Walking on Water

So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

MATT. 14:29-33

We spend most of our Florida vacation within site of the Gulf of Mexico, but -- with the exception of our eight-year-old traveling companion -- most us us limit our actual immersion to splashing around right in the fairly miniscule waves.  

Last winter, the proprietors of a surf shop a few blocks from our rented house caught my attention with a strange contraption that looked like a cross between a surfboard and a kayak.  You stand on it like a surfboard, but -- rather than skimming on the crest of a wave, you paddle it like a boat.  Though I am about as graceful as a drunken giraffe during an earthquake, it looked like fun, and I wanted to try it. By the time I got the nerve to talk to them about it towards the end of our stay, the wind and currents had picked up and made conditions unsafe for a beginner.

That's me!

Since then, I found out this "has been a thing" since 2005 when it came over from Hawaii, but really took off in the past year or so.  Several friends have used them on northern New Jersey's lakes. People's little kids were doing it. A senior citizen with an enviable torso glided past us on one right near the water's edge during one of our daily walks. I was not going to miss the opportunity again this year!

So midway through our trip, I marched myself over to the languid youth guarding the pile of  equipment on the beach.  He has a cake job at this time of year, before the snowbirds and college kids arrive, we shared the beach with only a few other people so he mostly has to sit there and hope someone wants to rent something.

There were no lessons... after about a five-minute description of what to do, he dragged one of the boards into the water and guided it past the breaking waves.  I flopped onto it, managing not to go off the other side, and followed his advice to start out kneeling until I got more confident with my balance.  After five or ten minutes, I tentatively got to my feet and lasted a few minutes before flying off into the drink.

Unperturbed and glad I had not yet made it to where my friend Linda was waiting with a camera, I scrabbled back onto the board and tried again.  Before long, I was standing more than kneeling, and getting used to the sensation of trying to balance on top of a giant pan of Jell-O.  I am proud to say I didn't fall again, and made my way slowly up and down the beach, hoping the wake from a passing speedboat wouldn't send me flying right when I was in range of my intrepid news photographer.

By the time my rental hour was over, my quads were like rubber bands, but I was hooked.  I can understand how this is the Outdoor Industry Association's reported #1 new sports activity for 2013.  I also think it will help me in the gym, since it requires constant engagement of your core muscles and awareness of how you are distributing your weight.

Speaking of weight, I cringed when I saw the photos. I hate pictures of myself to begin with, let alone shirtless ones, and studying for the Project Management Professional exam plus some medical issues meant it was not a very outdoorsy summer for me! Hopefully I can find more chances to "SUP" next summer which will help counteract too much computer time.

"I feel pretty, o so pretty"

At the end of our week on the beach, we headed to Busch Gardens in Tampa for a day before flying home.  I was kind of amazed how in-your-face Christian the Christmas (clearly not Happy Holidays here!) decorations and music were.  But my point (yes, there was one!) of mentioning our visit there was that we saw a hippopotamus swimming underwater.  This huge animal, which lumbered slowly around its enclosure on land, was positively as graceful as a dancer as it moved through the tiny fish and plants that surrounded it.  Similarly, as uncomfortable as I was with the sight of my pale, flabby self, there was none of that while I was actually cruising, albeit slowly, on top of the waves.

Make it Stop

St. John of the Cross / San Juan de la Cruz / St. Jean de la Croix

We spent the last week on Captiva Island, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast.  It is a place of rustic beauty, largely overgrown by palms, sea grape and scrub pine. The weather somehow seems more "real" when not competing with traffic and neon and jet exhaust, so one can actually sense the subtle changes to light and wind and water each day. There are few people around during this "shoulder season" between the end of hurricane weather and the arrival of the snowbirds, most of them retirees from Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is not unusual to have a quarter-mile or more of shoreline completely to yourself, other than a bustling tide of sea birds who always seem to be working so busily that one feels almost enough guilt to reach for the corporate Blackberry. Almost.

"In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night." ANTOINE ST. EXUPERY

Thursday night, we made plans to watch the Geminid meteor shower from the beach.  With very little artificial light, it's possible to see an amazing array of celestial detail on Captiva, and the coincidental new moon meant we should be able to take in the show with very little interference.

