While at the coast, I met Tommy. Tommy is a black lab.
I also met Ted, Tommy’s friend. They were on the beach and Ted was throwing a ball with one of those ball launchers. The other arm was in a sling, one that I recognized. It was similar to a sling I had worn when I had shoulder surgery.
Ted mentioned that he had shoulder surgery, but had chosen not to get his bicep tendon reattached. He took off his sling to show me his detached bicep. I noticed a sadness in his voice when he talked about this. He opened up because I had told him about my own tendon repair and how it took nine months to recover.
During our conversation, Tommy was running around the beach, in and out of the water, losing the ball, finding the ball. All the while our conversation went from Labradors to shoulders, to biceps, to what lay ahead.
I mentioned that Melissa and I were going to visit our grandkids in a couple of weeks. He brightened and said he had chosen not to have the tendon reattached so he could recover quickly and hold his grandkids sooner.
Melissa and I made our annual trip to the Oregon Coast last week. This year we went to a different location in the same month and season as last year. We traveled to Tierra Del Mar near Pacific City with her parents. On one outing we visited Cape Kiwanda at low tide. This is when I took the photographs below, except for the last photo when the ocean spread its wings over the cape at high tide on the day we were leaving. The photographs are of the same vein of an unpublished photo study I am working on of a book by John Daido Loori (a Zen Buddhist rōshi and photographer) titled, “Hearing with the Eye: Photographs from Point Lobos.” The photographs and words presented in his book are “an attempt to enter the hidden universe of the insentient and ‘see things for what else they are.’”
