St. Augustine Beach – Emptying The Backpack

Commit = Finding My Nerve Again.

Good news this week from Papa Luie: You are never too old to learn something new! Papa Luie is the conga player who encouraged me to learn congas so I could make music with the Saturday morning music group playing at the St Augustine Farmers Market.

Actually, he said, “Learn conga or washboard. We need both.”

I chose conga, though I was more than a little intimidated. Now he’s teaching me and making a place for me to play music too. The lessons last week centered around some new patterns to practice, as well as three rules: 1) there are no rules for playing; 2) you’re never too old to learn; and 3) ya gotta commit. Papa Louie, whose age I will no longer try to guess, took up playing conga when he was 75. Yeah. Now he’s like my own personal Yoda and that is not because he is a head shorter than me. “There is no try. Only do. Commit… or go home to your recliner,” he said.

Commitment is the theme of the week: commit to not backing away, commit to not being timid but rather putting your back into the return of the ball in a volley, commit to the drive, commit to the first few notes of a verse. Commit or go home.

Photo Courtesy of Doug Mackenzie, Mackenzie Images, 2023

Commitment

Actually, commitment was this week’s lesson ad nauseum. From traffic, bluegrass music, pickleball, and life in general, I heard: Do not back away from what you want to or need to do.

The time is now to speed up a bit more when you enter traffic, to move forward, not backwards when you see the ball coming at you, and to sing out rather than wait for another chance.

Commit = speed up or move over?

As it was, the insistence of several noisy and angry drivers behind me was not so gentle after all, though. I confess they were justified in their angry gestures and (likely)rude comments; I was, in my mind, still driving in Monteagle, our bucolic and peaceful mountain (of course) town and summer home, where rush hour” means six cars, the speed limit on many roads is whatever you want it to be, and meandering drivers share the gravel roads with speeders. We don’t even have a stop light in Monteagle. That’s actually for safety’s sake. Besides the deer, the biggest danger for drivers in Monteagle is fog. We live at about 2000 feet elevation there, and the fog comes in and sets for a spell, has a cup of coffee and lingers far too long in the winter. Uninvited, the fog seems to camp out on our front lawn most of the winter, and, while it is pretty if you’re sitting by the fire looking out, driving in the fog is nerve-wracking for those of us who are already more timid drivers.

Ghost ship in the fog off California Coast
Photo Courtesy of Doug Mackenzie, Mackenzie Images.

The advice they give you for driving in the fog doesn’t help, either: “Roll down your window because you’ll hear the other cars before you see them.”

Driving in the fog 101: “Roll down your window because you’ll hear the other cars before you see them.”

Such dangerous driving conditions separate the timid drivers from the more aggressive ones; some drivers seem to see the fog as a reason to hit the accelerator. Wisdom dictates then that putting a stop light in downtown so some of us might be waiting to start or turn when another driver barrels through would be a foolish and short-lived experiment. Driving in Monteagle, though, usually allows me to meander, to notice who’s at the Piggly Wiggly when I drive by or decide if the line at the pharmacy is too long and I can wait to get those meds tomorrow. Driving in Florida, where we are “wintering,” however, does not tolerate, invite or accept any lack of commitment when I turn onto the road. Meander onto the Beach Highway at your own risk.

Wait, you might wonder: doesn’t being at the beach encourage you to meander?

That’s the rub, as they say. (Pass the Coppertone.) So many folks now want to live where they can meander that others move to the beach to serve them beers and crab legs, to sell them big beach houses or to build newer, even bigger ones. All those folks are in a hurry; they have zero patience for meandering. The many interactions between those two groups of beach dwellers as well as the struggle many visitors have with being able to slow down while on vacation combine to create what is the social ebb and flow of today’s beach life. Meander onto the Beach highway then at your own peril. You have to commit, to turn onto the road and be ready to accelerate immediately, not after you’ve checked the sidewalks for neighbors out walking dogs. They’re out there dodging traffic themselves as they make their way to the quiet of the actual beach, where we all have permission not to commit to much of anything except meandering.

