“It’s a good day. My stolen surfboards have been found.”
Shit, man.
My stolen surfboards have been found.
The caper was solved by a stroke of luck and my quick-thinking, levelheaded and on-the-ball, not to mention beautiful, wife. She sent out a series of text messages to friends and surfers first thing we discovered the loss while I cursed the thieves who entered my garden and made off with my boards. She then fielded replies while I drove hopelessly around town looking for any trace of my boards only to come home depleted and empty-handed. [continue reading…]
“Watch out, I bite!”
I’m on the search for my surfboards, not quite as desperately as the morning of finding out they’d been pinched from my garden. I’m still mad as hell, of course. I still feel violated. But I’m not about to accost anybody carrying a board that from a distance looks like it may just be mine.
No. I’m cool and calm and spirited in the search, out to get the bad guys and my surfboards back.
The first stop is the local surf shop.
“Yeah, they could come in here to sell them, you know. We do buy and sell boards,” the shopkeeper tells me.
So I describe my boards in detail. The sizes, shapes and the number of fins. Even the lettering on the boards, the brands and the dings, the age of the wax (there’s probably a six-year coat on the longboard, rubbed thin in places by my chest, knees and feet) and the brown spots where water has leaked in, as well as the unfinished repair job and the Silver Surfer design on the bottom of the longboard. The shortboard, I tell him, has my name written along the stringer, followed by that of the shaper. “Para Charlie,” it says.
The shopkeeper nods his head and then pauses before saying, “But how can I really believe you? How can I believe that these are really your boards?”
I didn’t pause for even a second with the thought of what on earth didn’t you understand from my description? How could I make that up?
Then I thought, I guess now I should say the word, “Reward.”
“My surfboards were nicked.”
Shit, man.
How do they know?
I left my two surfboards in the backyard for the first time (or second, maybe the third) and, well, you can figure out the rest and my subsequent stream of expletives this morning when I found that they were gone. What happened? Take any of these verbs – took, stole, nicked, ripped off – and put a bunch of bad words before it (well, not too, too many because my mother reads this) and add in my boards at the end and you’ve got it.
They took my fucking boards. [continue reading…]