Life’s a Beach…

The Talisman, the epic novel by Stephen King and Peter Straub, begins thusly:

On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and land come together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic. He was 12 years old, and tall for his age…. He stood there filled with the confused and painful emotions he had lived with for the last three months…

I thought of this passage as I stood and watched our son, much older of course than 12-year-old Jack, and about average size in height for a man his age, standing for the first time in 6 years in the ebb and flow of the surf at the Manhattan Beach pier, with one hand in his pocket of his jeans shorts and one hand holding his shoes.

I have no idea what exactly was going through his mind, but I know that he too has lived with confused and painful emotions for going on 6 months now. Because conditions were very nearly perfect the week we were there, we could easily see the gradual “C” shape of the coastline beginning with the mountains that lurk over the beach at Malibu to the north...

and sweeping around to the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the south...

with Catalina Island 25 miles off the coast in sharp relief. It was gorgeous.

We laughed with delight at the 3 little shore birds running up and down and back and forth in front of us,

seeming not to mind at all that we were not that far away from them.

And a pigeon, hunkered down in the warm sand.

I know that pigeons are not thought very highly of in urban areas, but I like them very much. My uncle raised homing pigeons and raced them -- of course they were quite a step up from the mongrel birds that grace urban landscapes -- and I had a coop of pigeons when I was a girl – until we went on vacation and some boys in the neighborhood stole them (but I did not find out who did it until many years later, at my 10-year high school reunion).
I hope that he will not have to wait another 6 years to stick his toes in the Pacific. I hope that he will be able to return to California in June when my sister's youngest daughter... 

marries her sweetheart.