Commit = Don’t Back Away

“Commit.” Be ready to accelerate. Be ready to hit that ball when it comes your way on the pickleball court or accept being in the losing team most of the time. “Don’t back away,” Steve, my partner in several games yesterday, encouraged me. “It [the ball] won’t hurt you,” he said. (Actually it does sting, but not as badly as always losing or worse being the one person no one wants to play with because you let the ball go by too often.) “Stand your ground,” he said, gently, but with some insistence. “You’re not here to watch, right?” Steve is older than I am, slender and wiry, clearly someone who has always been athletic. He sports a neatly-trimmed beard and is the kind of consistent player I’d like to be. “You didn’t start playing this game to watch the ball go by,” he says. Steve makes it look so easy to keep the ball in play without being aggressive. I find his coaching to be so much more compelling precisely because he isn’t one of the “Every shot is a kill shot” players. Those guys tell me not to back up and watch the ball go by as well but, in my thinking, they are suspect because their response to aggressive play is more aggressive play. “If the ball is hit hard, hit it back even harder.” Steve, though, is himself trying to navigate the game by being assertive rather than aggressive, and I really appreciate the distinction.

Assertive Does Not Equal Aggressive

Coaches and Instructors have shown me how to practice returning those more aggressive volleys, they’ve shown me how to use my torso to garner greater strength myself, they’ve even taught me, at my request, how to slow down someone else’s aggressive volley. That takes a lot of practice. And commitment. We haven’t talked, though, about the struggles of those of us who have been intimidated around more aggressive folks all our lives. Easily half the pickleball players out there struggle when facing more aggressive players, which can be especially disappointing in light of the fact that many players take up the sport as much for the social outlet as for the workout or the competition. We’ve wondered more than a few times if this was really our game since we don’t want to be aggressive ourselves and so many players seem to embrace the aggressive potential of the pickleball.

I’m grateful I realized, though, that the encouragement from Steve was not whether to be aggressive but whether or not to stand my ground as best I could, to take my place as one of the players on the court for that particular game, or simply to give it up. Instead, his encouragement was just that: encouraging. He was suggesting I needed to see how it feels to claim my space. That’s not the same as being aggressive. Aggressive players want their space and mine. I have the option of walking away and letting aggressive players have my space, or, I have the option of standing my ground and that, Steve was trying to tell me, is satisfying and even empowering and is why many of us play. I’m actually okay( with not winning all the time. Well, most of the time.) I’m good so long as matches are close games and include lots of good volleys and points. I don’t like getting “pickled” (losing 11-0) any more than the next player, but, mostly, the fun comes when the games are fairly evenly matched. A game where one server simply aces every serve bores most of us. Like most every other player, I’m here on the court to try to improve my skills, to compete, and to play. “You gotta commit,though,” Steve said. “You aren’t out here to watch the ball go by.”

Commit = Sing Out

That message seems to be everywhere right now. The next step in my joining in with the Saturday morning jam session at the St. Augustine Farmers Market (see previous post about setting goals) is being allowed to sing a song or two, and I’ve been practicing to meet that goal. I’ve been studying bluegrass singing techniques, practicing finding the tenor or baritone line above or below the melody and learning lyrics to old bluegrass songs.

“Commit,” Annie said. Annie took up banjo later in life also and she gets my hesitation but she knows hesitation is not a singer’s friend. “You gotta hit that note or it’Il sound like you’re being strangled,” she says.

At a session in the near future, I’m gonna have to ask to sing lead but first they need to hear me harmonize and so I’ve been joining on Mondays with a smaller group to harmonize and offer percussion.

Talking about singing won’t get me anywhere, though; they need to hear me sing. So, this week I jumped in with that smaller group and, while I’m not sure my tenor line wasn’t flat, I committed. I sang loudly enough to be heard or so I thought. Let’s just say the invitations to sing did not come flying in, though, and it was clear heading into the larger jam session this week that I would have to work that much harder at overcoming my timidity. My desire to participate needed to outweigh the tendency to shrink back into the wings, to stay on the fringe, not risk being bad at this.

My desire to participate needed to outweigh the tendency to shrink back into the wings, to stay on the fringe, not risk being bad at this.

