The breakfast table sits at a window with no breeze. Nothing of the Pacific winds pass through the courtyard because the space is so small that the ground level apartments are blocked by outdoor stairs and walkways to the upper units. The table is only a couple feet wide and deep enough for one person’s legs, and it fills about a third of the kitchen. Outside the back door, the painters have set up scaffolding that keeps the door from opening more than eight inches, and by 8 a.m. – sometimes 7 – the workers are out climbing on the rattling metal and bending boards.

I sit at this table with her when I stay on the weekends. I only stay when I can afford the plane flights. We sit and drink coffee and look out onto the landscaping beneath her window. When the work crews are out, we close the blinds and smile at each other when a voice outside is particularly loud or the Spanish comes so fast it’s hard to believe there is someone on the end who can understand what’s been said.

She had the chairs in the kitchen covered with floral cloth with blue tropical flowers in a red-sunshine background. I get up to pour more coffee and to fry eggs or pour orange juice. But we mostly look at each other and talk about gentle morning things, subjects that don’t confuse us and are far less serious than the morning paper.

She keeps her surfboards in the kitchen – a long one with a blue oval in its center and its edges trimmed with a thick red line. The shorter board she bought for me from a nearby surfing school. It’s banana yellow and at least a foot shorter than hers. When we surf, she takes the short board and I take the long one.

In the mornings, though, we do not talk about the waves or the lessons she’s given me. The learning comes more naturally. The only act that’s forced is me trying to read her Portuguese cookbooks and her laughing. When we’re done, the sink is stacked with too many plates for two people to have dirtied, but they are there, and I stand next to her and clean them or do it alone when she goes to work.

I think the morning is my favorite time together. Looking out at the simple sidewalks, the shrubs cut to perfect lines, the refrigerator and the stove to our backs, the day seems in order, in our control, and it isn’t until we step out and see the mess the contractor has made that we feel like maybe it might another day indifferent from the last.

I have not heard her yet, but I am told the woman who lives above our kitchen is divorced and that on Thursday nights, when her son is staying with his father, she has unruly parties with her girlfriends. They are always loud, from the moment they show up until after 12 or 1 when they shout down into the courtyard over the loud dance music. I’m also told that no one dances and that the woman is the landlord who owns the entire building. She must be as up in arms as anyone else who’s lived in the complex this summer. She hired a work crew to put new authentic wood designs on the second story and in mid-July saw a lack in either initiative or craftsmanship and opted for the workers to smear concrete on the walls. I think the change in plans was meant as relief for the construction crew who obviously couldn’t do what she asked and mercy for the tenants who’d weathered the noise, the painter’s drops and the DH Johnson Construction banner on the building’s front side.

But this is all in the evening. This is all after our moment together. By twilight, whether we’ve gone to work or surfing or both, whether I’ve walked the beaches and written about the seaside weddings in the park, the more common moments are the ones that quietly stand out.

Then my writing voice wanted its own space and I started writing for local magazines. I took my work and my private writing sessions public with this blog and invited people to look. I invited you to read over my shoulder while I wrote down stories, character sketches, poems (some disguised to hide identities), interviews, thoughts, feelings, and that was fine when it was all about the words, not the happenings. When some changes came to my personal life, I didn’t feel as though this blog was serving its purpose: people were reading for the details, not the sincerity in them. I was comfortable enough yet to handle the questions that came when inadvertently welcomed people into my life, so I took the blog down.

So much can change in three years, and now it’s just me half the time, me and the kids the other half, and a mostly quiet apartment in a plain apartment complex. But there is also more time to write, to read, and to study. I’ve gone back to the beginning, where I was at 8 or 10, when I’d write in my secret journals and push them up into the dust under the bed so no one would see the stories. I was more awake to the world, then.

In the last year, I’ve been gathering material. I’ve been living life. Sun-lit tables in little trendy Spanish restaurants (not me), exploring the ocean and tide pools (me), back to my roots and a midnight drive through the old neighborhood that isn’t safe to walk at that hour. I’m back, this time with a water-wrinkled notebook and and internet connection to relay my new words. I expect you will find the writing better, eventually. And, I expect you to find someone different here.

