Peaceful, Easy Feeling: Part 2

← Bermuda, from the air!







I’ve been thinking again, about Peaceful Moments.
Also, perhaps because my mother is in the hospital right now, and I am geographically far from her… I am thinking about family.
And peaceful moments.

Once, long ago, I went to Bermuda with my Dad, on one of his business trips.
We stayed at this gorgeous hotel, called The Belmont.
It is an immense pink-stone castle perched high atop an amazingly level crag… an outcropping, the far side of which plummets down to the ocean itself where waves break onto the surf with the sound of poured raw rice.
Breathtaking. The effect created as you enter the foyer of The Belmont for the first time is that you are boarding a huge ship, free-floating toward a horizon of never ending sea. You drop your bags to the side and walk towards that wide-open view at the far end of the foyer.
My God!
You see the terraced plateau of land out back where, were it not for the swimming pool and tennis courts in the way, over-excited tourists might accidentally tumble directly out, into the Atlantic.
It was here, on that first evening, that I leaned on a stone ledge on the terrace, and watched the sun submerge itself ever so slowly into that horizon.

I brought my tennis racket to Bermuda. I thought maybe some of Dad’s colleagues might have been interested in a game or two.
Little did I know how many of them had shopping bags of booze in their room and were in no shape to run around on the court sweating Bacardi during the day.
I would go out to the court with my racket but no one was there.

But once, on my way back up to the room, an Oriental man in the elevator noticed the racket and asked if I wanted to play.
"Hell, yes!"
In a few minutes we were out on the court in a pitched battle.
This guy was in his fifties and he was kicking my mid-twenties butt.
It was the best tennis I’ve ever played with anyone, and at the end of it all I was completely worn out, just this side of serious cardiac problems.
I stopped to catch my breath, and I wondered where Dad was.
When I looked up to the pool terrace I saw him. He had been watching us play.
Tennis with that particular audience, and the whole ocean as a backdrop is something I’ll never forget. There was something immortal, in it.
One of the Peaceful, Easy Feelings© .
I miss you, Dad.

For part 1, in this series → peacefully CLICK IT.

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