I used to have nerve until…

I’m pretty sure I was considerably more self-assured, bolder even, when I was younger. I did not hesitate to enter the flow of traffic using only peripheral vision to scan lanes while I pedaled a ten-speed bicycle into city traffic. I didn’t think twice about riding at night through town or riding alone even in the dark. That, though, was before I realized I was mortal.

Perhaps realizing you will not actually live forever is something most folks don’t realize until they are “up in years” as my grandmother used to say, or declining in health or strength. Some of us can point to a moment when we lost at least some of our nerve, though, because we suddenly realized, “Hey, we could die.” Until that time, many of us had ridden or skated or raced through life, jumped trestles, run stop signs and woven through traffic like our favorite friend of Mario. Life – or at least the possibility of it ending – first slapped me upside the head when I was about eighteen. I was biking to a college class, weaving in and out of city traffic and, of course, wearing no helmet. No one wore them back then. I stopped at a light next to a semi. The light changed and I started pedaling just as the truck turned my way, dragging me and my ten-speed along the road. Another driver evidently alerted him to the bicycle and rider he had been trying to crush, and, thank God, he stopped. I remember thinking, as I was being dragged, that those big rigs looked even more menacing from underneath. When the dragging stopped, I laid my head on the pavement for a moment, grateful that my bike had protected me from the truck’s tires. I phoned home and got a ride to my classes.

…that moment when I realized I am mortal after all.

Maybe realizing I could die, that I was not going to live forever, ought to have compelled me to trade up from my ten-speed to something more substantial—a small tank, for instance—but mine and my parents’ response at the time was to get me a motorcycle. Maybe we figured I’d be able to outrun the big rigs. I got a couple of lessons from the guy at the dealership, then the salesman said I was good to go and so I went. I had to get to work and school, and, with two adults and three driving teens in the family, we simply could not afford a car just for me.

Like so much else, the motorcycle worked for a while, right up until I woke up in the back of an ambulance. Thing is, I wasn’t driving that motorcycle when we wrecked; my mother and I had decided together that she ought to learn to drive the motorcycle as well. Yes, my mother was driving and no, she had not taken the lessons. In retrospect, that was not exactly a shining moment for either mother or daughter. I have long regretted climbing on the back of that little Yamaha 250 to share with my mother my vast experience handling a motorcycle. In our defense, we lived on a small road where the only regular traffic consisted of neighbors pulling into their driveways. The road did, however, dump out onto a busier road so while Mom did well driving down our road away from calamity, the trip back required she remember how to apply the brakes and, well, that didn’t happen. It was a bonafide miracle that we ran into the side of that car; if we’d been going another mile per hour faster, he likely would have hit us full on and shoved us into ongoing traffic. As it was, I was thrown backwards onto our road. Thank God we were wearing helmets. Mine was cracked; that’ll tell you something about impact. I woke up in the ambulance the first time, looked at the EMT and asked him what day it was. He got flustered and couldn’t tell me and I remember thinking that, if the EMT didn’t know what day it was, what chance did I have to figure it out? A nurse told me when I awoke again later in the hospital that I had upset the EMT. Poor guy, he was not much older than I was, and it had been his first day. I would like to be able to tell you that he wore the uniform well or that he visited me in the ER and I found his blue eyes haunting. Instead, I wonder to this day if he had any personal thoughts about mortality when he saw a girl his age lying next to her mother on the pavement unconscious.

The physical effects for both my mother and me were miraculously minor. We each had a concussion and lots of scrapes but those injuries were far less memorable than the tension and strain of living in our home for the next few weeks. I did apologize several times over the next few weeks to my father without much effect. He couldn’t speak to me or my mother for several weeks even though neither of us were injured worse than we were. He didn’t even lecture me when he showed up in a used car for me to drive from then on.

I can show you the scars on my legs nearly five decades later, but the greater impact of those two incidents was that I was no longer confident about much of anything and my go-to response for anything coming at me fast was to curl up like an armadillo and hope whatever it was would bounce off me. This is the red carpet of trauma I have been trying to unfurl now for years and lately, life has been saying in so many ways, it’s time.

…lately, life has been saying in so many ways, it’s time for me to find my nerve again.

