Cross Stepping

One of my favorite songs played regularly on our local radio station KPig in Freedom, California, is the Seconds Flat tune: “Will you please dance on my grave, with your bare feet on the ground…” It gets to the heart of what a good memorial service is about, which is remembering what it was about a person that gave us joy. The best memorial I have ever attended in that regard was the one for Robert Jones.

Robert, a forty-eight year old police officer, was riding his bike on Highway One three years ago when he was hit by a car. It took him three and a half months to wake from the coma, and when he did his wife Toni took him home. I didn’t know Robert personally, but I had surfed with him many times at Pleasure Point. He charged the biggest waves and had a smile for everyone out there, not just the best surfers or the people he knew. Having spent my first few years of surfing being ignored or bullied in the lineup, I was grateful for Robert’s attitude. Little did he know the people he affected, and so it was that I asked to be part of a group of volunteers helping him at home.

The day I heard about Robert, I packed my surfboard and headed out to Steamer Lane. I wanted to surf with him in mind as a kind of prayer. Waist to chest high waves were coming through the Indicator off Steamer Lane, a good day to practice walking the nose, which I had yet to master. That day I stopped clumsily sidestepping to the front of the board and started cross-stepping.

Sidestepping up to the nose was the ultimate in uncool, but for a reason: cross-stepping was about grace. It had as much to do with the mind as it did with the board. It had to do with the day as a gift, just as Robert’s presence in the water always had been.

I got to be with Robert several times during the first period of his recovery. Toni proved to be an amazing woman, strong, prayerful, and committed. She brought him home -– to their dream home they had bought just two weeks before the accident –– determined to help him walk, talk, and eat again on his own. Robert, once a driven athlete and police officer, now used his eyes and different sounds to communicate joy, anger, pain, “yes,” and “no.”

During my visits, I helped get Robert changed and out of the house for walks around the block in his wheelchair. I helped hoist him and his wheelchair up the ramp into the van Toni had bought and adapted for him. I delivered the family a dinner or two. A year after Robert’s accident, Toni decided to continue on without the regular help of the church team.

Two years later Toni and a support team pushed Robert in his wheelchair all the way to San Luis Obisbo, using the less busy side roads, to raise funds for the Fallen Officers’ Foundation. By then Toni had stopped most of the physical therapy because of seizures that regularly interrupted Robert’s progress. “He’s just taking a different path,” she said.

Robert was excited and motivated to make the trip. But from the outset Toni said they would stop if it put too much of a strain on him. Although at times he got tired, he and the team of people pushing him made it to San Luis Obispo.

Toni said she couldn’t have coped if Robert had died the day of the accident, and that he stuck around because he knew that. In the spring, only a few months after their trek to San Luis Obispo, she told Robert she was ready to let him go, and one week later he died. Even without spoken language and the muscular body he’d used to surf, bike, and practice martial arts, Robert was intuitive, kind, and strong. As Toni said, “He was all about love.”

On a bright, clear Saturday morning in May, a group of surfers gathered for a Paddle Out at Robert’s favorite spot, Steamer Lane. The plan was to paddle out the Chardonnay, a popular charter sailboat carrying friends and family of Robert and Toni’s. The ocean was calm and glassy as we waited on the grass by the lighthouse to see the Chardonnay leave the yacht harbor. Just as we spotted the top of her sail skirting along the jetty, the wind came up to push her along, and by the time we paddled out past the kelp beds, the Chardonnay was there to meet us.

Toni sat at the bottom of the stern wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a lei of fresh flowers. Robert’s friend Annette blew a conch shell in greeting. Another friend, Quentin, wearing a Hawaiian shirt over his wetsuit, climbed onto the boat and gave his friends big wet bear hugs. Quentin, who’d been living in Santa Rosa at the time of the accident, had moved back to Santa Cruz to be closer to Robert.

We formed a circle next to the boat, and friends told stories. One of Robert’s boards, which Quentin had pushed out to the Chardonnay, floated in the middle of the circle. A few people held baggies of his ashes, which we divided and, at the sound of the conch shell, flung into the water.

We waved to the Chardonnay as it pulled away, paddled back through the kelp, and waited under the cliff for a set to come through. Robert’s friend Rim Partridge caught the wave of the day on Robert’s board. By the handful, we caught tiny waves on a low tide, and as I floated in the channel beneath the big rock on shore, something caught my eye: the waving kelp of the tidepools reflecting the sunlight and creating flashes of deep beautiful blue. That was how I had known Robert, a miraculous bright spot in a lineup where adversity was as common as the northwest swells.

For Toni, letting go of Robert was hard, but after what they had been through the last three years of his life, she had to let those ashes fly. After the paddle-out, we gathered at their house for a celebration. A crew of chefs grilled food for an amazing lunch spread, and a Hawaiian band played ukelele and sang. Toni had set up tables outside, and had photocopied a collage of photos for each of us to take home. But what struck me most was a tile hanging above the kitchen, which a friend had made for Toni when Robert went into the hospital for the last time. It said, “And they lived happily ever after.”

Kiddie Pool

Blue and I are not proud of the sheer yardage of petroleum products we accumulated when Carly and Eliot were little, but the truth is the toddler stage of parenting can easily involve a lot of of plastic.

It started with the kiddy pool we bought when Carly was two. I went for the sturdy model with the built-in slide, not considering when I rolled it up to the cash register that durability might not be compatible with pack-ability. Ten minutes later in the Kiddie World parking lot, I was opening windows and folding down the seats in the Explorer in an effort to wedge in the pool. In the end we left the pool at Kiddie World, drove home, and called Blue, who picked it up in a George H. Wilson truck. Not just any truck, but the one with the huge bed for carrying ducts and equipment. There were miles of space around the kiddie pool in the bed of that truck.

To Carly it was a serious pool, too humongous to fit in an SUV. It would be years before it looked to her the way it had to me the day Blue brought it home, dwarfed in the bed of the George H. Wilson truck.

About that time Blue’s mom bought us a play structure at Costco, another monolith of plastic that entertained the kids for hours at a time in the backyard. In the summer we moved the play structure so that on hot days Carly and Eliot could careen down its grander slide into the kiddy pool.

By the time Eliot was ten he was longer than the diameter of the pool. I filled it up one hot day, but he spent hours playing under the redwood tree instead. Probably if he had slid down the slide, his feet would have jammed up against the other end of the pool. And Carly? She was inside checking out a friend's MySpace.

The following weekend Blue and I got the pool and play structure ready for our nephew Chase, who within a year would be climbing and sliding. We brushed off the spider webs and scrubbed the dirt that had splashed up on the sides through a winter of rain. We scoured and sweated, opting not to dismantle the structure to fit it through our back gate. Instead, we lifted it over our neighbor's fence and carried it down her driveway to the truck.

We were tying down the plastic in the back of the truck when Eliot came out on the front porch in tears. He wanted his pool! We were taking his slide. He wanted them back! He let me hold him for about five seconds before he broke away.

I knew why he was crying. It was not that he had plans to use the pool or play structure anymore. It was that he knew as well as anyone: he was watching a chunk of his childhood slip away in the back of a George H. Wilson truck.