Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul Read online

  Alan cheered wildly!

  I turned to Alan’s parents and asked, “What does that sign mean?” With tears in their eyes, they replied simply, “I love you.”

  Linda Schnecker Erb

  The Fishermen

  Gateway National Park at Great Kills is located in New York City. Visitors to the park number in the tens of thousands each season. They come to fish, swim and picnic or just to stroll along the beach. As a “regular” at the park for the past thirty years, I have seen just about everything there is to see in this wonderful place. From harbor seals and sea turtles to egrets and herons, it is easy to forget that you are still within the confines of “the big city.”

  Every day in spring, a small group of us fish at the park for striped bass. Casual fishermen shy away when confronted with the worn look of our faces and the rough tone of our conversation. True striped bass fans work hard for their success and are reluctant to part with “privileged information.” We begin around 1:00 A.M. and fish until dawn. At thirty-five years old, I was the youngest of the group. The Nelson brothers were in their early forties and still lived with their mother. Jimmy was the older of the two, a dyed-in-the-wool “bass hound” with two fifty-pounders on his resume. John was by far the loudest of our group. Recently divorced and retired, he was six feet, two inches tall and built more like a linebacker than a fisherman. John had a broad smile to go with his wit and a knack for catching huge fluke, which earned him the title “Duke of Fluke.” And, finally, there was Frank. In his late sixties and in failing health, Frank was the general target for most of John’s wisecracks. Frank seemed to enjoy the attention, though. I suppose the daily verbal jousts kept Frank’s mind off his problems. His wife passed away during the winter, and years of hard work had taken their toll on his body. Unable to haul heavy gear across the sand, Frank was relegated to fishing near the parking area.

  We were friends in the quiet, casual way of fishermen, but we really didn’t get to know each other until the spring of 1999. That was when we first noticed the little seagull with one leg. White and gray with a long slender beak and dark eyes, it swam surprisingly well, although a bit slower than the other birds. The real comedy—and what really caught our attention—began when it got on dry land. Hopping around in search of a meal, it looked like a drunk staggering home. Or, as John put it, “like Frank on a good day.” We felt a little sorry for it, so we fed it some of our bait. Jimmy figured it had lost its leg to a bluefish. He was probably right. A hungry bluefish would eat anything that moves, and with its powerful jaws, there was no question it could bite a bird’s leg clean off.

  That was how it began. Our new mascot would go off from time to time. But he always came back, sometimes a day later, sometimes two. John would always toss some fresh fish at him and comment on how well he was doing. We figured he was a pretty tough customer, surviving on one leg. He took what life dealt him and found a way to keep going. Then one day, he showed up with a broken wing—a death sentence for a seagull. He probably had hurt himself trying to land—those one-foot landings had to be tricky. It was clear that our friend needed all the help we could give him.

  Every day, the seagull waited for us to come and fish, knowing that a meal pretty much always came with the deal. When Frank offered food, it would hop toward us, its injured wing dragging behind it. John called the seagull and Frank “birds of a feather.” And when we realized that the other birds were stealing the injured gull’s food, we took it upon ourselves to shoo away the hungry, healthier intruders. Deep down we knew it had no chance of surviving the winter—no matter what we did. But we chose to ignore the truth. We were determined to make the best of it. We cared for the bird as though it was a member of the family.

  During this time, Frank began to open up about his wife. He seemed to accept things more. It was as though this silly bird gave him something to care about again. At some point, the bird even took Frank’s place as the butt of John’s jokes. Even when the fishing was better in other places, we chose not to leave. Our friend would be waiting there, happy to see us, and we didn’t want to disappoint him.

  The days grew shorter. The fish had already begun their fall migration. We knew the bird’s days were numbered. When the fish moved south, they took our little mascot’s food supply with them. In a desperate attempt to circumvent Mother Nature, John and Frank made daily trips to the beach with bread and little pieces of fish.

  One day the pair came with their food, but the bird didn’t show. They waited for hours. “Maybe we’ll see him tomorrow,” John said hopefully. But Frank knew the truth. The inevitable had come to pass. But Frank wasn’t as sad as he thought he would be. The little bird had brought this solitary group of fishermen together in an unexpected way. These men, as different from one another as they could be, had cared for it, each in their own way, expecting nothing in return. The fact was, the little bird had become their friend. “No,” Frank said, “I don’t think we will be seeing him pass this way again.” He looked out across the water. “We gave him one heck of a summer, though.”

  Stephen Byrne

  A Day on the New Hampshire Shore

  We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

  Henry David Thoreau

  There were six of us in the car: me, my friend Shelley, her parents Mel and Cathy, and her aunt Pam and uncle Jay. We had made the two-day drive from Michigan to see Shelley’s ill grandfather, who lived in a small town south of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I agreed to go to keep Shelley company, and because I had never left the Midwest. Once we got there, however, a pall was cast by the condition of Shelley’s grandpa. It was much more serious than we had known. It seemed that everyone who saw him returned fighting back tears. So rather than sightseeing, we spent most of our time in the parlor sitting on the couch, talking little to each other or anyone else.

