Noseride by Miki Dora
|
|
When he surfed for what was to be the last time, he had made no
conscious decision to stop or to give it up. It was the end of
another perfect day at the beach. The last wave of the day
obligingly held his Crest pintail noserider in its
firm grip so he could slowly walk to the nose and casually dangle
five toes over the front and stay there gently climbing, dropping,
and sideslipping just by rocking his knees right and
left going on seemingly forever until he simply ran out of wave and
stepped off onto the sands of the beach leaving his surfboard
floating in and out on the ebb and flow of the waves as he turned,
satisfied, watching the setting sun.
And then twenty years went by - just ... like ...
that.
Maybe it was just naïveté. Maybe he was seduced by the
notion that a good man does the right thing. He was, indeed,
a good man. Yet doing the right thing didn't
leave much time for surfing. The trouble, he realized, with doing
the right thing (whatever that may or may not be - it depends on
whose
interpretation
you subscribe to) blindly without any discrimination, is doing
anything that way stifles creativity and possibility. Who knows?
For whatever reason, twenty years of raising a family and running a
business while growing slightly flabby in the belly followed,
during which surfing became nothing more than a distant memory,
surfacing
only in blissful dreams in the dead of nights after
sleep
came too slowly in the darkness of frustration and hopelessness,
and the retreat to dreaming of riding the waves provided a solace
which, upon waking, suddenly, fretfully disappeared.
|