“Oh … are you not going to look at the fish?” Mary asked me, the disappointment showing in her face but even more evident in her voice.

We were 50 feet out from the beach, just beyond the arching line formed by the recreational swimmers with their back to the sea. I was using all my concentration on staying afloat and familiarizing myself with the water. I hadn’t yet begun to focus on the leisurely aspects to the swim, and I doubted I’d need the goggles she handed me.

I am from Kansas, a place with no natural water to call its own. I disqualify the lakes because they are all manmade. There is a river, but it’s too polluted for swimming and everyone knows that river water isn’t permanent. Rivers come from second hand sources upstream, from higher ground. The ocean has always been there, lapping at the beach, depositing sand and shells, and taking them away again. I came here to California to see Mary, to escape a marriage that failed during a bitter Midwestern winter, and to learn how to surf. Mary spent her childhood days on wave boards in much clearer waters, letting the foamy swells and what they brought to shore teach her about what she believes and what she doesn’t about herself.

But our first and only surf lesson came the day before in much shallower waters on Pacific Beach. There, I had time to watch the waves wash off everything about her but her smile, and then bead on her shoulders. She was the main reason I swam out so far, and because I believed in her notion to keep my first viewing of the cave pure. I needed to do this swim for her (I had to say with her another few days), but mostly for me.

“No, no … let me get my goggles on, then I’ll follow you,” I said.

She walked us down to the beach from her little apartment where we’d made love off and on the first two days I’d stayed with her. We had to be quiet because construction crews were re-plastering the second story of her building. The workers would go up and down ladders and rearrange drop sheets right outside her window while we in the throes of making love.

We found the beach on a path that avoided the easy peer down into the cave from the sidewalk. High cliff walls make the cave unreachable by foot. She said tourists – and I imagine the natives out walking in couples or as families – came down the hill from the T-shirt shacks, the salmon stucco hotels and the grill-out restaurants to peer down at the steep cut in the hillside. This was “too easy”, she said, but I think she meant it wasn’t fair to skip the swim. The view isn’t earned that way and it wouldn’t feel the same as pushing through the current in the cave that’s been weathered into an arch by thousands of years of licking sea waves, and, with tired arms, pulling yourself up into the horseshoe-shaped clearing to look up at the smooth walls. The reward is the miniature world between the steepness and the private ocean that rolls in to you, still wild but secret, too. After you absorb that feeling, it’s back in again, back through the cave, back into the open sea with the blurry fish, and the planes flying overhead dragging signs for beer and strip bars.

The entire town has seemingly come up around the cove. In some ways, it’s a celebrity – at least, a local personality that tourists and natives gather around to see and occasionally visit. Sidewalks follow the beaches past the houses and apartment complexes, but all the cement seems to lead to here. Businesses display black and white photos of the cove for sale that show all the old buildings from that era, many still there. The cove is the community’s treasure, and it’s crown jewel is only reachable with that long one way swim with currents and salt, and impossible visions.

Along the rocks, a seal family slapped onto damp stones turned the same shade as their skin. The seals, despite unwanted attention, barked out to sea. Around them yellow boats and swinging oars of the kayakers stopped them for a closer look, then floated and bob in the water, just watching the miracle animals secluded from the swimmers at the public beach but still under watch.

This was all odder to me than the normal tourist. Back home, a seal sighting is restricted to the zoo. It was as though I’d swam out into a exhibit and the tourists on the higher ground would start throwing me raw, whole fish.

I followed Mary. She was ahead 20 yards most of the way, pacing me. I’d see her looking over her shoulder and smiling, then her feet was disappear as she dove deep and cut through the water making S-shapes with her wrists. This was the secret, she told me later, to not wasting energy.

Seagulls were on the hunt overhead and it was them I came to see the most. Compared to me, they were traveling at lightning speed, and it was tiring just wanting to move as fast as them. The water was pushing toward the cove, but not in complete waves, so the surface kept leveling, and the view of the sky or the cliffs never registered without brown water filling out the bottom. With my view cut down so tightly, I imagined the birds were prehistoric and the million dollar housing plots are overgrown with shrubs – the sand bar.

