Today, the boys went with me to work. This is a frequent enough occurrence that few people comment on my propensity to take kids to the office with me any longer. For their part, the kids have learned to adapt to whatever work environment I'm in, so at my current company, they keep their voices very low, often in whispers, because the only sound there most of the time is the sound of fingers tapping keyboards.
On that score, somebody made fun of my typing today. This has been a common complaint throughout my career -- "How can you be a writer when you can't even type?"
Another version is many people's assumption that I cannot spell, because of the typos and transpositions that cloak my IM and email messages much like the runaway invasive Brazilian Pepper ("Florida Holly") once strangled out local vegetation in the shell islands in Florida, as well as throughout the other tropical regions of the state.
Brazilian Pepper is difficult to control once it invades an ecosystem, because it sends up root suckers and new shoots when its trunk is cut, and it produces a huge crop seeds that are spread around by birds. Like many invaders, it looked kinda pretty to new eyes visiting the region, as I first did in the '60s.
But its surface beauty quickly was replaced by revulsion as I came to appreciate how much damage it was doing to the native vegetation, which, unlike this invader, had slowly and painfully established itself in this forbiddingly hostile environment -- sand ground from shells, trapped by mangroves, slowly fertilized by seaweed, birds, fish, and dead wood.
Soon, the delicious but hazardous prickly pear grew in these islands, along with the exotic Carissa, Poinciana, key lime, Florida papaya, as well as a number of edible, crunchy seaweed vines that thrive above the tidelines. I gathered and ate all of these foods at an earlier age. You must have tasted key lime pie; if not, you are in for a treat someday, one you really shouldn't miss.
We used to watch sea manatees lazily work their way through the muddy Bay waters, porpoises dive and play, huge rays jump, clouds of mackerel migrate, sheep head nibble the barnacles on wooden docks, and -- at low tide -- all the strange little shelled creatures crawl their slow crawl across the sand.
Several times I found eels, seahorses, small sharks, along a host of other strange creatures.
Snorkeling in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific, and the Caribbean, I eventually came to appreciate the astonishing diversity of life that flourishes all along our dwindling coral reefs.
Once, at sunset, my brother in law Ty and I snorkeled offshore from Tioman -- a magical tropical island that was one of the shooting locations for the legendary musical South Pacific -- out in the South China Sea off the east coast of Malaysia, when we roused a giant sea tortoise that immediately sped away seaward. (These creatures may be slow on land, but they can move just fine in the ocean.)
***
I have no idea why tonight I am swept away by memories of Oceans Past. I have not been for a swim since Hawaii in '05 and Mexico in earlier '05. I'm not sure I've been on any kind of real vacation since then, I just don't remember, but if I have been, it certainly was not tropical.
I've long been a sucker for the tropics, even if I rarely go there. That kind of environment seems to unlock something hidden deep inside, a part of personality that somehow survived a childhood in the frozen north, like a spore waiting for warmth to activate its growth; or, more graphically, a male organ waiting for the visual stimulation of a female before starting its inexorable stretching expansion to a width and length that epitomizes male desire, and therefore the continuation of our species, at least until the advent of the Petri dish.
To me, there is no distinction between a tropical beach and sexual desire. They are one and the same. But a beach is so much more than that. It is a place where something much more profound may flower, and that, of course, is insight, and ultimately, potentially, love.
We all wander along the beaches both of our imagining and our choicing. Whether your naked feet in fact touch the sand is beside this point. If you can feel the sand, smell the water, and sense the breeze that hovers just offshore, you're able to be where I'm talking about.
***
Today, on the way to work, the boys and I listened to Forum, hosted this day by Scott Shafer, like Michael Krasny, a gifted journalist. Scott had a guest arguing that gays and lesbians undermine the morale of the military, and need to therefore be excluded. His other guests, unlike her, seemed reasonable, thoughtful, and nuanced in the comments they delivered.
My boys were talking among themselves and I heard them utter the word "Umbrage," which at first me to believe they were speculating why this negative creature was taking such umbrage at the notion that people of diverse sexual orientations might be able to function as loyal military representatives, just as other minorities have before them.
The boys, though young, are not exactly ignorant in these matters; one has written about the much-decorated "Go For Broke Brigade" of Japanese-American soldiers who fought in World War Two; and the other wrote an imaginative essay from the point of view of a Chinese girl during the Gold Rush.
Of course this is San Francisco, where we've long stopped segmenting ourselves one from the other on the basis of trivialities like gender or sexual orientation. Even so, and despite their excellent intellects, my boys were not employing a rather obscure word in the way I had inferred.
No, they were referring to a despicable character in the Harry Potter stories, a certain Umbrage who represents the worst of humanity in a wizardly sort of way. Upon reflection, I decided they had gotten this particular analogy precisely right. I, for example, take umbrage at those who continue to deny human rights to gays and lesbians.
Why? Ignorance, fear, and prejudice -- these have always baffled me. But then again, I was today only another driver, a commuter, listening to a radio program as I navigated down a highway, spewing waste chemicals out of my tailpipe, squiring my sons to the magic valley of silicon chips, where men still think machines are amazing when they tell them, not a new truth, but exactly what they want to hear.
Where men play with gadgets in fantasy worlds, while the bodies of the poor rot in fields of poverty where we rich men never go.
You see, for me, it is a fine line indeed between my own deep attraction for technological solutions to our huge mutual problems and the indulgences of fools. I walk that line every day, not just now, but ever since I embraced the emergence of the Internet.
None of this technology matters one whit if it doesn't help us learn to care for one another more than we have to date. But, before that can possibly happen, we have to be self-aware enough to calculate our potential effects far outside our self-enclosed bubble.
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