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Show my toes would curl toward my stomach. Look there, he would say, trouble. Within minutes the tourist would find himself tumbling madly up the shore, arms and legs flailing, bathing suits drawn to his ankles like a flag of surrender. Sometimes lifeguards would have to rescue them, often because they had ignored the sign posts signaling dangerous surf or rip currents and found themselves literally and figuratively over their heads. Sometimes my father went in. Count, he said. Waves arrive in sets of seven and within each set of seven the waves increase in size, the next always bigger than the last. In addition, each set of waves also increases through seven sets of seven, the forty-ninth wave, then, being the largest of the series. Always know where you are in the series he told me. Together we chanted with the surf, one, two, three. ilculus of the sea. At the end of the seventh wave, like magic, the waves would subside, a tiny ripple wandering up the sand and providing me the window in which to enter. Then there was the rogue wave, the kahuna, the one that will take you down, (pull you out, roll you over, like the spotted body of an eel bursting from its hole. Always watch for the kahuna, Hawaiian for chief, the one for whom the rules were made, the one from whom the rules protected. Those who get in trouble, Jennifer, are the ones who fail to follow the rules of the sea. Such advice was easy for my father to dispense. Even though he is a tall man, his 117 |