The importance of smoked oysters

Tonight, my boys and I revisit some old haunts. We're in our thirties now, and when we were teenagers we would gather once in a while on Ocean Beach, at Stall 24 (or was it 22, or 26 or 28...) and aim our sights on a spot halfway out from the breaker wall to the ocean and make a fire. We would "find" wooden pallets (most likely from Safeway) not too far away, sometimes we would have to "find" wood in other places as well, and there would be a small amount of non-alcoholic beverages and everyone's mothers would be notified that we were indeed safe and sound, and we would feel free to party our faces off on the coast of America. We would sing, invite strange gang members to join us, run around the coast like we owned it and sometimes we would even strip down to our "bathing suits" and feign death and the ocean undertow, crashing into the coldest waves you could imagine.

Tonight, a new crew of people and a mixture of the old guard are hitting the beach again, because now it's legal to have fires on the beach as long as they are made in the pits provided by the dudes from Burning Man, and we'll see how successful old traditions remain in our slightly older and much more legally responsible hands. And finally, we will be able to drink beer legally by golly. :)

Old traditions can't fade. Ever, even if we forget them we are still bound to live some aspect of them. In our friends we find things that we do to be just what we do, but over time they become a good habit and when we get older and take a few steps away from we can revisit our old habits and traditions together and look at how our hair has slimmed, bodies grown huge, but what remains? We do. Maybe we have even added a few new people to our lives, to join the tradition, and some are gone and won't be back. Oysters and brie, choral music played under moonlight, hacky sack in crowded places, frisbee golf, Monty Python marathons, and the fires at the beach are those traditions for me, and in the last decade I've picked up a few more. They will never ever be stupid or lame or outdated, even if they really are lame or stupid to others. We have to fight against the pressure to only like what is 'cool and now' with what we know is really really cool, that which is classic and timeless and can't be outdated. New can be very very good but old holds its precedence in the minds of those who have gotten old too. You can't know that until you've lived a little and know how valuable your traditions are. Traditions are a part of community and as our community grows and we invite new loved ones into our lives and our circle of friends they bring with them their own traditions, and so the world gets a little smaller and a ton richer. We only want to share smoked oysters and brie with everyone, a big fat circle of all our friends come together, each with a slice of sourdough and a wedge of brie topped with a small smoked friend, everyone feeding the person to their left. It's good, no?