I maintain a love-love relationship with the water. I love to be on it, living near it and my best days happen when I'm on or around it. I would, however, love to be more comfortable and dare I say, faster in it.
As my 11th place triathlon swim (out of 14 age groupers) at this past weekend's Charleston sprint triathlon shows yet again, I just am not all that comfortable and quite slow in the water. Damn, I thought I was going to better in the water this year but that doesn't appear to be the case. And despite my poor swim result, I actually felt pretty comfortable in the water and biked and ran (4th and 1st respectively in my age group) well. My first thought was that I took a wrong turn out there on the water but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case. Well, it's back to the drawing board. I guess I'll have to hit the pool/ocean more, get someone to take a look (again) at my stroke and channel the skills of Michael Phelps and the US swim team at the Olympics this summer. My 13-year old daughter, Bridget gave me a bit of advice last year after watching me do a few laps at the pool, "Dad, you need to kick more." Simple, to the point and although triathlon wisdom says to limit kicking, I might be taking the triathlon wisdom too literally. Better kicking...I'll give it a try. Thankfully, all three of my children have been on the swim team for years now and won't have these swimming challenges later in life.
Memorial Day weekend is the official unofficial start to the summer and brings out beach goers in droves. The usual 15 minute ride to the beach turned into a one hour plus struggle, unheard of in these parts. One whole hour!? I vaguely recall the approximately six annual weekend beach days around Boston's south shore and the accompanying full day ordeal to get to the water. Charleston sure has spoiled me so with traffic onto the islands backing up due to construction, the holiday crush and great weather upon us, it was a (relative) struggle to get my daughter Ailish and I there. It was, however, worth the effort as we body-surfed, swam and generally just frolicked in the surf, enjoying each other's company. Summertime bliss on Sullivan's Island.
Summer also means the end of the school year for my three Daniel Island Schoolers and with that comes the the annual grade school yearbook purchases that brought back vague memories of my single, boring, relatively uninteresting high school senior (and only) yearbook. Remember those yearbook quotes and ambitions we had to come up with? I do and remember not having a clue what should be stuck in print next to my soon-to-be outdated picture for me to some day in the future flinchingly revisit and show to my loved ones. The fact that I could not come up with any quick, witty and modestly ambitious nuggets that would stand the test of time might have been an indication that I had not yet really started my life's journey. Maybe I could jump ahead a few years and borrow words from Frank Black of the Pixies from one of my all-time favorite songs, "Wave of Mutilation":
cease to resist, giving my goodbye
drive my car into the ocean
you'll think i'm dead, but i sail away
on a wave of mutilation
a wave
wave
i've kissed mermaids, rode the el nino
walked the sand with the crustaceans
could find my way to mariana
on a wave of mutilation,
wave of mutilation
wave of mutilation
wave
wave of mutilation
wave
I do remember the day I purchased the Pixies' seminal work Doolittle, a melodic, hypnotic, scary and edgy album that that punched me in the nose on first listen. I was working as a 3rd mate on a ship in Japan, found it at a local record store, took it back to my ship and after the first listen thought this was the perfect mix of far-reaching radical screaming non-sense (that made sense) intertwined with perfectly harmonious sounds wrapped up into one special package. After seeing them a few time through the 80s and 90s, I had the good fortune of catching their Lost Cities Tour in Charleston in the spring where they played Doolittle plus b-sides in it's entirety. Although the show was a bit of a paint-by-numbers affair, they did a nice job and Kim, once again, had me at the first note.
I recently heard sad news that an old friend, WFNX radio in Lynn, MA is leaving the greater Boston airwaves. Despite a death spiral to irrelevance for FM radio and the ridiculously poor signal from their "remote" radio studio in Lynn, I still found it sad and a bit like having lost touch with a high school buddy and hearing that he passed away unexpectedly. The station was sold by the Phoenix group to one of the chains for a couple of million bucks and a few cases of tofu. Back in the 80s though, 'FNX was relevant and important to me. I remember the summer between high school and college, brief as it may have been with my July start date, when the sweet sounds of Kim Deal's unforgettable voice and baseline introduced me to the Pixies and great music:
And this I know
His teeth as white as snow
What a gas it was to see him
Walk her every day
Into a shady place
With her lips she said
She said
Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Hey Paul, let's have a ball
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love
Well, it's a few weeks later and a quicker and equally enjoyable trip across the inner coastal waterway onto Sullivan's Island awaits. I wonder if my Boston Latin School English teacher would let me use Perry Farrell's words for my declamation assignment. "Ocean Size" hits all the right notes:
Wish I was ocean size
They cannot move you
No one tries
No one pulls you
Out from your hole
Like a tooth aching a jawbone...
I was made with a heart of stone
To be broken
With one hard blow
I've seen the ocean
Break on the shore
Come together with no harm done...
It ain't easy living...
I want to be
As deep
As the ocean
Mother ocean
Some people tell me
Home is in the sky
In the sky lives a spy
I want to be more like the ocean
No talking
All action...
No talking
All action...
