Charlie's birthday would be Feb. 8, the Friday after next.  We are also approaching the one year anniversary of his passing, Mar. 17.  It was a Saturday morning, about 10:15 am.  This Saturday, Feb. 2, will mark 46 weeks since he passed.  It is still incredibly hard to believe he is gone.  He was always so healthy, always took such good care of his health.  When his mind started to go it took a long time to recognize and accept the fact because from day one he had always been brilliant.  Look at that kindly and handsome face.  In pictures, we see Charlie harvesting fruit on a visit to Italy, then him and me at Lake Cuyamaca in about 2008 or so, then me as I was in 1976, a surf local at Tourmaline, then a pic of Charlie about a year and a half before he passed, and finally one of him in a shirt from his beloved Stanford University about a year before he passed.

Charlie on the Kalalau trail on Kaua'i.  We did the 11 mile hike from Ke'e Beach to Kalalau three times.  It is the hardest hike I have ever done, but the best.  We hiked the Grand Canyon from the rim to Phantom Ranch and back about two weeks before the first Kalalau hike, it was easy compared to Kalalau.  It is an amazingly beautiful place, an amazingly beautiful trail.  Hawai'i trails make you strong.  All three times after hiking to the beach Charlie hiked back up into Kalalau Valley, and all three times I passed on the hike to the valley, for me, enough was enough!  He back packed out about 30 lbs of oranges from the valley, gave away most on the hike back to Ke'e, but we kept some and they were delicious.

He had only shortly before recovered from an operation removing lymph nodes in his groin after melanoma was discovered on a leg.  No cancer was found in the nodes, it took him a couple of months to fully recover from the operation.  He was balls out on the hike that followed his brush with melanoma.  (First doctor gave him only a 50-50 chance of survival until the lymph nodes turned out negative, then raised his chances to 95%!)  We met a hippie who lived in a camp up a vertical cliff near the waterfall.  He had been part of a commune living in the valley which was evidently, according to him if I remember correctly, funded by a son of Elizabeth Taylor.  Sterling, the fellow, had lived at the commune with the heir of a great Cuban tobacco fortune, both gay, they had taken lots of ellis-d and had climbed "the cones"while high, during the nights.  Wow.  Charlie and Sterling scampered up the vertical cliff to Sterling's camp, it is of course technically illegal to live at Kalalau, but the authorities had never taken it on themselves to climb those cliffs to force him out.  A very interesting fellow.

The waves at Kalalau were often gigantic and very powerful.  In fact, from the overlook in Koke'e Park you can hear them breaking, they sound like big cannons being fired.  We saw a very large shark through one of the waves once.  We also saw a really attractive brown guy, Mundo, body surfing the giant waves. And then Abe, a definitive hippie with beautiful long hair and a great body.  But I digress.  Of course.