Ambassador

I first met Sharon at Capitola Beach with her Chocolate lab Lokie, who has since passed, and with whom she walked every morning after her surf session. Sharon’s father was from China, and her skin tans a deep brown from all the time she spends outdoors. I call her the ambassador because she will talk to anyone, knows all the regulars down at Capitola by name, and is always kind and friendly, even at a surf break where someone invariably barrels through on a prone paddle board, a lethal weapon in a crowded lineup.

When another fellow surfer, an introvert like me, complained about Sharon so freely giving out her phone number, I confessed I was one of the people who had it. I used that number after I read her partner Roy’s book, a California Western neither Blue nor I could put down. In turn, Roy read the novel I’d just published, and we became fans of each other’s work.

Then I injured my shoulder. Like the knee injury I incurred skiing, it could have been much worse, and like the knee injury I was charging when I should have slowed down. It’s something Blue and I both reconcile with since we started collecting Social Security. It’s not the mortality and aging I grapple with as much as the long-held habits, like moving too fast, that used to serve me well and no longer do.

It was a summer afternoon and I was speeding down Berkeley Way, one of the only steep hills in Santa Cruz, and one of the original concrete streets Blue’s Grandpa George paved when he was a young man. I’d been down it a thousand times on my bike, but this time my tire hit a crack, skidded, and sent me flying. I landed on the concrete --helmet securely fastened-- and my e-bike, weighty due to the battery, landed on top of me.

My friends Doug and Donna happened to be walking up the hill and saw the wipeout. As I collected myself Doug picked up the heavy bike, and they stood talking with me while I assessed the damage. I had a raspberry on my knee that was bleeding down my shin, and felt pain when I rotated my shoulder. Donna, a retired nurse, wanted me to walk home with them so she could give me a band-aid, but stubborn as I am, I planned to continue my errand. So they stood with me, while I held a Kleenex over my knee and breathed until my heartrate returned to normal. Then I mounted my bike, and more slowly, went on my way.

I was headed downtown to buy some sofa pillows, and after shopping I stopped near the entrance to stuff what I’d purchased into my bike bags. That’s when a woman who seemed to have spotted my knee from twenty yards away asked if I needed a band-aid.

“That’s kind of you,” I said, “but I’m going to head home and clean it in the shower before I put on a band-aid.” It surprised me that she’d spotted me from so far, and only later did I realize how I must have looked, disheveled and loitering near the doorway, jamming into bags what appeared to be my worldly possessions.

I told Blue if the shoulder didn’t improve in a week I’d see a doctor, but with icing and rest it got better. I’d paused surfing and swimming, but needing submersion, called Sharon, who took a cold plunge every morning after her surf session. A mass of people cold-plunging was another thing our friend, who’d gotten Sharon hooked on it, wouldn’t appreciate, but I was desperate.

I met Sharon in Capitola on a foggy morning, and with a fellow cold-plunger setting his watch for ten minutes, we hit the water. The two of them dove right in, but I stepped in gingerly until at last I was submerged. I hadn’t planned to stay in as long as they did, but ten minutes in 57-degree water felt doable.

“The hardest part is when you first hit the water,” Sharon said, and she was right. It felt delicious “icing” my injured shoulder, and treading while bobbing over the waves in a gentle south swell counted as physical therapy. It brought me back to childhood, when without wetsuits we played in the ocean for an hour at a time, at a beach that on a minus tide you could walk to from Capitola.

Before I knew it the ten minutes were up. We eased out of the water and walked up the beach, our iced bodies immune to the cool air.

Two weeks after the injury I was able to return to plank position in Pilates. At the rate I was going I’d be surfing with Carly and Kalen at the end of the month when we traveled to Carlsbad. After that I’d probably cold-plunge less. But I would be forever grateful to the friends who on a foggy morning brought me back to one of the greatest joys of my childhood.

Labradors are the real cold-plungers.