The Body’s Natural Tendency
Ona gray afternoon I walked by the sea with my friend Linette. We paused towatch some young guys surfing, and they moved with grace and snap, and it was nice to be out there, enveloped by the day. There was a middling sort of tide, the air was damp andsalty, and a fog-thickened sky blurred the edges of things and muffled the noise of the beach. The day had almost the aura of a dream, but it was all a tad toocompelling and too luminous to view as unreal, and those boys on their boards possessed a fully awake exuberance and athleticism.
My friend Linette likes being by the ocean. It's in her spirit and her history, and I was happy she could come. Her father Henry Lum had been a surfer in Hawaii during the 1950s, a Makaha regular, the “skinnyChinaman” who rode twenty-foot waves but could barely manage to dog paddle. “Hereally didn’t know how to swim,” said Linette, “but he read in a book that thebody has a natural tendency to float, and he took it on faith.”
Sillyme. I have always assumed that swimming would be a prerequisite to surfing. Butfolks are forever stretching the boundaries of what you thought was possible. I’vebeen wondering lately what it would feel like to be out there, and I watch witha new kind of wistfulness.
“Like a magic carpet ride,” Andy Neumann once said.
“Thatsounds pretty nice,” said Linette, “but for me it was more like being a dishrag caught up in the spin cycle of a washing machine.”
“Maybeyou weren’t ready,” I suggested.
Notthat first time. But she learned, and she even went on to instruct others. “Don’tworry,” she would tell them, “The body has a natural tendency to float...”
Linette and I have been sharing family stories as we walk, and she hasconvinced me that despite my being Jewish and Italian (and maybe because of it) I’ve had a rather Chinese upbringing, and this could explain why weseem to understand each other so well. There’s a lot of hilarity and similarity in the guilt thing, for example, or ambitions thrust upon you whether you like 'em or not, personal desires that could never meet approval, and that bravehistoric moment when you make the break, defy the rules, become yourself. Butof course you never really get away. It’s all in your head and your heartforever.
And I think we're both missing our fathers today.
In time you find yourself looking for them in the places that they loved, or you discover them anew in the ways they are remembered by people who knew them differently, or you glimpse them in some aspects of yourself.
Now oneof the surfers we've been watching, a boy named Nole, comes in and shows us a wooden surfboard he shaped andbuilt with $7 worth of materials. It’s heavy and primitive, a virtual plank, but lovelyin its simplicity, and no doubt hard to ride but he does okay.I tell him that Linette’s father was riding wooden boardsback in the 1950s, riding them on big waves, in fact.Henry Lum? Nole hasn’t heard of him.Well, guys like Woody Brown knew him, and Jock Sutherland.And ol’ Ray Kunze was sure impressed.
Linette and I walk on, laughing so hard at times that I can’t believe we aren’t regularbuddies, and I guess that's what we'll be.I pull up to the mailboxon the way back to the house and thereamong the junk mail and bills is a genuine package wrapped in brownpaper and hand-addressed to me. It turns out to be a little journal that three dear friends and I have been circulating among ourselves over the course of several years. The idea is to hold onto it for awhile, write your thoughts, thenpass it on to someone else in the group to do the same, and collectively itbecomes a story over time. It had been in Teresa’s possession for so long wehad almost given up on ever seeing it again. And now I read Teresa's words and I understood the powerful current that had knocked her down and swept her off course.
She is back, though, cancer-free, and missing us.
At the end she has written: “I take more time to enjoy the little things for I have realized they are the big things. The moment is now. All we really have is now."
And reading this message from an old friend with a new friend by my side, I feel lifted. I feel asense of levity and a lightness so pure that I think it must be true: the body has a naturaltendency to float.