Here's a photo of a photo that my father carried in his wallet for years and years, for most of my life anyway. Brother George, brother Hugh, and myself at Carmel's Monastery Beach a long time ago. I'm how old? Five or six, perhaps? The photo is faded, but the memories are not.I keep this photo close to me now, usually in whatever appointment book I'm carrying. I think it's too fragile to survive in my wallet.
This may be the same day I learned to fly on that yellow air mattress. Playing in the surf, laying on that yellow pad, waiting for the foam to push me up onto the steep beach, I was suddenly pulled seaward by the undertow of a large wave. I couldn't see it, since I was looking shoreward, but I could feel the surge of energy pulling me back and out. My brother tells me my eyes were as big as saucers--literally, he'll say, no figure of speech--as I felt the power of the ocean and as I looked at the faces of my father and brothers, all aghast or anxious in their own ways. Myself, I don't recall feeling upset or worried; I recall excitement and wonder.
The wonder is I wasn't sucked up into the curl and over the falls, caught inside, wiped out, dragged out to sea, possibly drowned. This was the infamous Monastery Beach, after all, though it must have been a calm day for us to be playing there. (We spent our childhoods roaming the Monterey and Santa Cruz county beaches, even though we lived so far away up in the East Bay. Monterey was--and is--the heart of our family. We'd also learned to swim almost from birth, so the sea, sand, and rocks were occasions for fun, not trouble or worry. And, if ever there were a crisis, I knew my father or big brother Hugh would save me.) Then, instead of being crushed by the mountain of water--that I still hadn't seen, only felt--I flew, propelled high and dry by the watery avalanche.
First, that undertow pulled me out, and then the lip of the breaking wave must have hit the sand just under my feet, flooding forward, sweeping and flinging me and that yellow air mattress up and up and high beyond the water's edge and the hard wet sand, all the way onto the soft dry sand at the feet of my brothers and father. Hugh was certainly right: my eyes as big as saucers the whole time. I hardly had time to worry; I only had time to wonder. What a lucky, lucky boy.
