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Health & Fitness

BLOG: Early Morning Musings, the Old Man and the Sea

In which the author confesses a love of the ocean.

We went to a movie recently and during the previews all of a sudden there came a two or three second glimpse of our favorite lighthouse on the coast of Maine.  When we lived in New England we would vacation in that area regularly, and it has a place near to my heart. When I am in the doctor’s office, and the nice young woman straps that torture device around my arm to check out my blood pressure, I close my eyes and picture that lighthouse, and I am sure that the old blood pressure goes down. If I have trouble sleeping at night, I visualize that lighthouse and imagine the waves pounding on the rocks, and in nothing flat I am dead to the world.

Now I am perfectly happy living in Minnesota, insofar as our children and grandchildren are nearby and there are lots of wonderful lakes and the state has not gone completely cuckoo by passing the Marriage Amendment or the Voter ID Amendment. (What’s with this business of government by constitutional amendment?  Next thing you know we’ll be considering an amendment forbidding the barking of dogs between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.  Or maybe vice versa. But I digress.)

But my absolute favorite places in the world are all on oceans or semi-oceans.  The Maine coast. The Gulf of Mexico. The Sea of Cortez/Gulf of California. The Pacific Ocean. Great cities like Charleston, SC; San Francisco; Vancouver and Victoria, BC; Seattle. Get me close to an ocean or something like an ocean, and I feel relaxed, in tune with the universe in a way I don’t feel inland.  (Lake Superior is nice, but somehow it has never quite captured my imagination or my heart the way these other places have. It’s like Triple A baseball: very good but not quite major league. Which, come to think of it, also describes the Minnesota Twins. But I digress again.)

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I like to think that there is an irony in this, in that I grew up in the great state of Iowa, hard by the corn fields and hog barns of the nation’s breadbasket. I saw an ocean for the first time when I was 14, and then didn’t see another until I was 22. There is no apparent reason for me to feel so at home by the ocean.

Sometimes when I explain this to people, they smugly declare that this is precisely why the ocean so fascinates me: it is so different from what I grew up with that I am drawn to it. Sounds like a reasonable explanation.

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On the other hand: If I had grown up on the coast of Maine or on Puget Sound or by the Gulf of Mexico, do you suppose I would find within myself a deep and persistent yearning for the corn fields of Iowa?

I’m not betting on it.

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