Everywhere I turn in the past few months, weeks, days, I see or hear encouragement to commit, to overcome the tendency to sit back and let the ball go by or miss my chance to make music. Yesterday, Annie, who gets my hesitation, took matters into her own hands and shoved me up front to where the microphone was so I could sing that tenor line on “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” It’s apparently time. Being thrown onto the pavement was neither the beginning nor the end of trauma for me; but, after decades of watching too much of my life go by, it seems the universe is urging me to accelerate back into the midst of life’s flow, to not just sit and watch the ball go by, to risk being the one making music and to not simply stay on the sidelines any more.

“There is no try. Only do. Commit… or go home to your recliner.”
Papa Luie

More Lessons from the Ocean – A Warning to the “Aggressively Helpful” Among Us

Walkway from homes to the beach at St. Augustine Beach in aftermath of Hurricanes Ian and Nicole, 2022. Photo Jodi McCullah 2022 All Rights Reserved

Walking along the St. Augustine, Florida, beach and seeing the aftermath of landfall of two hurricanes in the course of a couple of months, I realized that the ocean, like any living thing, strikes back when other living creatures encroach. Many a relationship has suffered and been destroyed or abandoned because of one partner taking up space that the other is meant to be occupying. Makes sense that the ocean would be no different. When we do not recognize and honor her space, this, the largest creature we humans interact with and desperately need, can be terrifying and mighty.

Walking along that beach pondering relationships and what the ocean offers for healing was humbling when I considered the damage we did first. St. Augustine Beach saw some of its worst flooding this past year in an area that had been “repurposed” by a land developer in the 1920’s.

In “Anastasia Island” Kenneth M. Barrett, Jr., a local photographer and writer, describes how Davis Shores was “built” by filling in oyster beds and salt marshes with dredged materials to create a new space to build homes. That neighborhood, ironically, suffered some of the worst flooding during the recent storms and, though I cannot claim to know of direct causation here, it has been telling how the ocean seems to have tried to reclaim much of the beaches in general where homes have been built. (www.LegaciesandMemoriesPublishing.com)

Photo Jodi McCullah 2022 All Rights Reserved

Relationship Lesson One: don’t take what’s not yours, including space. We’ve all sat at a table or on an airplane or shared the stage with someone who feels the need to take up more than their fair share of the space. Not only do these folks not share, they do not relinquish the extra space when confronted and usually do not seem either able OR willing to figure out themselves that they have claimed more than they deserve. Try to walk on an indoor walking track, for example, and notice who immediately allows faster walkers to pass and who seems never willing to move over.

Back at the beach, when walking after a storm surge, you will see newly-formed “cliffs.” Actually, these are twenty-foot-tall sand dunes sheered off by the hurricane’s storm surge so that they now resemble cliffs. New sand is being brought in to repair those; many of them are all that separates thousands of homes and the ocean. More to the point here though is how we who traverse and hope to find healing for relationship damage respond to the markers along the way. On the beach, there are markers to show us the paths we who walk the beach are asked to respect and follow; authorities ask us to stay on those paths to allow the dunes to heal. These dunes were habitats and breeding grounds before the storm, the places where others lived and breathed. Do we see the other creatures who also walk here? Do we respect the boundaries they have set? Or are we oblivious, or worse, do we simply disregard those markers in the sand of our relationships?

Photos Jodi McCullah 2022 All Rights Reserved

Of course, it is sad that most of us living “First World” lives take up more than our fair share of the world’s resources and leave more than our fair share of the messes that need to be cleaned up. That’s a post for another day. We cannot possibly recognize those transgressions if we do not, however, first recognize how we do this on a personal basis.

Those who are faithful in the small things will be faithful in the big things.
Luke 16:10

Listening to the beach when you have a fractured relationship somewhere in your life can also bring lessons in repairing those relationships, complete with intentionality and peace offerings even in the presence of the mangled metal aftermath.

