Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

My daily three-mile walk in the morning keeps me in passable shape, clears my head, and gets me going. I start each day, after coffee but before breakfast and writing by heading out to the park where I walk in circles. As a writer, I'm seeking inspiration for my novel, working out plotholes. As a human being, I sometimes need to blow off steam. The Jacarandas shading the pea gravel pathway are a beautiful distraction, stunning in springtime when they bloom in deep blue purples, and mandatory in the summer when Los Angeles heats up early. Today as I near the patio sitting on the perimeter of the park, I see the gardeners have hosed down the cement. The entire surface is still wet and puddled. Slick. Without my permission, my heart starts pounding, bringing me crashing to a halt. Wimp, I think. That's in the past. Shake it off. I can't. I’m afraid. I'm fifteen years old again, walking along a sandy road near the beach in San Juan with my best friend. We're both...

IT WAS A TIME OF TANS, BLONDS AND HOT PANTS, WHEN THE ENDLESS SUMMER WAS JUST A SHORT WALK DOWN A HOT SIDEWALK Beach Music, originally published in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, is really a tale of two cities: San Juan, Puerto Rico and Santa Monica, California. File it under On the Street Where I Live     Beach Music We came to California from Canada, with a detour to Puerto Rico that lasted one endless summer of a year. A year in which I turned 15, and my hair turned blond from living in the sun. “Psst,” the boys and men would call after me in the blue-cobbled streets of San Juan. “Psst! Hey, blondie. Psst! Hey, cutie pie.” I was devastated when my parents said we had to go, that it was time to leave the island so that my older brother, Russell, could get a first rate education. The plan was to drive cross country from Miami and settle in San Francisco so that my brother could finish high school before going on to UC Be...

Thinking of tiny Puerto Rico, holding you in my thoughts P.R., home to some of my sweetest memories. The year we lived in San Juan with the beaches of the Condado and Isla Verde our playground, the beautiful blue cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, the soft smooth flavor of coconut ice cream, and every surfer boy I fell head over heels for, memories I still hold dear today. It was 1968, the year the World Surfing Championships were held in Puerto Rico, the year I turned 15. Sharing an old post about an old memory from that idyllic time. Originally posted on 6/17/2016 #10 Avenida Ponce de Leon, San Juan Puerto Rico This is another story from my not quite year in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the 10th in the long line of places I've called home. We lived in a high rise above the city on Avenida Ponce de Leon, but my second home that summer was the beach. It was the year I turned fifteen. Image via JorgeMachucaSurfer.com Surfing Lessons Chris lived in a low-slung house ...

BEACH MUSIC IT WAS A TIME OF TANS, BLONDS AND HOT PANTS, WHEN THE ENDLESS SUMMER WAS JUST A SHORT WALK DOWN A HOT SIDEWALK We came to California from Canada, with a detour to Puerto Rico that lasted one endless summer of a year. A year in which I turned 15, and my hair turned blond from living in the sun. “Psst,” the boys and men would call after me in the blue-cobbled streets of San Juan. “Psst! Hey, blondie. Psst! Hey, cutie pie.” I was devastated when my parents said we had to go, that it was time to leave the island so that my older brother, Russell, could get a first rate education. The plan was to drive cross country from Miami and settle in San Francisco so that my brother could finish high school before going on to UC Berkeley. But, once we got there in the fall of 1968, we found that while the city was undeniably beautiful, we simply couldn’t take the cold. After one short year in Paradise, we’d grown accustomed to beach-kissed legs, fried plantains and coconu...

I've dreamed of going to the Keys for at least two decades, and now, after years of nurturing the dream, I've booked a pair of plane tickets. That's when reality hits; the Keys I've crafted in my head might be a place I can't find using GPS. I've looked at the map, the thin tail that falls off the tip of Florida: Key Largo, Tavenier, Plantation, Isla Morada, Summerland, a skinny strip stretching about a hundred miles before it bottoms out at Key West, the most famous key of them all. I know I won't find it there, the key I'm looking for. Oh, I'll go. Key West is a writers colony of sorts, tourists flock to see Hemmingway's house, and the beaches look beautiful, but the key I'm looking for is as ephemeral as a breeze, more elusive than a hundred hours on the internet can deliver. The key I'm looking for might be on a beach in Tripoli where, when I was five, I paddled at the shoreline while my mother held my sister's hands as she t...

Thanks and appreciation to James Stafford for running my piece  Beach Music   on his Why It Matters site! If you're up for more from me - Thank You! - I have a few more stories gathered loosely under the Memoir:  On the Street Where I Live   heading.  This is the most recent:  The Sticky-hot Days of Summer . I'm really glad you stopped by.

Kisses as Deep as the Ocean  Liz had arrived in January along with her parents, her brother, and younger sister. They were all as white as the Canadian winter they'd left. The trees in Niagara Falls had been bathed in ice, everything was white, even the sky, as if blue had flown south for the winter. They flew south too, into the blue. When the stewardess flung open the cabin door they'd been the first down the stairway onto the airport's tarmac. The sudden shock of steamy air fogged her glasses. “It's like a hot house.” She'd taken her glasses off, letting the perfume and warmth wash over her face. Beyond the airports chain link fence, palm trees beckoned from their turquoise background. She wanted to drown herself in a sea of blue. “It smells funny” Nancy complained. Her father explained. "You're in the tropics. It's the humidity. Wait till you see El Yunque. The air is so heavy it rains all the time." EI Yunque, he told them, was...