A Potted History of Jaffas.

[jaffa1949]

This was an article I had published in a worthy Surf magazine called "White Horses" some time ago.
I recommend the magazine it is among my favourites ( not just because they accept my writings) I'll list my favourite magazines later (another topic)

Seasons
Surfing and death have had a strange coexistence through the seasons of my life.
Spring was fresh, new, and at nine years old everything revolved around daily surfing progress: springing effulgently into life.
Perhaps by being blindsided by life, death remained unnoticed. Hawaii in ’69 held no mortal fear for a 20-year-old.
Death came swiftly like a tsunami. First marriage, doomed to fail, after the cot death of our first son. The birth of a daughter within 18 months, followed immediately with a rancorous divorce.
I joined the ranks of the living dead while land-bound, shambling through a poor semblance of life. Crazed by grief, taking midnight bodysurfs off Sydney beaches, handing the responsibility for life to the sharks. They, like Cronulla, failed to live up to their promise.
The summer of my life evoked a change. I became more interested in the quality of experience in all things: Drugs, food, wine, coffee and women. Some were phases to be discarded, others became inherent to the way I live, remaining today. The surfing side of this was looking for waves of superb quality around the world.
Death remained present throughout. The drug friends were cut down – corpses or near corpses. The motorbike crew died or were so stitched together their body scars looked like railroad marshalling yards.
Occasionally someone died surfing, but that felt poetic and heroic.
I remarried. I found someone who appreciated and encouraged me to surf and now had three stepsons to whom I could hand the surfing torch.
Summer was great, so full of promise, even giving me a grandson to take the torch further! Surfing was in full flower and so rich beyond the imaginings of any nine-year-old in spring.
As with all Australian summers, death came like an all-consuming bushfire. My youngest son, my mother, my wife’s first husband (my sons’ father) and our grandson and my wife’s mother all died. All within weeks of each other. Another son opted for a living death in the form of drug-induced psychosis.
Summer ended sifting through those ashes of the “family estates”, an aftermath of sadness, anger, anguish and fond memories
Perceptions and values were tested and changed. My marriage became even stronger. We worked together and from the ashes we nurtured a new autumn growth of life. Retiring and moved within a few hundred yards of a beloved break.
Autumn too, has hope. One son begins his life overseas and is a strong, tall man. One who has survived psychosis is still lost not finding his way back. The damaged trees recover.
Autumn unfolds now, gently, with the nature of leaves falling from trees.
My father and mentor of 60 years, the man who taught me to surf in the first days of that spring now so long ago, has died.
His death was different, the falling of a leaf, a death in its proper time.
The rhythms of death are different now. Each will come in their own time, in the natural order of things.
Mine will be sometime in winter. I probably won’t write about that.

[Big H]

Thanks J.