Rest in Paradise, Donald Takayama (1944 - 2012)
"When I lived in Hawaii, I’d take a drive from Waikiki to where my grandmother lived—up along the coast heading east, and it takes you past Hanauma Bay. When my mother was pregnant with me she’d take a walk along the beach… You park your car. If the waves are good you sit and watch and ponder it for a while. You grab your car keys in the towel. And you jump in the ocean. And you have to wait until there is a break in the waves… And you put on a fin—and you only have one fin—and if you catch the right wave you cut left because left is west… Then you cut down into the tube there. You might see the crest rolling and you might see the sun glittering. You might see a sea turtle in profile, sideways, like a hieroglyph in the water… And you spend an hour out there. And if you’ve had a good day you’ve caught six or seven good waves and six or seven not so good waves. And you go back to your car. With a soda or a can of juice. And you sit. And you can watch the sun go down … "
— President Barack Obama, describing what he’d do with a day if he could do whatever he pleased.
Koji Shibata at one of his favorite secret spots, somewhere in Japan »>
SWOON…
(thanks for pointing me to this, Rob!)
Agatha Christie was a surfer:
These included Cape Town and Honolulu, where Christie learned to surf. “It was occasionally painful as you took a nosedive down into the sand, but on the whole it was an easy sport and great fun,” the author wrote in her autobiography, later picking up “a wonderful, skimpy emerald green wool bathing dress, which was the joy of my life, and in which I thought I looked remarkably well!” and managing to stand upright on her surfboard. “Oh, it was heaven!” she wrote in her memoirs. “Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seemed to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour; all the way in from the far distant raft, until you arrived, gently slowing down, on the beach, and foundered among the soft flowing waves.”
