My dad and I have had long years of separations in our lives, and some really great times together. As a child, he was the person I looked up to most in the world, idolized, really, so the break was  rough. I have happy memories of time we’ve spent together as adults, but the time of my young childhood has been a bit lost.

My dad and I dancing together in our Houston driveway. He and my mom’s had just returned from a long trip to Hawaii, hence my grass skirt.

Recently, our first visit in Seattle happened — Sarah Stiles, a beloved Bike League colleague and friend, drove up from Santa Cruz. She is a recent convert to yoga (is three years recent?) and dragged me to a class with an instructor she’d heard amazing things about.

I really tried to do the poses, dripping with sweat and attempting to keep my skin from being exposed, and enjoyed the class. The highlight, though, was the end, when we were lying on our mats (my rented one smelling uncomfortably of feet) and the instructor told us to remember something peaceful.

I closed my eyes, exhausted and energized, and was suffused with a color — yellow/brown. I couldn’t figure out why I was thinking about that color with such a peaceful feeling, so I stayed in the moment. Suddenly, I realized it was the tan/brown/yellow of the water at Galveston beach, my home beach growing up, and a place my dad still goes to frequently and loves.

So many of my early memories of my dad are in the water. He was always most comfortable in and around the water. Walking along the beach, looking for sharks’ teeth, was one of the happiest occupations of my childhood. Hands folded behind me just like my dad’s were, stepping carefully behind him and not putting him in a shadow, reaching down every now and then to find a shell, or rarely and wonderfully, a shark’s tooth.

Best, though, was in the water. My dad dabbled in surfing (the waves in Galveston were really small), so he had a surfboard. He taught us to float dead man style. He held us on the surfboard way out on a sandbar where the water was quiet. And sometimes, if we begged just so, he would hold his two arms out like bars, and let us rest lightly on him. He was doing all the work, and my sister, and then myself, and then her again, and so on until dad said no, just floated in the warm, sandy, salty water.

It was lovely to have that memory back, just a few weeks ago. Lovely to recapture some of that innocence and love from my childhood. Thanks for the lift, dad, and for teaching me to love the ocean so wholeheartedly.