So far out from the beach, my breath mixed with salty seawater swallows that dry the tongue and burn in the chest. This is what it is, though, to be alive. I was another of the humans temporarily turned into a wild sea animal, perfectly accepted by the marine life and the more native swimmers. The sea took me in without regards or questions. We belong to the water, really. Our bodies are 70 percent water. We have to drink it to stay living. The sea and I made amends midway to the cove and it was decided that I would swim as well as I could, and as long as I did, it would agree not to drown me. I trusted it and kept swimming behind Mary.

The current carried me through the cave and up onto the rocks inside the cove. We sat together and watched the water spill over the rocks’ smooth tops and soak through the gaps. The only sound was the ocean. The only smell was the ocean. All I could feel was some light sunshine and the water turning to foam in the rocks.

After a few minutes, I slipped back into the water which had its way with me again, and she led me out again, back into something treacherous and lovely all the same. I was more relaxed after letting water carry me on the way out. I listened to Mary offer reports over her shoulder about the colorful fish that I was missing. I watched her feet disappear and I wondered if they might turn to a fin as she dove deeper. How could anyone be so natural in the water? The cave teaches that something has to be surrendered before you can reach your nirvana. And even then, your small, private paradise can only be found in certain places, and through certain people.

One summer, when my ability to remember was staring to come to me, I went out to the backyard and ran up the hillside, unexplained, into the tangled tree branches and slopes, and there was a small steep, narrow gulley near the main trails’ start where I laid in the rivulets. The morning sun shone through the bare spots in the shimmering leaves. I looked up. Throughout the branches, a net that had been woven, and I remember it being thorny, connecting the little spot together like the underside to an umbrella, and I felt safe there. I always did, on the hill as we cleverly named it. I laid there and looked up at the thorny-netted rooftop, free here from my parents, in a place that never intrigued my older brother, beyond the backyards and the points of care from the neighbors, and between my neighborhood and the farm a long way behind us and next to it, a flower nursery that used train cars as working stations and places to store flowers. At one time, I knew every inch of it, every fallen tree branch, every bird’s nest.

I drove up the street, the night less ominous and instead beginning to nestle the street and houses and trees together and yet still be haunting. When I was a boy, the city went gradually into decay, and in the span of three years went from a livable neighborhood where you could sit out on the porch with neighbors deep into the early hours to a place where you weren’t sure what was going to step out of the night. On a Wednesday, close to 1 a.m., no one was out. The night was warm, and the bar I’d just left kept the door open, but it had gotten cool enough that it should have been closed. I was cold as I steered by my old house, and stared at the two cars in the driveway and the one out front. We never had more than one car in the drive, usually none. The house looked the same. I looked at my old bedroom window where I used to sleep in a small, square room with carpet with alternating red, blue and yellow strands tightly woven together so that the carpet looked like fire. The walls were sunshine yellow, and then when I was in high school, I wanted it all gray. Gray walls, gray carpet, no color. I remember lying in bed afraid that the arms of the plants in the flowerbed that tapped my bedroom window were actually kidnappers, and I slept for a year or more with a pillow partially covering my head and the sheets pulled up to my chin.

On a night like this, I would have been scared. The plants would have come rapping on the window screen for me, and I would have forgotten how much I loved about the old house until I’d gotten older, and come back to see how colorless my life has become.

I see the girls while coming in from dropping a check at the rental office, across a winding sidewalk and about 100 feet from my backdoor. They pay no notice to me, and I go inside and slip open the window to listen to them. The kitchen window in a sparely furnished apartment is an entertainment and a simple appliance that acts as a radio, a clock, a television, a fan, and a jury box. The noises that filter in through the screen are the radio waves, and it easily becomes a television when you put your eyes to it to bring a picture to the sound. I use it as a fan or a vent when I’ve singed my dinner in the skillet or need to freshen the air. The former tenant was a heavy smoker, and the cigarette smell has permeated the carpet, but it’s only noticeable if the place has been closed up for a time. And the window can become a jury box quite easily if I think about these children and the parents who live in these complexes, who I see leaving for jobs on weekday mornings, and coming home and parking in the same spots in the evenings, but who I’ve never once noticed in the middle-yards, tossing pitches, pushing kids on the swings, or calling them home for dinner. But all the children sleep somewhere and they are back again the next day after school, in the same groups, segregated from one another by age and gender.

