The sky is tinted grey, shading into blue at the horizon as I step out onto the balcony. There is a line of white right at the tops of the waves coming in on the shore, fattening into a bright blob of lemony yellow, the herald of a new sunrise. I look out over the beach as the sky brightens, watching the gulls hover and land, pecking at the sand dollars washed up by the last tide. I sip my cup of hotel coffee, feeling the breeze and smelling the sea, all the different fishy salty scents that comprise the smell of a beach. Contemplating a small walk along the sandy stretch in front of me, before the day gets hot and everyone wakes up, I smile as I hear “good morning Daddy.” My oldest child managed to find a souvenir seashell that morning that the seagulls didn’t break apart while we walked in the cool morning, before everyone else woke up.
I never thought it would happen to me at the age of 21 but this pretty young girl that came to town to visit her sister for the summer to babysit her kids has placed a note under my door and I think she likes me!
True story, the rest is epic history. Best summer ever and I keep the details of that one for myself.
Thirty people huddled under a huge tarp at the top of a muddy hill, passing reefers around.
After a half hour, the tarp comes off. In a haze, I look down the hill at 400,000 people.
Out of the teeming crowd, walking straight towards me, comes Charlie, my best pal from high school.
Sitting Indian style, smashed in tight, nowhere to move. A terrible leg cramp comes over me, I need to stretch it out straight. The young lady in front of me says, let me rub it, I’m a nurse.
Nestucca Bay, Oregon, 1979. Three friends, a canoe and three crab pots. A driftwood campfire, a huge stockpot of boiling water, and a sack of fresh picked corn on the cob. Two cases of beer and a bag of weed. Drink beer, smoke weed, paddle out to the crab pots and retrieve dungeness crabs. Boil crabs and corn. Eat crab and corn, drink beer, smoke weed. Time to check the crab pots again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Boston Children’s Hospital. My 15-month old daughter was admitted for surgery to revascularize her brain after sustaining multiple strokes from a rare congenital disease called moyamoya. She had complete left hemiparesis (i.e. the left side of her body was paralyzed).
The operation is called pial synangiosis which involves taking an artery from under the scalp, removing a window of bone from the skull and re-attaching the freed blood vessel directly onto the brain (to get blood-flow to the undernourished brain). It’s a very complicated four hour operation, performed by the Neurosurgeon-in-Chief at BCH, who developed the procedure. There’s a chance of stroking out post surgery if the blood pressure elevates too high and sutures pop. Minimal pain meds are allowed due to the nature of the operation.
The first 12 hours post operation were hell. Daughter was writhing in pain and all I could do was hold and comfort her, hoping her BP didn’t elevate. The operation was a success however and by PO day 2, she was stable. But, we weren’t out of the woods yet.
One week later she had the exact same operation on the other side of her brain. Her post op course was about the same as the week before.
Having her discharged from the hospital was a very happy moment I’ll never forget. But, it wasn’t the best memory.
The best memory was on the train trip back to Florida. With daughter’s head still bandaged from the operation, we stopped in Philadelphia (where I grew up) to visit my brother, sister and their families and to pick up my other daughter who we dropped off on the way up to Boston.
During the welcome home celebration, youngest daughter began moving the left side of her body once again and she was beaming. It’s as though a foggy fugue lifted from her mind. Her older sister gave her the first big hug. Others followed.
She’s now 19-yo, sassy and has only residual partial paralysis of her left hand and foot. She doesn’t let it get her down though. She and her sister are still tight as ticks and they always have each others backs.
My not-so-happy memory was from a couple years ago when she crashed my car through our garage door. That cost me a thousand bucks!
A chilly night, with an enveloping fog rolling in over the central Oregon coast. Before dinner, my beloved and I stop at Devil’s Churn to check it out.
Several yards away overlooking the naturally-formed chasm, we are alone, freezing and holding each other close. As advertised, the waves are rowdy and violent, sprays flying up and over the Churn wall in our direction. I can’t wait for a big one. My beloved – like me, she has never been here before – assures me it will happen. After a few minutes, I start to wonder whether this will end up being a disappointment.
And then the big one happens.
We see it coming into the Churn: faster, with greater volume and force than any of the previous waves. It hits the wall, sending untold gallons of water into the air, arcing inexorably towards us as if it we had been its intended target. In several moments, we are pelted and soaked by Nature’s ejaculation; so palpably exhilarating it can’t be described in words, it’s also cold as hell (if hell was cold), but we are together under it and nothing else matters.
A few years ago, I don my lab/clown coat and join the March For Science. There were a few chants. Then, somebody yelled “Let’s chant the periodic table!”
I yell “H!”
Some one else chimes in with “HE!”
The first person says “Umm, I was joking and am unprepared for this!”
The very first time I held my niece. She was only a few hours old. She spit up on me. I became the first person she ever vomitted on. I have MANY happy memories of her. I remember answering her science questions like ‘how do airplanes fly?’
The day Mom called my sister and I outside saying Bubby (that’s Yiddish for grandmother) had a surprise for us. I was wondering if it was toys or candy or maybe a bike. It was instead a purebred red shorthair miniature daschund. We named him Goliath.
When my younger sister was in labor with her first child my BIL would come out to keep us in the loop. This kid would be my first nephew and my parents first grandchild. At one point we hadn’t heard from him in a while so my father and I went sneaking down the hall. The delivery room was closed of course, but suddenly we heard a baby crying, just like on TV. My father turned to me with his eyes shining like 200 watt bulbs and said “did you hear that? DID YOU HEAR THAT?” I’ll never forget the look on his face.
I convinced a girlfriend to drive out to the mountains to spend the night in a shelter I’d noticed on a map. Turned out to be a tiny thing, and we had it all to ourselves. It was a Friday and she was exhausted after a tough week at work, so she fell asleep shortly after nightfall. In the following hour, I noticed so many shooting stars that I had to wake her, and that was how we unwittingly experienced the first Perseids metor shower that either of us had seen.
On our first date, my wife almost pushed me into the lake near her home. She laughed fit to bust and I’ve never seen her face light up like that. Although our wedding day was a close second.
