Nightglow Window

Red Stripe Friday

It's been a tough couple of days for Christy (more -- probably a lot more -- on that later), so we decided to go out to dinner tonight with the girls to a Jamaican restaurant called Jamroc, a little place with a great vibe next door to Encinitas Surfboards.

It was a good call. We sat outside and there was a guy playing a steel drum and we cracked open a few Red Stripe and I could see Christy start to relax.

Christy was a seventeen-year-old Rasta chick when I met her, with reggae stickers plastered all over her car and the largest Bob Marley poster I'd ever seen in her bedroom. She was all about Bob, Steel Pulse, Peter Tosh, and Pato Banton. I remember her telling me what a great tape Babylon By Bus was. She was a tiny bit of a Laguna Beach hippy chick and I loved that vibe about her. It was her version of tar balls and scars.

So tonight seeing her relax while mouthing the words to three little birds took me back twenty years.

The steel drum and red stripe and overall mellow vibe out there on the patio of Jamroc also reminded me of our honeymoon in the Cayman Islands.

I remember swimming in Stingray City on Grand Cayman. Christy was feeding the stingrays and accidentally rubbed the squid guts on her stomach. Soon she was being swarmed by stingrays as they tried to get at the smell. She took it in stride with only a few squeals (okay, maybe more than a few) and the whole incident seemed harmless until recently.


Christy, about to get mauled in Stingray City, Cayman Islands, April 1994.


This photo cracks me up because it looks like she's dog paddling when really she's a good swimmer.


Still my all-time favorite photo of Christy.