toddlers to enjoy. The water is warm enough to go in at 8 a.m. without screaming but not so warm it feels like a bath. I’ve enjoyed the northwest coast and the eastern shore from Jersey to Florida, the southern coast of England and the Northwest coast of Scotland, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Gulf coast from South Padre to Sanibel and, of course, the North Coast where I lived for ten years (that’s Lake Ontario for the uninitiated). But this beach will always be what I think of when someone says, “Let’s go to the beach.”