Tag Archives: beach

Beautiful Mosaic of Memorial Rocks

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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Some people have rocks in their head.

Others have hearts of stone.

And then there is a recent visitor to Ventura, a man of Baby Boomer age and reportedly from New York, who was caught on video proving he suffers from both sedimentary maladies.

Imagine a vandal toppling gravestones in a cemetery and you get an idea of what this king of jerks from Queens did at the memorial rock garden that graces a raised cement planter along our beach promenade.

Specifically, The Jerk ruthlessly threw into the ocean some of the beautiful rocks decorated to honor lost loved ones. Watching the detestable act, posted widely on social media, made my heart feel like it had been stung by a hundred jellyfish.

If you have never visited this special garden of stones, you are missing out. It is one of the loveliest little jewels of a place you can image, affording a view of the ocean and the music of breaking waves and this sunny greeting on a tiny sign: “Welcome to Haole’s Memorial Rock Garden / Please leave memorial rocks for all to enjoy!”

Haole was a dog, a Yellow Lab albeit with white fur, who was famous because he surfed. Indeed, Haole once appeared on “Good Morning America” and also stars in a book, “Ride the Wave: Love Sofia and Haole the Surf Dog,” which is the true story of how he helped teach a little girl with Down syndrome to “walk on water.”

After Haole died five summers past, the memorial garden was planted with its first rock and today blooms with many hundreds, if not a thousand or more. The mini-markers come in many sizes and shapes, although most are round or oval, and more than a few are heart-shaped. Almost all are pleasingly smooth as if selected with great care.

What makes these stones true gems is they are hand-painted with flowers and hearts, sunsets and rainbows, paw prints and palm trees, angel wings and crosses, with R.I.P. wishes and other heartwarming messages along with the names of loved ones – pets, yes, but also human moms and dads and spouses and siblings and friends. Many are true works of art and all are works from the heart.

Together, this colorful avalanche creates a mosaic worthy of comparison to a stained glass window in a church, which is fitting because this comely corner of the seaside seems like an outdoor temple. As such, it is common to see people – pedestrians and cyclists and rollerbladers; alone and in couples and small groups – stop and visit, pause and ponder, remember and pray. Some search for the rocks they have previously left here while others leave new stones now.

One rock in Haole’s memorial garden is especially dear to me because I know its honoree as well as the artist, my 6-year-old granddaughter, who lovingly decorated it. When Maya learned that my good friend Nick’s dog recently crossed the rainbow bridge, she found a stream-polished rock, palm-sized and oval; cleaned it and painted on swirls of deep blue and sea-glass green, and added white stars; then, in her neatest kindergarten printing, in black marker wrote: “Henry.”

Coincidentally, Henry’s rock was placed at the southernmost tip of Haole’s garden, precisely where The Jerk committed his briny desecration. I went to check and was relieved to find “Henry” still resting in peace in view of the Ventura Pier. I hope the memorial stones that were tossed into the ocean can be, or have been, retrieved at low tide.

One Jerk cannot wipe out Haole’s four-legged legacy.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Thanks, ‘Carissa’, for the Ventura Shout-out

by Woody

I remember watching “Little Miss Sunshine” in a downtown Ventura movie theater a number of years ago and the audience erupted with applause and cheers at the dramatic pageant arrival scene when Steve Carell’s dad character, driving the family in a bright yellow VW Microbus, misses the freeway exit and has to take an overpass to turn around…

…and the brief on-screen “star” is our 101 California Street exit – only four blocks away from the movie theater we were watching in – with the high-rise Crowne Plaza beach hotel in the background.

If you are at all like me you feel a similar thrill whenever you see Ventura in a Hollywood role. For example, our downtown in “Swordfish” or several local spots in “Two Jakes” or our beloved pier in “God Bless America” to name three more.

I imagine it’s how Monterey’s “Cannery Row” neighborhood must have felt to be immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name. Less famously, the fictional coastal town of Cabrillo hints strongly of Ventura – and the old Star-Free Press – in my predecessor Chuck Thomas’ novel “Getting Off The Map.”

Well, a new book has me smiling and cheering for featuring Ventura in its pages. Actually, the fictional beach town is named Buena Vista, but make no mistake it is Buenaventura. From the beach and pier to Main Street and the foothills, its author – Dallas Woodburn – pays homage to her dear hometown through and through.

My daughter’s second novel, “Thanks, Carissa, For Ruining My Life” from Immortal Works, has just been published and – Boasting Dad Warning – instantly soared to No. 1 on Amazon’s list of Young Adult New Releases.

