On surfing, breakfast, obsolete models

My stepdad had a very particular bearing when he surfed: stately, elegant, and straight-backed, like a Windsor chair. Later I recognized his style as typical of a California-bred longboarder of a certain age, but at the time it seemed a conscientious objection to the thrashing of the other surfers. He was easy to spot from shore.

The routine as I remember it (I was young) was for him to drive himself to the beach at dawn in a duct-taped Volvo, surf, return before the rest of the house was up, hose off his wetsuit and fix an enormous breakfast. The breakfast is what I remember most vividly, because later, when I started surfing, I always wanted the same thing.

The pantry at our house was a walk-in space that smelled exactly how I imagine the Oregon Trail general store to smell (dry goods!) From these shelves my stepdad would pick granola and honey; from the fridge a container of plain full-fat yogurt; from the fruit basket a nectarine or banana.


Get ready to hunt

These things would be piled in a bowl and eaten at the kitchen table facing the mountain ridge. Depending on the time of year, the kitchen would either be shaded by bordering tobacco plants or bright with early sun.

The breakfasts marked the first time I conceived of food literally as fuel. My stepdad’s mouth became in these moments an optimized component for sustenance. Watching him reminded me of the way that smaller mammals eat: to survive, first, but not without pleasure.

I ate similar breakfasts when I started surfing, usually substituting blackberries from the yard for banana. The habit fell away when I moved East for school and then to New York; so far it hasn’t come back.


Sick waves and sartorial missteps

Indoor life doesn’t require a large breakfast. Often it doesn’t warrant breakfast at all. Fresh air and early activity, it turns out, are the prerequisites of an appetite, and without much of either the body is able to run on lower-grade fuel, or none.

Once a month or so at Trader Joe’s it crosses my mind to stock up on granola and yogurt. No doubt you’ve experienced similar moments of misplaced nostalgia— mistaking objects themselves for the feelings that accompany them. It’s this conviction (and the self-enforced abidance by it) that prevents me from replicating early stepdad breakfasts. Those meals were gifts of circumstance, and some things cannot be recreated.


Stepdad


—Molly