On Sundays We Go Surfing

making memories

My seven-year-old daughter was excited to arrange a play date with her babysitter. They’d do their nails and their hair and makeup. Let’s arrange it for a Saturday, said the babysitter.

On Saturdays we go to shul with daddy.

Ok, how about Sunday?

Umm… on Sundays we go surfing with daddy.

The babysitter laughed and threw up her hands.

When you walk over the dunes from the car park, Freshwater unfurls its sandy beach and rocky cliffs and yawning glittering maw. You breathe in the salt and the sight. Sydney’s coastline is a miracle and Freshwater one of her crowning jewels.

You never regret a swim or a surf.

But it’s not the surf or the shimmer on the water that enraptures me these mornings.

Daughter paddles out, somehow sleek through the water with her thin arms and enormous foam board. I push her onto a frothy wave and she scrambles up, standing for a few moments before falling into the surf. I hoot at her, and wade over. She’s grabbed her board as I’ve taught her and hopped back on. Her hair is wet. She’s laughing. I kiss her head. I help guide her back out, my hand on the small of her wetsuit back.

I love you daddy, she says.

It’s this moment. I feel it as it’s happening. I’m living it now, registering a moment that I know I’ll look back on for decades. A perfect memory that tastes like sea and sun and rings with my daughter’s laughter. I’m living this memory now, and it tastes fresh, untinged yet by nostalgia or years gone by. Only gratitude.

On Sundays we go surfing with daddy. When she’s fifteen and twenty-five and forty-five and sixty-five she’ll remember too. On Sundays we went surfing with daddy.

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