Memories of them good ol' summers at the Mount

There's something to be said about a summer that serves up six swims in six days and so far the lazy hazy days of summer have served us loyally and royally just like Tana to his team.
Each of the last six days, be it morning noon or nigh on night time, my 12-year-old daughter Holly and I have waddled and waded, rocked and rolled, bobbed and bounced around in the surf like a stubborn straw in an upsized soda that refuses to sink. And it's been bloody brilliant!
The feeling when you slide between the sheets at night after a day in the sun and surf is sweeter than tupelo honey and just for a Mauao minute there is a youthful rebellion against all the melodrama of melanomas when the warm flush of slight sunburn makes the sheets feel cooler than Josh Stone's vocal chords or a Brad Pitt poster - if you are that way inclined?
Not since I was Holly's age can I remember spending so much time in the sun drenched swells off the Mount's Main Beach.
Back then summer seemed to last forever and the month of January lingered longer than a slowly licked ice cream. Suntans and sunburn were covered in Coppertone, a tanning oil that fried you quicker than a Doggy Box hotdog, our little kai shop opposite the hot pools back in the mid sixties was my source of holiday pay.
Every morning we would shove skewer sticks up sausages' backsides to feed the batter-loving Bodgees who flocked to the footpaths of Adams Avenue in January.
And every jukebox from the Coconut Grove, opposite Barney's Four Square to the Lee Mount dairy next to our little sausage-selling shop, would belt out a Beach Boys ballad about some surfing safari that had four-fifths of fork-all to do with any artificial reef.
Ah yes! They were the days all right. When a 12-year-old Mountie was king of the kainga and the out-of-townies from over the hill and far away were fullas with fat wallets and even fatter pukus.
As soon as I had skewered enough sausages to fill 50 vats I was off on my magical Mount mystery tour that would start around 11 every morning at the red canoes and bright yellow dinghies along Pilot Bay.
Then I would take in a pit stop of mini putt at old man Higgins' sixpenny siphoning shop around the corner where you had to be careful not to let him con you into a golfing lesson on how to hold the shaft. And by the time the sun had hit the surf out in front of Davies' yellow and black corrugated iron sheds on the Mount Main Beach it was time to take up the Beach Boys' challenge and hire one of Jim's black beauties as we called them, the thick black surf riding mattresses for a shilling an hour and worth every damn penny.
Man those mattresses were fun and the look on faces as they flew into the foreshore was equal to any freefall or roller coaster ride of today. After showing the out-of-townies how to ride the black beauties and then trying to diddle Davies out of half-a-crown by telling him he wrote down the wrong start time, I would wander past the infamous Greenhouse, where the front veranda would be swaying to the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, while the guitars gently wept and the purple haze that they listened to and sometimes swallowed, took them to a place where Bobby Magee's blues fell in love with strawberry fields forever.
Don't even try to work that one out, you just had to be there. .
But everything was beautiful back then in its own kind of way and the magic of the Mount for a 12-year-old was heaven on a hotdog stick.
Life just rolled along from summer to summer with a bit of footy in between.
There were no worries, no foreshores flogged, no teenage tagging or Mum's nagging, no boom boom cars or kids in bars, no taleban just television, no Al Qaeda just L&P;, no bird flu just me and you and a dog called Boo travelling and a-living off the land.
A land that had - and still has now - a silver lining sewn into its white cloud. A land that has plenty, especially here in the Play of Plenty - where the early bird catches the wave and a dad and daughter can swim in the surf six days in a row or eight days a week.
Pai marire
tommy@indigenius.org