The story centers around two teenagers, Rose and Brad, who travel parallel journeys of self-discovery, empowerment, and acceptance after popular “queen bee” Carissa tears apart their lives. In Hollywood parlance, it’s “Brittany Runs a Marathon” meets “Some Kind of Wonderful.”

A wonderful kind of thing some writers like to do is scatter “Easter eggs” that only certain readers will find and recognize. “Carissa” has a basketful of such hidden treasures. For example, Tony’s Taco Shop is obviously Snapper Jack’s; Nature’s Grill makes a cameo as Nature’s Café; and in a role encompassing its own storyline is the Buena Vista radio station WAVE-104.3 that is, clear as a Santa Ana wind-blown summer day, Ventura’s KVTA-1590 where Dallas has been a guest on esteemed radio personality Tom Spence’s morning show. The observant reader will find more brightly dyed local gems.

Books are time machines and while “Carissa” will surely transport most readers back to high school, it carries me to when Dallas was only 6 or 7 and already dreaming of becoming an author. In my mind’s eye I can still see her, sitting tall on her knees, in a chair at the kitchen table and typing on her great-grandfather’s restored Underwood No. 5 typewriter. Punching the QWERTY keys, firmly with only her right index finger, she let her imagination soar.

There was modern magic in that 1911 heirloom: in second grade, Dallas had a poem – “Peanut Butter Surprise” about a PB&J sandwich made with a jellyfish because the grape jelly ran out – published in The Star’s “Kids Corner” feature and in fifth grade self-published a book of short stories and poems that sold 2,000 copies.

The little girl’s big dreams kept coming true with a play produced off-Broadway, a John Steinbeck Creative Writing Fellowship, and a handful of awards for her debut novel “The Best Week That Never Happened” two years ago.

Thanks to “Carissa” her writing life remains charmed, not ruined.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Music to a Beach Boy’s Ears

by Woody

Ask a hundred people to name their favorite piece of music and you are likely to get a different answer from each, from the Beatles to Beethoven, from country to classical, from Amadeus to Zeppelin.

This question came to mind the other night as a much-needed Southern California rainstorm was drumming madly on my rooftop and rat-a-tat-tatting against my bedroom windowpanes. Buddy Rich and Keith Moon never played more magnificently.

Rain is the best lullaby of all, I thought while lying in my warm dry bed, but before drifting asleep I considered the subject further.

Reaching back in time, back to my youth in Ohio, back to humid summer weekends at our family’s modest cabin with a nearby pond and a not-far-away lake, I conjured up another magical melody: the chirping of crickets; joined occasionally by bullfrogs croaking their basso notes a short walk away; and in the distance, much less frequently, the eerie-but-beautiful lonesome howls of coyotes.

Moreover, instead of counting sheep to fall asleep one could count a cricket’s chirps for 15 seconds, add 40 to that number, and arrive at an approximation of the outside temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.

Winter nights, where winters are truly winters, have their own soundtrack for inducing slumber. If you listen closely with eyes shut, I swear you can hear snow falling. Rather, I suppose, one actually hears an absence of noise as the snow muffles out all but the loudest of sounds. All the same, it is a beautiful lullaby indeed for as Mozart noted: “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

Nearly as hushed as snowfall and softer than tap-dancing rain, with a cadence slower and more soothing than a cicada’s summer song, is to fall asleep to the whispered breathing of someone next to you. Here, too, the music is in the silence between notes, between inhalations and exhalations.

And yet, pressed to choose just one song to fall asleep to, I will opt for a percussion performance of waves crashing on the beach. Even in daylight, this is my favorite music, but at nighttime the ocean’s song is tenfold more mesmerizing.

One of the magical properties of music is that it is a time machine. Hearing a specific song can instantly transport us back to where we were – and who we were – when we first heard it and listened to it frequently.

Such was the case for my wife’s recent birthday when our family, all seven of us, rented a beach house in Avila Beach – or “Vanilla Beach,” as three-year granddaughter Maya renamed it. It was a long weekend of paradise.

During the daytime, the cymbal-like crashing waves were largely drowned out by talking and laughing and all other goings on of life. But at night, after the moon rose and “Goodnight Moon” had been read to Maya and we had all likewise gone to bed, the surf raised its volume pleasantly. Again, the music was as much the silence – the sea rising into a gentle swell, rising into a wave, rising into a vibrating crest – between oceanic muffled thunderclaps.

And again I was transported back in time, back to 1972, back to when I was 12 and spent the entire summer at Solimar Beach with my godparents. For a kid from the Midwest who had never before seen an ocean, falling asleep to the Pacific’s pacifying cadence was even better than listening to a rooftop symphony of rain or concert of cicadas and coyotes and bullfrogs.

All these years later, the surf’s song remains my favorite lullaby.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com