Ocean Love

Today is my dad's 90th birthday.  I'm on the Oregon Coast visiting my daughter who was just five years old when Daddy died, so all her "memories" of him are from stories I've told her. However, he would have enjoyed this vacation as well as I am.

He first saw the Pacific Ocean in Northern California when he was in the Navy. He joined after the Pearl Harbor attack and went to boot camp in northern Idaho. Yes, you read that right-- northern Idaho. There is a very deep lake up there and the Navy still uses it, I believe, for some kind of testing with submarine equipment. However in WWII it was also know as Camp Farragut and was a naval training facility.

After he finished his training to be a radioman and learning the Morse Code, he went to San Francisico to board a ship for the Philipines.  I don't know the timeline. I'm not even sure where he went to his school to learn his job, and I don't know how much time he spent in San Francisco. But just imagine what that experience would have like. San Francisco has never been a sedate place. From its very inception it was a port town---sailors looking for a good time.  But I think of my dad, who'd spent his life up till then in a tiny valley in the mountains, living in virtual poverty. Here he was in a very big city, bright lights, and he had an income of his own.  Actually, my dad wasn't a wild partier; all his stories of the few days he spent in San Francisco were of the yummy seafood.  He told me of date he had while he was there, but the point of his story was that he had such bad cold that he spent the whole evening trying not be obnoxious with his sniffling.

But the seafood! He waxed eloquently about the shrimp, crab, sourdough bread, salmon and oysters for my whole life. He loved all that fresh bounty from the sea and whenever he had the opportunity to indulge that taste, he did so with gusto. We got halibut in the winter when it was in season, and he settled for canned oysters to make the stew he had at least once a week. We always made shrimp cocktail for special dinners. Plus he lived in the trout fishing Mecca of the west. When they visited us in California, we'd always go to the nice seafood restaurants that were readily available.

So today, in honor of his birthday, I am happy to be on the beautiful, bountiful Oregon coast, enjoying the crashing surf and wheeling gulls. And now we're off to have a delicious brunch of oysters and eggs. I'll lift a glass of milk in his honor and scarf down some seafood for him.

Happy birthday Lynn Ray Welch.