  At one point, we tried to take a walk. But in a town that consisted of three buildings—a post office, a general store and a hardware store—we quickly discovered there was nowhere to go. Two days passed. I had never seen the ocean before, and Shelley’s mother suggested we go to the beach for some fresh air. She and her sister Pam and their spouses decided to accompany us. The girls had spent summers in the area until their parents divorced, and they went to live with their mother in Michigan. This was their first visit back to New Hampshire in a decade.

  My first sight of the ocean took my breath away: It looked cold and expansive, with a gray sky that stretched for miles above the churning blue water. I took my shoes off, despite warnings about the jagged rocks, and raced to the water’s edge where the tide lapped my toes. The others joined me there, and we stood gazing for what seemed like forever. I could tell that the minds of Cathy and Pam weren’t far removed from the sickroom where their father lay, and it was not surprising when Pam said, “Remember how Dad brought us here to sketch?” Their father’s hobby had been painting until a third stroke had disabled him. Cathy nodded, then returned to gazing in silence. For a while, no one said anything. Then I picked up a stone and threw it into the water.

  Shelley’s uncle Jay smiled. “That stone took 4,000 years to wash ashore,” he said. “Now you’ve put it back where it started.”

  “It wasn’t a very good throw,” I answered. “It’ll probably only take it 2,000 years this time.”

  Mel smiled, too. He picked up a jagged rock and gave it his best shot. “Six thousand years, easy,” he said.

  Shelley heaved a heavy stone underhand.

  “Two hundred years, tops.” We were all smiling now. Pam gave a toss. “Aw,” she said, “that’ll be back by the end of the summer!”

  Hours later we left the shore smoother than we had found it, having set scores of rocks back thousands of years in their quest for the shore. I wondered why their goal was to leave the ocean at all. If it were up to me, I thought, I never would. Shelley’s grandpa died th
at week. After the funeral, we went through his things in the attic and garage. Paintings were tucked everywhere. All of them were of the ocean. There were dreamy watercolor seascapes of sky and water, oils of ships in a harbor, and pastel renderings of his girls combing the beach. He had tried to paint the ocean even after his strokes, his efforts touching and sad. I was an outsider to the family’s loss, yet I was infinitely glad for having been there, having learned that the love of the ocean is the love of life, a love that never leaves us as long as we live. We are like the rocks, I thought, blithely riding the tides, only to be beached until some kind hand throws us back to sea.

  Nicole-René Rivette

  Guided Tour

  One humid day in May while walking through the New Orleans Aquarium where I worked, I heard a voice say in a heavy accent, “Excuse me, sir, can you direct me to the penguins?” I turned and found a young man in his mid-twenties accompanied by a woman in her mid-forties and an elderly woman who stood quietly behind him. The young man had a warm demeanor and stated that he had just moved to the states from South Africa. I learned that our aquarium was one of his favorites, and he had come to show his mother and grandmother our exhibits.

  As it happened, my duties as an educator at the aquarium included narrating the feedings of our penguins, so I happily offered to escort them to that exhibit. As we strolled through the building I was impressed by their knowledge of ocean life. They seemed to know a great deal about many of the creatures that were housed at the aquarium. When we reached the penguin exhibit, he was pleased to see an African black-footed penguin, which was indigenous to the Cape of Good Hope, near where he grew up.

  We talked about the penguins for more than an hour. The young man and his mother were very enthusiastic. The grandmother, on the other hand, remained silent no matter how much I tried to include her in our discussions. The young man noticed this, too, because he leaned in close to me and said, “Excuse my grandmother. She is a South African woman and from a very different time when our people did not fraternize with yours.” I told him that I understood why she was being that way. I remained upbeat, but I could not help but feel shaken by his admission. As a black man, I had experienced prejudice before, and it did not sting any less in this instance.

  We continued to discuss the penguins, and before I knew it I had completed a full-fledged guided tour. When we reached the lobby, they thanked me vigorously, and I bid their family farewell. On the way out the door, I looked toward the grandmother one last time. She never made eye contact, nor did she allow me to do so with her.

  About two months later, I came to work and found a letter in my mailbox. The letter had no name or return address. It was postmarked from South Africa and read, “Thank you for your kind tour. You are very knowledgeable, well-spoken, charming and a wonderful host. I grew up with a number of opinions on black Africans and heard even worse things about American blacks. During our visit, I watched you quietly and noticed that your love for the ocean is equal to that of my grandson. I am a very old woman and set in my ways, but you have certainly showed me that at least one of my beliefs is not true. Thank you for changing an old woman’s mind.”

  Nathan S. Woods

  A Forever Ocean View

  My mother and I longed for an ocean view, the kind that went on forever just like the real-estate ads boasted, where we could be swept up in the sea’s changing moods. Neither of us could afford a house on the ocean, but dreaming was free so we did plenty of that. Still, we hoped someday at least one of us would realize the dream and share her good fortune with the other.

