Ocean Siren
(Draft of Chapter 1 of developing memoir with working title, “Diary of an Ocean Lover”)
Any attempt to describe my life — however imperfect the endeavor — must start with the sea.
Our Mom liked to remind me with immense pride and smiling approval from our Dad of my toddler years when I waddled about the shore with my older sister Danna in cotton diapers on Balboa Island.
Do you remember how you pronounced, ‘boats’? she’d ask, invoking fond memories of Balboa and Laguna Beach, both south of Los Angeles. “Bopes. I used to call them. Bopes,” I would respond with feigned interest. As if to prove a memory I did not hold, Mom kept an old black and white photo of Danna and me in long blond curls toddling around the beach at Balboa.
Today a flood of memories of childhood summers in southern California reveal days on end spent swimming in pools and playing at the shore. You can say we lived in the water, in the swimming pools — at neighbors, friends and Brentwood Country Club (BCC), about which I will describe later. We ran through the sprinklers in our backyard, almost as much fun, that is, until I was 12 when my love for the ocean became conscious.
We took to water like big fish. Danna and I took our first formal swim lessons when I was four or five, Danna, seven or eight, at BCC’s Olympic size pool about 1954. I was already accustomed to the water, gleefully dog paddling across the length of the pool on my own. Dad was there on weekends, holding each of us aloft, pivoting around in 360-degree circles, dipping us into the cool clear water, as we squealed in delight. They were rare moments of joy for him, distracted as he was otherwise.
My memories are collaborated by a home movie taken in 1947 on the deck of the leased cliff side house our parents rented for several years in Laguna Beach before they bought a home in Beverly Hills. In this ancient ghostly black and white 16mm movie, our parents are each featured tenderly holding baby Danna, age 6 months, close to their chests, slowly rocking her back and toward the cameraman, or camerawoman when Mom’s turn came to record. Their faces show ecstasy. Danna is aglow in a magical white light, the kind I’ve experienced only in dreams when the spirit of those we’ve lost return.
We are the grandchildren of East European Jewish immigrants. Not much light here to explain our attraction to the sea except our paternal grandmother from Odessa who may have partook of the city’s beaches swum in the Black Sea. But perhaps this is far-fetched, owing to her indirect at the very least experiences of pogroms by anti-semetic Ukrainians.
Human evolution, however, may yield more understanding of this natal attraction to the sea, an unexplainable feeling of a link to our ancient amphibious mammalian beginnings. See the human baby swimming underwater. Can similar movements be recognized in a swimming sea turtle?
Love of water seems to have been imprinted down the line maternally. Leave it to our Mom, with her Jewish Roma heritage. Grandpa Dave and Grandma Anna from Bucharest don’t look Roma in their Sunday dress in old black and white photos. But Mom, ever flamboyant in any situation, a dancer and swimmer in our family, was a natural athlete who craved the outdoors, particularly the shore. And so, when Dad landed on the Monterey Bay Peninsula at Fort Ord in 1943 to train for war, it didn’t take any persuasion on his part to call for his three-year bride in New York City, and in turn, 61-year-old Anna, who arrived in America at the turn of the 20th Century to spend nearly all her entire adult life in the cold snowy confines of the Bronx. As it turns out, she, too, was an ocean lover.
It took Mom less than a week to find a stucco bungalow to rent in Pacific Grove just blocks from the beach despite the spare listings the fall of 1943 quickly snatched by soldiers and their families. She immediately established her daily routine of sunning on the beach, dipping her toes in the tepid Pacific, combing the intertidal zone for shells and stones. This is how she spent those days from late September through November 1943 as Dad worked on base typing for Company Headquarters Personnel Office, U.S. Ground Forces.
Among our family artifacts is a letter she wrote to her Mom back in Washington Heights, among a trove of wartime correspondence she kept from Dad’s days as a soldier when they were separated.
Dear Mommy,
Here I am at the beach (Pacific Grove). It was cool in the house and I put on my heavy blue suit — but as soon as I came here, it was warm — now I’m sorry I didn’t put on my bathing suit. There’s a woman here who reminds me of you. She goes in swimming, 2 and 3 times a day — and this water is freezing. I don’t know how she does it. But she’s here everyday with her 2 grandchildren. And they are just like her — they live in the water. I’m just sorry you’re not here now you would really enjoy the beach…
Grandma Anna, a babushka from the Old Country, never formally learned how to write and read English. She spoke and wrote English in phonetic Yiddish. Those old photos of her, my only source of physical connection besides Mom’s descriptions and the few letters from Anna, show a plain-looking heavy-set elderly lady never smiling. Yet the truth lies less in her looks, and more in her actions. For at least a few summers in the early 1940s, Mom and Grandma Anna rented an apartment a block from the boardwalk at Long Beach, Long Island; the same summers Dad was starting his law practice in Manhattan, and Grandpa Dave managed his three apartment buildings back in the sweltering streets of the Bronx.
For more than several years up to a certain day in 1962 we rode our Schwinn 10-speeds most anywhere we wanted around Beverly Hills. But that summer, I extended my range beyond the city limits, waaay beyond, to the shining Pacific Ocean. I don’t remember telling my parents. Not that I made a point not to. I just never thought to. The boundary was naturally extending out, farther and farther. It’s not that they didn’t care. Dad imposed impossibly strong rules on us throughout our childhood. But as far as the feeling of safety went, it was a different era.
And so, at the age of 12, I discovered the treasures of the sea — an open frontier that would provide the perfect escape from the cruel unforgiving life at home. The summer of 1962 opened up a great freedom for us, inspired by my classmate and buddy, David Morse, who explored the boundaries every weekend on his own, cycling great distances. As it turned out, David was motivated by similar reasons — a home life increasingly claustrophobic, darkened by fathers who may not have exhibited alcoholism, but certainly, its negative behaviors.
On that hot mid-summer day more than a half century ago, we arrived on our 10-speeds having ridden 12 miles to the sea. We stood, gapping upon big swells rolling in from as far as we could see, marching steadily in straight lines, eventually crashing into avalanches of white foam onto the shore. Their power did not diminish from where they first formed at the horizon. Their rising crests turned to clear churning barrels. Even as they fell into white water, their power did not diminish. As we soon found out in the water, their strength was to be respected.
David and I silently weaved our way through an army of human bodies lying camped on the sand, humanity smeared in suntan oil and holding tin foil reflectors to chests. We carried tightly inflated blue and red canvas rafts rented from the parking lot vendors. The water was littered with riders, parents and children, standing and bobbing in the moving tide, or flopping around sideways, some separated from their rafts, holding tightly to the loop in the cords tied through small metal rings to the front corners as the waves had their way with them.
We jumped in without hesitation, drenched and surprised by the warm salty water quite different than chlorinated pool water. Instinctively we climbed on our canvas floats and paddled out. The powerful surge of the waves pounded us one after another. But our Southern California suburban physical conditioning reflexively engaged and we managed to paddle out through the gaps. I don’t remember how many waves we caught that day and rode all the way to shore, or how many times I lost my raft, how many waves pulled me under and leaving us desperately swimming up for air, or how often I choked on saltwater. I was hooked!
