Waves of Friendship for Surfer
Arden Taylor hasn’t surfed in months, and misses it desperately.
He used to surf all the time. When he closed his contracting business and signed on to manage a coffeehouse, he figured he’d have more time for his wife and two boys--and more time for the waves.
But fate has dealt Arden Taylor a blow both cruel and kind.
On the one hand, he’s looking at death from a vantage point more intimate than any 42-year-old would want. One day last September, a terrible headache sent him home early from his shift at the Starbucks in downtown Santa Barbara. Doctors found five tumors but were later only able to remove one.
On the other hand, friends that Arden never knew he had have buoyed him through his ordeal in a thousand ways he never could have guessed.
Sitting in a turquoise La-Z-Boy in his Ventura living room, he shakes his head--bald from chemotherapy--in wonder.
“I’m just constantly amazed,” he says. “These people have such big hearts. They keep encouraging you and building you up and wanting to help. It makes each day a lot easier to deal with.”
People from his church--Calvary Chapel in Oxnard--have gone all out. For months, they drove him to medical appointments. They helped care for 8-year-old Graham and 12-year-old Jesse. They cleaned, they mowed, they brought in hot dinner after hot dinner, platters circling the dining room like jumbo jets waiting to land at LAX.
Construction pals showed up to paint and re-stucco his house--for free. A fellow Starbucks employee got her band to do a benefit for him at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. Neighbors, relatives, faculty members from Anacapa Middle School, where Taylor’s wife Laura teaches science, have all chipped in with fresh-baked cookies, good wishes, prayers.
And now, the word has spread in surfing spots up and down the coast: Arden needs you.
“I’ve been getting calls from all over the place,” said Keith Akins, a moving force in the free-form Ventura Surf Club. “Everyone wants to help in some way.”
The club is planning the Arden Taylor Surf Benefit--its biggest-ever contest--next month, along with raffles for custom-built surfboards and other beach gear. Aiming for 200 surfers the weekend of March 11, the club hopes to raise $10,000. Ninety percent of it will go to the Taylors and the rest to the American Cancer Society. (For additional information, call Akins at 671-9939 or sign on to https://www.bottomssurf.com.)
“We just wanted to do something,” said Akins, who had a brush with prostate cancer last year. “Arden is the nicest guy in the world.”
He’s also one of the better surfers, a big man known for his grace on the board. “Smooth, flowing, old-school, soulful,” is the way one veteran surfer put it.
Taylor, who has judged many surf contests, puts it differently.
“Surfing is kind of what keeps my head on straight,” he says. “Not being out there has been the toughest thing.”
He didn’t plan for this.
When he finished constructing his church’s new building, he wanted to quit at the top of his game.
“What better time could there be?” he asked. “I had some money, I didn’t have to go bankrupt, and my last project was a good one.”
Starbucks was a steady, if smaller, check. And he liked the company even before taking a job there. Dropping by a Ventura Starbucks each morning, he had worked out a unique trade: Free maintenance services for free coffee the rest of his days.
Now he tries to walk the mile and a half from his house to Starbucks, but his cancer treatments have sapped him.
“The reality of it is that I sit in this chair a lot and it drives my wife crazy,” he says. “Now she gives me a list of things to do every day: Drive to the store, go to the bank, just get out of the house.”
On his better days he strolls to Starbucks, or takes a walk by the ocean, gazing out at the surfers.
“You realize life’s short,” he says. “And you better pay attention to it.”
*
Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
