A Day at the Beach

Summer means happy times and good sunshine. 

It means going to the beach...

Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys

The four of us have quite wonderful memories of our camping vacations when we were children. We camped in the mountains, we camped at the state beach parks at San Clemente and Carpinteria.

We camped the old-fashioned way: we slept in tents in sleeping bags on cots or on air mattresses, mom and dad cooked on a white gas Coleman stove, and at night we had a white-gas Coleman lantern with a brightly glowing mantel to light the campsite and flashlights to guide the way to the rest rooms. If you had to “go” after the last trip, then there was a bucket in the tent.

Dad always made “campin’ cocoa” with canned milk diluted with water, sugar, and cocoa powder. And lurking in that last swallow were usually small balls of cocoa that did not dissolve.

Last Saturday the oldest brother decided he wanted to make some “campin’ cocoa” that we were going to take with us to the pier at Hermosa Beach and drink with our pinky fingers in the air. And so we did.

The beach was a hive of activity. That Saturday was a Beach Cleanup Day on the California beaches, and at Hermosa Beach people of all ages were scouring the beach for trash. They were staging and setting up on one side of the pier.

Something very different was happening on the other side of the pier. The Best Day Foundation also had an event. A large group of volunteers were helping children with special needs have an experience that some of them had never had before: a day at the beach.

Children who couldn’t walk were pushed to the shore line in special chairs with wide balloon tires to join those who could walk...

and they waited while men on large surfboards, some of them with rigid seats, helped the children on the boards and took them out to the end of the pier.

On the return trip they waited for the right wave and surfed in to the shore.

Something about this touched my heart, and I found myself crying as I took picture after picture. That afternoon I cried as I tried to tell Richard about it, and I started crying yesterday when I told my friend Judy about it at lunch.

I lost some of the photographs I took because of a memory glitch on my camera but Best Day Foundation was kind enough to let me borrow some of theirs, which is why the surfboards are different colors..

Paying Attention

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day... fifty the day after that... and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's—GASP!!—too late.” Stephen King

I would tend to agree with Mr King, but sometimes when you need 1000 words to describe something because you don’t have a picture then you do need those pesky adverbs – and adjectives – to paint the picture.

Now that breeding season is over and the Common Grackles have finished raising this year’s brood, they have begun to gather in large flocks. One such flock roosts at night in a wooded area near the house. On days when it is likely going to be too hot to walk later in the morning, I usually begin walking in that brief period while the sky is still pearly gray, just before the sun breaks the horizon, and by the time I turn around and head back the sun is up, and the birds have roused and have left the roost, making quite a racket as they discuss things among themselves, and are heading off in a group to wherever they spend their days.

They don’t fly in a nice formation like geese would but string out across the sky without much organization, like a black ribbon that seems to go on for a while before the last bird disappears over the trees.

But the other morning as I watched, the black ribbon of birds began to twist and coil and turn back on itself and swirl vertically and horizontally before it straightened out and headed off again. I stopped and watched this amazing spectacle, probably with my mouth gaping.

True, the display of this small flock of Grackles did not rival the amazing film I have seen in nature programs of a murmmeration of starlings, but I never thought I would see anything even close to that in person.

I am so glad I kept watching them instead of just glancing as they took to the air (ho hum, it’s a large flock Grackles and I've seen them just about every day for several weeks, so what?) and then looked at something else.

One morning in early winter when I was walking in the park, a bald eagle came from the woods at the edge of town and flew directly overhead toward the residential area. They do winter in the area, but are usually not that common near the town, so seeing one is sort of a big deal. It flew right over two women who had finished their walk and had cut through the car lot of the dealership that is next to the park. They were looking in the window of a new car and never saw the eagle it because they weren’t looking up.

I realize people can’t pay attention to everything – because after all, if you are paying attention to one thing you can’t be paying attention to something else, but…

Farewell, Mollywog

Some months ago I started to write a post, and then it petered out and never got finished:

I have returned from the groomer with Molly, and she is stretched out on the couch next to me while I read. Her coarse fur has been shaved, and her warm body feels like velvet as I stroke her. The arch of her ribs is like a knobby fan under my hand, and which rises and falls as she breathes…

We noticed several days ago that something was wrong with her breathing. We took her to the vet yesterday, it looked to him on the x-ray that she had a tumor in her chest that had ruptured and her chest was filled with fluid and blood -- from one area he got pure blood when he tried to draw it off so he stopped. It didn’t look good, he said. He wanted to keep her overnight, but we decided to bring her home.

She was still very groggy from being tranquilized, and we had put her on the floor in her bed, but by the time I went to bed she had recovered enough to to hop up on the couch and stretch out in her spot.

This morning I sat down next to her on the couch, coffee in my right hand, Bible on my lap open to this morning’s reading, and my left hand stroking her fur. And again, her ribs felt like a knobby fan under my hand. Only this morning, there was no rise and fall, because she wasn’t breathing. She had died in the night.

And appropriately enough, this morning’s reading from the Old Testament was the first three chapters of Ecclesiastics

For everything there is a season,
a time for every activity under heaven…
A time to be born and a time to die….
A time to cry and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance.

Today there won’t be much laughing or dancing. But it will come.

 I am going to miss this dog so much.