Alas, when the time came, a swiss-cheese blanket of clouds had spread across the island.  Nevertheless, we took advantage of what gaps there were and glimpsed at least a handful of the quick darts of light the particles made as they zipped by.

Our last full day of vacation dawned warm and muggy, and the clouds cleared up by the time lunch was over, promising a solid beach afternoon to wrap up our week.  The youngest member of our party was my companion on boogie boards in the gentle surf until he found a buddy his own age and left me to seek company with the grown-up types.

We learned the news of the school shootings in Connecticut from passers-by, and instinctively reached for smart phones to see what was happening.  It was hard to reconcile the squeals of laughter from the kids at the water's edge with the nightmarish experience I knew other kids, very close to their age, had been through. As the details were pieced together, the predictable pattern of debate was playing out on Facebook walls and blog posts: gun control, mental health care, school prayer.... a kaleidoscope of speculation and rhetoric, all coming from a place of confusion and pain.  Because of course nobody, regardless of politics, would wish the scene in that school on a sworn enemy, let alone a first-grader.

I have my own thoughts about guns, and health care, and school prayer, and I was not immune from the impulse to share them in the raw voice of someone trying to process the unthinkable, in what appears to be an arms race of ever-escalating unthinkables, because we can't seem as a nation to figure out what's driving people to such acts.

That night, after trying to stay out of earshot of TV gunfire, I hit the beach again with a longtime friend and the dad of my little surfing buddy.  We didn't talk much as we scanned the much-clearer sky for laggard shooting stars we were told we might see.  Staring up at the bejeweled blitz overhead, I remembered what the Little Prince told his pilot friend after meeting the snake whose bite he knew was his destiny: "In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night."

We saw one meteor each, and trudged home again with stiff necks for our trouble.

On a scrap of paper on my bulletin board at work are four words I scribbled to illustrate something to a co-worker who was coming to grips with a difficult family situation

 HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE.

People are calling for -- in addition to gun control -- stronger mental health systems which would ostensibly identify and separate the about-to-become-unhinged from our innocent kids. But -- to repeat an old adage I heard The Right Rev. Gene Robinson quote in a sermon -- it's not enough to keep pulling drowning people out of the water. We've got to head upstream and figure out who is throwing them in! I believe we should as a society take a closer look at how we treat each other, particularly how we treat those who don't fit the mold. Let's face it: we haven't exactly achieved the "kinder, gentler nation" we were promised back in 1988, right after I survived high school relatively unscathed. Instead it appears we have appointed Anne Robinson from The Weakest Link to determine who is smart, Simon Cowell to determine who is talented, and the Peter Pan chairman of Abercrombie & Fitch to determine who is attractive. In case you haven't noticed, these are not especially nice people, at least not the personas they wear for us.  It's not especially cool to be nice, is it? We trade casual put-downs with our friends and cheer at TV shows whose purpose seems to be to determine who can be the meanest.  And those who don't impress us or have anything to offer, we simply tune out.

If you are blessed with good looks, talent, and/or a good support system to constantly reassure you of your worth, you can survive the daily onslaught of unrealistic standards and "good-natured" barbs. But in the America of fractured homes and three-career families, where spend our days bumbling from one screen to another (I bought a week's worth of groceries today without interacting once with another human... is this really progress?), who's doing that for the people who aren't quite that strong? Who is noticing the misfit who eats his lunch alone? Whose job is it to compliment how well she draws on every surface that will take the marks of her pen?

 When I wrote about suicide a while back, I wondered if teachers have the bandwidth to understand the social dynamics of their classroom and keep anybody from falling through the cracks, but I don't think it can all fall on them. It's got to come from all of us. Nobody should be unworthy of a smile or an inquiry about their day. They may not respond in a way we would call grateful or even appropriate, but they were noticed, seen; they mattered, if even for a minute. Another Facebook poster railed that we should never mention these high-profile killers' names again, because recognition was all they were looking for. If that's true, if a tortured mind has been screaming to be heard to the point where it takes murder or suicide to get our attention, then shame on us. Maybe if they got it at age seven, we wouldn't be in this predicament. Maybe.