Hard work and kind words

The waves were still waist high (but not bigger) but the wind had come up and it was choppy. Going into the session, I was already not looking forward to it. I was looking forward to being done with it---like work.

And that's exactly what it was: hard work and about as much fun as doing your taxes. Early on I caught a whitewater wave that was about my speed. I decided to just stick with whitewater with the aim of practicing my (practically nonexistent) popup. There wasn't anything to lose by just doing whitewater because no way was I going to be able to stand up on, let alone ride, waist high waves anyway. The best I've ever done on them is to just hang onto my board as I ride in on my belly.

I haven't limited a session to whitewater since---oh, never. It made me look and feel like a retard but let's face it, if I can't pop up after three years, then that's what I am.

I tried to focus on what I could do and give myself credit for it---like, I could judge which waves were going to have enough force to them to be rideable as whitewater, and which ones weren't. I could put myself in position to catch them just after they broke. And in the two hours that I made myself stay out, I had lots of opportunities to try to stand up.

Early on, I did get up and stay up for five or six seconds---long enough for me to actually take notice that my hands were not clutching the rails but were up at waist level. Long enough to have the thought: What am I supposed to be doing with my hands? That was my ride of the day---you know, the one that after you get it you don't expect to surpass.

The rest of the session was a struggle to: 1) get a wave and 2) get up without pulling my right knee up straight into my face (I'm goofy foot). If my knee comes up straight it's over; my foot is going to be pointing straight. I don't know how other people do that twist that gets your leg/foot turned around. I do know that without it you're doomed. It may be that I can never master the conventional popup, and I will have to come up with some version of it that's unique and idiosyncratic to me, but which I can actually do. Maybe I will have to settle for the retard version of using my knees to push me up (but that gets my leg and foot pointing forward as well so isn't much of a solution).

Right now my unique version (the one I'm attempting, with about a one in twelve success rate, to execute) involves taking off with both sets of toes on the board pointing downwards, heels up; turning my right foot on its side, sliding my turned up foot to mid-board (feeling the contact between the ankle bone or whatever you call that bony thing on the side of the foot, and the board) then pushing up with my back foot and then, only then (because how could it be otherwise?) letting go of the board with my hands and standing up.

I was trying this over and over and it was hard, it was tedious. When I got out of the water for a drink, I looked at my watch and only a little over an hour had passed. It seemed like it was much longer. I was determined to put in two hours, but how I longed for that time to be up! This was work, as hard as anything I've ever done in front of a computer or anywhere else. I longed for that proverbial quittin-time whistle as much as any steelworker ever did. But I would not quit early.

Along comes this guy, and I expect to be ignored because everyone always ignores me, but he's heading straight for me on an empty beach. Then he's talking to me. Turns out he's a guy I've seen here almost as long as I've been coming to this beach (three years, remember?) I know his name but almost nothing about him, and I didn't recognize him all bundled up from the cold. It's C., one of the few attractive guys around here. (I like ________ guys with _________. Fill in the blanks with your imagination. And that's like as in like to look at. At my age that's all I can do, I'm well aware.)

My first reaction was to be embarrassed because he's been watching one of my worst surfing days ever. But he's not laughing, he's trying to be helpful. "Let me give you some advice," he says, and he does. "I remember when I was just a beginner." Then I really am embarrassed because I've been a beginner for three years. But he seems so nice and genuine, and I can count on my fingers the number of regulars on this beach who've even spoken to me, let alone tried to be helpful. I know very well that to most of them I'm just an object of derision----a kook---because I can't surf and can't learn. Of course, if I were young and cute, it wouldn't matter that I can't surf. But I am neither. So no one can understand why this old woman keeps coming here when she looks like a fool and nobody accepts her.

There are exactly two others of this crew who have ever had a kind word to say to me. You know who you are, and I appreciate you very much. There's another one who, while he will never initiate contact, is at least cordial when I speak to him. The rest of them just look at me, if they do, like I have three feet (which, if you've ever seen my tripod "surfing" stance with feet and hands on the board and ass in the air, is not so inappropriate).

Unexpected kind words can make all the difference when you're on the verge of giving up. When you feel like that, it only takes a small thing to push you over the edge---or back.

If not for C.'s talking to me today, for instance, I almost certainly would have lost it when I was struggling out of my wetsuit not paying much attention to what I was doing, then realized that I'd forgotten to free one hand before the other, so that both arms were now trapped in their rubber sleeves, making it impossible to use one to free the other. I imagined being trapped like that in wet rubber for four hours until my downstairs neighbor came home and I presented myself to him half naked and begged him to free me. Had that happened, I really truly would have given up surfing forever. But instead I found the inner resources---along with the outer ones of my teeth and a coat hanger---to ingeniously work myself out of my neoprene prison.