  In the meantime we took every opportunity to be near the water. Each Friday we had a standing date and usually managed to fit in lunch at a seaside restaurant. We ate our way up and down the coast of Southern California, seeking new ocean-view spots to savor. We even joined a beach club because it had a great restaurant on the sand. We could lunch to the sound of waves licking the shore, watch the sea birds swoop and soar or track the progress of the California gray whale migrations. It was, we decided, the closest we would ever get to owning any part of an ocean view.

  We would talk at our white-water lunches, but words weren’t always necessary. Sometimes we would just watch the ocean in silence, perfectly content. Once I asked my mother about her wistful look, and she said she was imagining herself a gull flying free over the water, becoming part of the seascape. We agreed that would be a perfect way to spend time.

  One Friday at the beach club, her voice broke a long comfortable silence, “Next Friday I need your help choosing my niche.”

  “What’s a niche?” I asked.

  “It’s where they put people’s ashes at the cemetery,” she said as a wave crashed into the sand. She’d been on a mission to get her affairs in order since a recent hospitalization for congestive heart failure.

  “I always thought you’d want your ashes to be spread at sea.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, a hint of a giggle in her eyes. “You know I can’t swim.”

  She had me laughing, breaking the somber mood that had overtaken me at the mention of cemeteries and ashes. I preferred to ignore the subject, but she was an undertaker’s daughter, practical about death. She wanted to be cremated. There would be no viewing, no funeral and no arguments. I wasn’t anxious to spend our Friday at a cemetery, but I couldn’t refuse my mother.

  “Where’s the cemetery?” I asked, resigned to a gruesome day.

  “Corona Del Mar,” she said. “Pacific View Memorial Park.”

  Of course, I thought. She was going to have her ocean view if it was the last thing she ever did.

  We met at Pacific View where the “counselor” showed us available niches. We narrowed it down to two locations in Palm Court, which resembled a giant stucco planter with marble-faced niches on all four sides and palms growing in the middle. It sat atop a hill with a panoramic view of the Pacific. That day the ocean sparkled azure blue, and Catalina Island rose up from the horizon.

  One niche faced the ocean, the other looked inland. But ocean view niches are more expensive than ones looking away from the sea. Her face fell when she learned this. She probably could have afforded the view niche, but it went against her practical grain. She regrouped and began to assess the virtues of the inland niche.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s right on the corner. You can sit here beside the niche and see the view when you visit me. I can just peek around the corner.” She was teasing me again, easing the tension. “Why should I plunk out all that money to be on the view side?”

  I could see she had made up her mind. She was buying the niche on the corner, without a view.

  Eighteen months later she died. My sister and I placed her ashes in the niche and watched the attendant secure the marble plate with mortar. We held onto each other, eyes straining through gray haze to see the ocean our mother had loved to watch.

  My Fridays were free, but I found myself at Pacific View often. Like my mother had instructed, I sat down facing the ocean. Sometimes I looked at the view, but mostly I closed my eyes and turned my head skyward. I’d see a kaleidoscope of red, yellow and orange swirls, pulling me inside the changing design and wrapping me up. It felt warm and sustaining, like a hug. When the colors subsided, I would leave, hardly glancing at the view.

  After a year I was still aching and empty, crying at odd moments. A college friend came to visit, and as a lark we went to a psychic. I was stunned when she said, “Someone has recently passed on. They are worried about you and can’t be free until they know you are all right.”

  Days later, at the niche, I thought about the psychic’s words. I normally took such pronouncements lightly, but I couldn’t shake this one. I sat at the niche, eyes closed as usual. I was edgy, though, and the colors faded almost as fast as they came. Hearing a bird’s call, I opened my eyes to see a gull circling above. I felt the words come before I said them, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be fine.” As if in response, the gull dipped a wing, circled once more and flew off towa
rd the ocean. My spirits lifting with the bird, I watched until it was out of sight. And there before me was that beautiful forever ocean view my mother had bought to share with me. I sat for a long time absorbing every part of it.

  Liz Zuercher

  3

  CELEBRATING

  THE BOND

  One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

  Rachel Carson

  Crab Lessons

  My son Geordi is a rather spirited boy. Very little holds his attention for long. He spends most of his spare time thinking up new ways to scare me half to death. Like the time he decided to “surf” on a tiny plastic lawn table that was meant to hold a few drinks rather than a six-year-old boy. Or when he came up with a new magic trick that included making his older sister disappear. Geordi had just begun learning about the ocean in school and was surprisingly fascinated by it. We lived in Delaware, so any discussion about the ocean usually included horseshoe crabs, which swarmed our coasts to mate in the late spring.

  As part of the lesson, Geordi’s teacher brought horseshoe crab shells to school for the children to touch and examine. When the teacher told the class that horseshoe crabs had been around for over 300 million years, even before the dinosaurs, Geordi thought that was officially the coolest thing he had ever heard. He could not stop talking about it for days, and I decided it was time for us to take a drive.