Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Corky Carrol and The Green Flash

With a title like that for this silly essay, one might well conjure up images of a svelte surfer careening down the face of a huge wave, keeping just ahead of the crash -- then catching his place right at the mouth of the Green Room...  Make that a huge tube with a thunderous crash following along just behind the surfer....  Can you see him do a couple of cool swoops, maybe let himself slide back into the tube, out of sight for a moment, and then explode back out again?  Flashing in and out of the Green Room.... yeah, call him the Green Flash.

But no.  Oh, I have seen that kind of action, but this silly essay is not about that.

It's not even about the Green Flash, per se.... though I now have actually (and recently) SEEN this phenomenon.  Yes.  It was a clear, clean horizon, no clouds and no fog hovering above the vast expanse of ocean.  The beautiful bright orange sun sank slowly below the horizon of the sea and just at that moment of setting --there it was, a small green flash of light, right where the sun had been.  It seemed to last, for it burned into my eyes and I could see it superimposed upon whatever I gazed at afterwards -- a bright green it was, like new grass.  I have been walking out to the beach at sunset for many years now, hoping each night to see what I now have seen.  I will, of course, continue to watch the sunsets, but I digress.

This silly essay should probably be deleted, but I have time on my hands on this particular trip to town, an hour's drive from our humble digs in a small Mexican village.

Perhaps you could say it's about what a delightful gentleman Corky Carrol is.

( As an aside, may I compliment him on his performance last night at a favorite seaside resort restaurant here in Mexico.  He played lead singer and lead guitar, backed up by his band (an iMac computer).... and thoroughly delighted the packed house of friends and admirers with his repertoire of favorite songs from over the years.  But this silly essay is not about that, either. )

Lifelong surfer, man of fame for his surfing skills, Corky has a home on the beach where .... well, where I personally go boogie-boarding.  This essay is NOT about surfing.  It is about boogie-boarding, sorta.

At the end of a great, long, bouncing fast boogie-ride on a whoop-and-holler wave, there I was, just starting to pull myself back to an  upright stance in the waist-deep water, when Corky came gliding in, directly in front of me.

I stood up quickly then, with a grin -- completely unaware for just a moment, that the top of my swimsuit was below where it should be.  My womanhood was in full view.  Corky was cool.  While I quickly rearranged things, he showed no reaction to that at all...  Instead, he commented on how great the surf was today, talking to me as a comrade among wave-riders.

Ah... and when I shrugged and said, that I was just a boogie-boarder, he QUICKLY replied, quite sweetly (with no insinuations at all....trust me) -- and with a big smile -- "Hey!  You're a girl who likes to boogie!"

As an addendum to all this...  Corky's lovely wife, who is NOT a surfer, has expressed an interest in coming out to boogie with me.