One Ocean Melt, Please
Mushroom Risotto will never be as memorable as it was on my first lunch out in fourteen months. Seated at a favorite bistro patio on a lovely April day, I marveled at everything. Our friend and server, after repeated ventures to our table, finally addressed me: “This is a menu. You should read the whole thing, but most people don’t order everything. Feel free to let me know what you’d like. Today would be fine. We also have liquid refreshments—I suggest you start here. Now.”
My post-vaccine startup after the numbing pandemic shutdown stuttered and stalled, then picked and perked up. Gradually, I steadied and gladdened. Adrenaline and cortisol, all the internal armor shielding us from emotional trauma, faded away as the viral threat diminished. Emotions, for over a year partially masked like my face, now belonged to me. Like a popped balloon, my whole being bolted into pandemic awareness—and immediately accepted the future’s open invitation.
Though I’d spent much of the pandemic outdoors, I didn’t see my true love until May. I recall the first time I beheld the ocean—a five-year-old punched by astonishment, tickled by eternity, mesmerized by beauty. Fierce and gentle, rough and smooth, rolling and rolling and rolling. Tide in, tide out. Beginning. Beginning. Beginning. Blue, green, gray—always changing, always consistent. Stabilizer and sustainer, the ocean was my preschool and graduate school teacher—a sensory educator offering no answers.
Best of all? The ocean eliminates questions.
I turned five again two weekends ago, feeling that old love at first sight of the ocean. I trusted the water and air, come what may. The first afternoon and evening, pandemic reality yanked at my heartstrings. Water waved, dolphins frolicked, surfers rode, ships sailed. The ocean’s rhythm, like a metronome’s beat, softly overtook me. Tick—tock, tick—tock. Waves lapped, lapped, lapped. Tick—tock. Tick—tock.
Just before sunrise the next morning, I awoke cradled in carefree joy. The ocean washed away the remaining pandemic residue—the last smatterings of shock and fear released overnight into salt air. The dolphin parade mid-morning melted fourteen months into one deep breath of gratitude. Cleansing, purifying water baptized me. Primordial newness. Infinitely fresh. Always beginning. Romping dolphins played tag. Not it! It.
“I drift like a wave on the ocean” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, presented by Stephen Mitchell). Days after returning from the beach, another water admirer, this one from ancient China, came to mind. “Do you have the patience to wait / till your mud settles and the water is clear?” Lao Tzu asks. Water pulls us close, perhaps because it is in every cell in our bodies—we are naturally watery. Children splash in fountains and run through spraying garden hoses, jump with both feet into puddles and hold their faces up to the rain. Dewdrops on roses—geese on ponds.
Each of us must pay the personal toll the pandemic cost us. Every single person, regardless of beliefs, paid and many continue to pay a price. On our own and in a place of our own choosing, it’s time to inhale the damage and blow it all the way out. Now. The mud settles and we’re cleared for takeoff. Taking off and flying, directly and ecstatically, into being alive.
Wherever you are, let’s ride Antonio Carlos Jobim’s irresistible “Wave.” His tender instrumental recording of his bossa nova classic reels us in with the promise that “the fundamental loneliness goes / whenever two can dream a dream together.” Jobim loved Oscar Peterson’s piano version of “Wave.” Watch Peterson’s fingers grace the keys. Alto saxophonist Paul Desmond’s quartet floats us on the same “Wave.”
From a little boat a cheery day, poet Mary Oliver falls hard for “One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins on a Summer Day.” The playful tail-slappers fill her with the world’s unimaginable kindness. “They rise, sparkling, and vanish, and rise / sparkling” and Oliver goes wild as the dolphin’s eye stares into her heart.
Antonio and Mary, meet The Waterboys, Mike Scott and friends. Their “Fisherman’s Blues” is anything but blue. What an image! “Castin’ out my sweet line / with abandonment and love.”
Rolling.
Told with McCarty’s characteristic wisdom, marvel, exuberance, and good will, Leaving 1203 is about navigating that way through. The author draws on all available resources—friends and strangers, food and laughter, life lessons learned in the very house she now empties, and, not least, her newly-inherited West Highland terrier, Billy. McCarty simultaneously learns and deftly teaches the fine arts of remembering, letting go, and holding on to what matters most. She not only finds the way through, she shows the way.
the greatest gift an author could give a reader… lessons of a universally philosophical and existential kind… a touching journey… a welcome, upbeat ride
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