As a kid, I rode the first urethane wheels into a board-sport revolution that sowed the seeds of my golden dream. As I carved swooping turns on the extensive, paved hills, on the closed roads surrounding Hartford Reservoir No. 6 on Talcott Mountain, wind blowing back my long stringy locks, I formed a lasting vision of myself at home on the Elysian fields of southern California's beaches. At nine I knew I wanted to surf, to live in shorts, Vans, and t-shirts. The vision was so strong, it pulled me west, away from my first true-love (or so I thought at the time) relationship, and into the fray of Mission, Pacific, and Ocean Beaches. A place where I would taste the glory of living in the ocean, of loving again, and recovering myself into manhood.
And so now, my son is also, seemingly, magnetically drawn to blue skies, sand, regular swells, and boardwalks flowing with rivers of fit, beautiful people. We've seen the University of California at Santa Barbara where he really stood out in a recent baseball prospect camp. We've rolled through the muscular, modern architecture of UC San Diego while, having a deep whiff of the view from the bluffs above Blacks Beach and Scripps Pier. And he just completed yet another prospect camp at the University of San Diego, my graduate school alma mater, and home to a perennially strong baseball team and startlingly selective undergraduate college.
I am so gratified by his aesthetic. Of course my very few readers will ponder, "how flippin' hard is it to decide to attend college in a beach town?" Well, if it were that common a decision, then these schools would receive far more applicants for each entering class than they already do. But they don't. And places like the University of Wyoming are fully matriculated (no offense meant, but that would never have worked for me). So the boy has developed an aesthetic I can really appreciate, and has done me one better by engaging that aesthetic in surveying his undergraduate choices where I could only have made that move after college.
And thus the theme of the post. Is there a better way to test, proof, and succeed in life than to try things out, keep the things that work, and discard those that do not? I cannot believe there is and perhaps that bears out my interest in science and inquiry, rather than faith. And on a far less profound level, it leads me to wonder how much longer I can live the way we do now before I reiterate...all the way back to the sands of sunny Southern California.
Happy New Year and may there someday be peace on Earth.
