The sun was low in the east, just breaking through the clouds, and the sea was calm, with a small, clean swell from the south.  It was the second day of the Van’s US Open and the men in the Challenger Series would continue the round of 96 that had begun the day before, while the women would be starting their round of 64.  The south side of the pier was already crowded with photographers, but there were lots of benches open on the north side.  I sat down on one of them and watched two old Vietnamese men pass by, one of them swinging two hiking poles, as if he were cross-country skiing.

The day before I’d lucked my way into the VIP sections of the Van’s Village, but today I was back to being an invisible presence, playing my lonely ukulele songs on the pier, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of a record I’d made twenty-fears years earlier, Ghost on the Roam, that had bankrupted me and gone nowhere.

Ghost on the Roam had been a collection of the best songs from my nomadic 20s, and the title track was a song I’d written while living in Humboldt County, where the beauty of the redwoods was intoxicating, but I’d nearly been driven out of my mind by loneliness.  At the time I merely felt like a ghost on the roam, not realizing until years later, after a seizure I’d suffered during the height of the pandemic, that the reason I felt that way so strongly was because I actually was one.

Now that I understood that, I had no issue sitting outside, playing to the sky, playing to the sea, capturing the rhythm of the waves, watching the people pass by, all the different races and nationalities, many of them paying their first visit to California, taking their first steps on the pier.  Sometimes an adult would notice me and come over, like the old ukulele enthusiast who’d approached me the day before.   The children would almost always see me.  They’d hear the music and stop in their tracks, or stare over their parents’ shoulders, wide-eyed.  It was good to play for them.  One day they’d remember seeing a ghost on the pier, and wonder if it had all just been a dream.

At 7:08 the announcer came over the loudspeaker.  The Men’s Challenger Series would begin at 7:35 where they’d left off, at Heat 17.  That would be followed by the first of the women’s heats, 1-8.  The waves were small but expected to increase as the day progressed.  Thanks to Hurricane Frank off the coast of Mexico, the next day looked promising indeed.

The Vietnamese man passed me, going the other way, and by the bathrooms I saw a group of Vietnamese women begin the calisthenics I’d observed them doing the day before.  A tall man with headphones who obviously wasn’t a member of their group, was shadowing their routine, but that disturbed no one.  I sat and quietly plucked out a tune about a life that has turned into a street fight.

A family passed by with a child who went googly-eyed with wonder when he heard the flurry of bright little notes that were tumbling out of my instrument.  His father tried to nudge him along, but he planted his feet and refused to be hurried.