Lesson two: be intentional about making space for the others in your life, especially after there has been a storm. On the beach, finding a gentle space to meet might mean sitting quietly next to a tide pool where the water and the emotions are calmer, quieter and restful and thus, where there is space for healing. Author Joan Didion and her husband, author John Dunne, shared for years the habit of walking every day in Central Park. They did not always walk together, she says in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” They liked different routes. Of course they did. They were two distinct creatures and would not share every single preference. They routinely, though, intentially, kept one another’s routes in mind and they made certain to cross one another’s path before leaving the park. This evidently was their habit, no matter how they felt about one another of a day.

There is calm and healing even simply in sharing space quietly with no other agenda, only being in the same space and breathing the same air, and this is especially necessary and powerful after a storm has visited and left you or your friend, child or partner feeling mangled. Tidal pools are physical pools of rest the ocean offers us, a physical natural example of the valuable practice of simply, quietly, with intention, sharing space. The message of doing so in a fractured, fractuous relationship is as powerful as it is difficult. Holding space for the other with intentionality speaks loudly without making a sound.

Holding space for the other with intentionality speaks loudly without making a sound.

Lesson three (and I can’t believe we need to say this out loud): give to others in your life, but only give what’s yours to give. Every time the tide comes in, as it goes back out, the ocean leaves gifts, mostly of shells, the abandoned habitats of creatures who no longer inhabit them. We can find many gifts there when we walk along as the tide goes back to its home. Quiet observation (notice the emphasis on quiet) takes you to those places where those shells are less damaged because there the tide is gentlest.

Tidal pools, though, are packed with sea life, from snails to barnacles to small fish. These pockets of seawater are not offering us souvenirs; the creatures in tidal pools are still alive. Where you have gone to find some quiet and calm is where they live. The same goes for the dunes where coastal authorities strive to rebuild lost habitats of the Anastasia Island beach mouse, the gopher tortoise, laughing gulls and wood storks.

Lesson Four: Do not assume you know what the other person wants or needs. You MUST ask. On our beaches, the county has taken to posting signs warning NOT to “help” a gopher tortoise if they see one along the shoreline. People think they are being helpful when they see one of these tortoises headed inland, pick it up and deposit it in the ocean. This will harm the tortoises because tortoises are NOT turtles. Tortoises are land creatures, and, if left in the ocean, could drown. The intentions of these helpful souls are no doubt good; they do not, however, show an interest in or an understanding of the need to ask what the other creatures need. We call that being “Aggressively Helpful.” And I know I am as guilty as the next person. We want to help so badly that we override what the other creature needs by not finding out what that creatures needs or even IF the creature needs or wants our help. We run roughshod over their needs trying to meet our own need to be seen as helpful.

This is actually not much different from ignoring those signs asking us to stay off the dunes. There, we simply go where we want. Being aggressively helpful, though, means we do for others what they likely could do themselves IF they wanted, but we do it without even asking. There is, then, such as thing as being too helpful. You may just want to look around but the salesperson is going to help you anyway. You may need to work things out in your relationship but one of your parents jumps in to fix things. In terms of relationships, trying to be too helpful equals proving to the other once more that you do not respect their space and choices nor do you value what they want or need, especially if it isn’t what you need.

My need to help that tortoise might be so overwhelming that I do not take the time to check and see if the creature before me needs my help (and, let’s be real, we can do this on our phones now that most of us carry them to the beach.) Come on. I am being aggressively helpful when I do not ask (whether I’m standing next to my friend or consulting a search engine for the difference between tortoise and turtle.) I do not listen when I find out that both of those creatures need me to leave them be, to give them the respect of their own space. Be forewarned: not asking, not respecting space too often means I am focussed on my own pain in the relationship. In fact, all of these behaviors scream that loud and clear.

Maybe, if you’ve read this far and are in pain in a relationship, it’s time to ask if the other will sit quietly with you at a tide pool (lake, pond, mountain view) to rest and see if there isn’t some wisdom there for you. Shh. No. Just sit quietly. I know if feels like it’ll kill you but it won’t. It’s okay to admit that sitting quietly when we are in pain is really difficult. Just breathe in the shape of the leaves. Feel the snow on your arms as you make a snow angel. Trail your hand in the water as the canoe floats along. There are lessons like these all around us. In today’s lessons, the ocean teaches us that, in relationships, we need to respect the other creature enough to ask, then listen and, oh yeah, show some respect and stay off the dunes.