Beaches
Harvey Silverman
I think it must have been at Rockaway Beach. We called it “riding the waves” though I guess it was really body surfing. I was probably about seven or eight years old.
Sixty years later here I am walking along a gulf coast beach. It is a pleasant walk which I have taken many times. My mind runs off to wherever it decides to go, so easy with the sound of the waves playing the ocean’s music in the background. The surf is usually quite calm, the waves only inches high.
Today, though, the ocean is stirred up, I suppose by some weather. The waves are a couple of feet high, and I can see whitecaps way out heading for shore. The noise of the ocean is loud today as the waves roll in, break down upon themselves and then bang onto shore. The added sound makes for a wonderful walk. I look out again and think, “Wow. The waves are high enough to ride today.”
That thought sends my mind off as I try to recall when I first rode waves. My dad taught me and we rode them together, I trying to make it as far as he. The distance we traveled measured in feet rather than yards but that was how I learned. Such a faint and faded memory but not gone; my dad and I and learning to ride the waves.
We went to Rockaway Beach a couple of times. Perhaps it was there that I received my instructions in wave riding. It is in New York and a place to which folks from “The City” went. My uncle and aunt rented a small cottage there for a week or two and a couple of times my folks and I drove down there from Massachusetts and stayed with them, just for a weekend.
By far my clearest memory of that time is walking with my dad along the Boardwalk, a wooden walk raised up on large wooden posts and to my mind endless in both directions. There were a number of stands there and we stopped at one. My dad bought a potato knish, something I had never seen. We stood together sharing it, periodically shaking a bit of salt onto it from a large metal salt shaker that rested on the counter. It was just delicious and the taste of that, my first knish, is still there in my mind.
No other knish since has equaled that first one. I measure any knish I eat against that original. For my last birthday my son had a couple of potato knishes shipped up from Katz’s Deli in New York. I warmed one, got out my salt shaker, and found a taste, aroma, and texture that took me back to that stand in Rockaway Beach.
Maybe, though, it was at Nantasket Beach south of Boston that my dad taught me to ride the waves. I guess I was eight or nine when my mom and I went there for a couple of weeks. We stayed in what was really a boarding house, with shared bathrooms and a shared kitchen. My dad drove the fifty miles or so on weekends to join us. There was a great amusement park there called Paragon Park which is long gone now but back then sometimes my mom brought me there. I loved the skee-ball.
Another ocean beach I can recall visiting with my folks was the one on Cape Cod in Hyannis. My dad and I had matching bathing suits of nylon in a dark maroon color. I wonder if he got a kick out of us being bathing suit twins. But there was hardly any surf so I doubt I learned there.
We also went to beaches in Gloucester but I was older and my dad preferred Wingaersheek Beach which has hardly any waves, unlike Good Harbor Beach. By then I already knew how to ride the waves. I spent three summers at camp in Gloucester. The camp had its own beach on a tidal river but once or twice a summer we went to Good Harbor Beach and I would ride the waves with my friends.
Over the years I continued to ride the waves though not often. But each year if I made it to the beach I would get into the cold New England ocean water which I called “staving off old farthood” or sometimes “staving off alter kakeritis” a fanciful condition using Yiddish root words; loosely translated “alter” meaning old, “kacker” meaning one who has a bowel movement but the idiom “alter kaker” means something like an old geezer, thus “alter kakeritis” a condition of becoming an old geezer.
I taught my two sons how to ride the waves. I expect the older will teach Ben, almost three years old now, to ride them someday. And I wonder what my dad would have thought when his great grandson, who is named after him, rode his first wave.
I have not ridden a wave for years now. I suppose alter kakeritis has set in.
Harvey Silverman
Harvey Silverman is a retired old coot who writes primarily for his own enjoyment.