After work, I listen to them while I make dinner, and let in the sounds from the playground down the row of khaki-painted buildings to the north. While I’m moving around the range and trying to remember where I’ve stored the plates, pans, can opener, and silverware in this new place, all the movement I can imagine outside sets the shadows on the walls and under the cabinetry into a motion that only I can perceive.

Yesterday morning, which was a Saturday, I listened to six boys playing football in the open grass in a space about the appropriate size for a football game not counting the cement back porch slaps that jut into spaces along the imaginary sidelines and the sidewalk to the rental office that cuts through one end zone. Usually, the boys are not organized enough to play their own game and stand around the play equipment or climb up on the swings and push each other standing in the seats and grasping the chains, like trapeze artists, swaying and too scared to somersault off into the rocks, proudly swinging without any supervision or discipline, without any care that the little girls on the slides would like a turn to swing but are too afraid.

They are gentle boys, and they would relent if the girls asked them for a turn, but they never do. The girls only get the swings if they happen to come first. If they’re not first, they just take rocks and toss them into the puddles that last for days after rains, thinning out the playground surface and annoying the grounds crew that has to stoop and replace the rocks when they’re about to mow.

During what felt like morning to me, but was actually almost noon, and while I was lining up my plate for a steak I fried, I heard an “ooh” that follows a big hit, and I looked out to see one boy lying on his back by the sidewalk, and another boy, who I’d talked to and thrown a few pitches to during an unexpected pick-up game, rolling off the ground from his hip and standing up. I stood an extra second to make sure he was ok, and he was. I liked that boy, but I couldn’t remember his name.

The soft clouds for sleepy afternoons always remind me of February, and they’d moved in and now were making the angles on the building tops sharp so they stood out. Both boys were fine, so I went back to my meal, ate at the shaky kitchen table, and took my trash out to the dumpster. The boys were gone and the sky was barely spitting rain. They’d quit their game on the flimsiest sprinkles I can remember a game ever being called for, and I went back inside not thinking I’d hear them again for the day. But they came back, and I heard them arguing about what down it was, and I heard them again talking about how close one play was to greatness. And, then the rain came, and they were gone less than 10 minutes later.

As often as I see them, I couldn’t say in what buildings they live or whose parents are theirs. The kids are well behaved, if sometimes a little lost and desperate for attention. I only know one boy’s father. They share the same name, and I’ve seen him selling a little pot, I’d suspect. Nothing serious, but he makes his way around the complexes, seems to know everyone, and sits out back with a woman who cleans apartments here, and is sometimes so drunk, she can barely pronounce her name. She tries to get me to talk, and I imagine she’s slept with some people in the complex, and what’s most surprising to me is that she has a pretty teenage daughter who comes out to walk their little dog, and seems well adjusted. The parents here don’t seem to take any interest in their kids. They are let loose after school, come home when the sun is coming down, and hopefully in one piece. I’m not sure how much they would be missed if they didn’t come back.

I would notice them missing. Continuous sound, even if it’s not from my own children, is important in an apartment that feels especially empty after my two daughters and son go back to be with their mother. The noise is not what is missed, it’s the type of noise, the sweet calls from upstairs from my little girls who always yell daddy first, then follow with a request for what they want. When I hear daddy in a public place, I still look for my kids, even when they aren’t with me, and I am aware of children being around when they are not mine, like these girls at the playground and the boys tackling one another.

I don’t know them or own no responsibility to watch them or keep tabs on them, but I do it. I know a few of the boys now. When they see a father throwing a few pitches to his son, like I do with mine, they all leave the playground and walk the length of the apartment complexes to join in, to take a swing, but most are too lazy or uninvolved to play in the field. Their energy is spent making it through the day, like mine is some days just to make lunch.

I try to move fluidly while I cook, not inhibited by the judges’ robe I wear while I turn the meat over, seeing myself an ideal parent who unjustly ended up in a divorced apartment, alone, completely innocent, like a zoo animal, like all those not-guilty jailbirds in the world wearing orange.