I was squatting down on the beach searching for jelly bean stones when I looked up to see a very attractive woman walking toward me. I struggled to stand up, my bad knee causing me to rise unevenly, and I said to myself, “try to look cool, try to look cool.” But it’s hard to look cool when you’re squat-waddling on the beach so that your back doesn’t have to bear all the burden of this compromising endeavor while your no longer 20/20 vision is closer to the pebbles. In any case, she appeared uninterested in my pebbles, and so each of us carried on.
Early today I drove to Pismo Beach, both a town and a beach, and happened upon a surfing tournament—junior pro level, ages 18-22. A few surfers at a time would be on the water for a set period, 20 minutes or so, and I think they had 7 chances, 7 waves to choose from and do their thing, taking their two highest scores after judges would score them like in the Olympics. There were live TV announcers, and the winner in each of the men’s and women’s divisions would get $10,000. You could watch the surfers from the 150 yard long pier, the point of which ended about where the surfers would begin to catch a wave. It was gray out, and misting—the first overcast day in the nearly 3 weeks I’ve been here.
I’ve always wanted to try surfing, to be propelled along by the power of mere water, to be among the focused sounds of the surf and away from everything peripheral. I can waterski on one ski, and I wakeboarded once 5 to 6 years ago in my early 40s. I’ve snowboarded successfully about 8 times, learning at about age 30, but after a very bad wipeout I returned to downhill skiing, which I can do fairly consistently without face-planting. And so I think I could surf, but I don’t see any surfers who look like me—fat, middle-aged surfers with beer bellies and no hair. Maybe we have our own beach somewhere so we don’t have to feel bad, or to make others feel bad for what they will become. I make a note to ask around.
I think it was at about age 17 that I started cutting my own hair, mostly shaving it short, then letting it grow wild. I would never use a comb, just run my fingers through it, and it would shoot out in all directions and make me look like some kind of wild thing, raised perhaps by a family of muskrats in the sloughs of South Dakota, then set loose in the city to someday return and tell tales to my soggy muskrat friends and family.
I’d always had a widow’s peak, not too pronounced, but enough to raise eyebrows and hope that those eyebrows would someday grow long enough to comb back over my head, because by 18 I could see that I was going bald. My hair fled perhaps half an inch a year until it was entirely out of runway by about age 29. And so I have not been to a professional barber in 30 years.
I suspect that this is why my retirement accounts are so flush: All that hair money has been accumulating interest and paying dividends for decades now, while the well-coiffed return month after month for their money to be scissored from them and broomed away into some Hefty garbage bag along with the earnings of the dozens of other victims of the day. And it is entirely because of this that someday I expect to own a wonderful beach home, and you might someday visit, the wind in your hair, the deed for the beach house in my name; you may stay a short while, then it’s back to your haircuts and rented property.
And so yesterday I sat outside my camper and plugged in my trusty trimmer and let it go to work, the slight breeze carrying what hair remained on my head to mix with the grass and the Monterey pines where I reside in one of only five such Monterey pine forests left in the world. Nutrients from my dying follicles would buoy them, I hoped, to live on with fruitful crowns, even as mine own has withered and extinction for this singular subspecies of Adam calls from not too far distant.
Most of the hair, in fact, was from my beard, and it’s my first shave since Jan. 5. It had to be done. In part it had to be done because in late December I purchased a new phone—something I try to do as in-often as possible. The new phone uses face ID, and lately, I think because I’d been clean shaven when I’d taught it my face, it had begun to have trouble recognizing that I was me.
Dry wine, Sweetarts
Last night I went to the Cambria liquor store and got a bottle of red wine and one of those tubes of Sweetarts, but then the liquor store guy made fun of me. He said, “What a great combination. ‘Oh honey I’m home with the wine and the Sweetarts.” And then he laughed and laughed, and I said, “I wanted Sprees but you don’t have them. The chewy Sprees.” And he just kept laughing.
I ate all the Sweetarts in the 7 minute drive back to my camper. And to be honest, what I really wanted was Bottle Caps. For the past six months or so I’ve been checking most gas stations I go into to see if they have Bottle Caps, but no one does. It’s possible they’ve stopped making them, but I won’t Google it because I don’t want to know the truth. I’d rather keep looking. The root beer ones taste like root beer.
Leave a reply to upalag555 Cancel reply