I was at the beach with a dear friend who is one of those modern, connected people who keeps his friends and family in touch with his every hour. As I sat in a tired heap on a beach chair after a dose of sun and deliciously warm gulf water, a pod of dolphins rolled by us, displaying their fins and re-energizing us all. I saw a black skimmer slice the water looking for food.
I am in a writing slump – this is not writer’s block really, more of writer’s laze. I thought a day at the beach would bring me back to my senses, and it did. There is something about the ocean that is both validating and terrifying at the same time – and maybe they are one and the same thing – the simplicity and smallness of being human. We who live on or near the gulf don’t take it for granted anymore, if we ever did. So there is an added pathos to that beauty. I am constantly aware that it is not so large or robust an environment that an act of human greed could not damage it irreparably. I pay greater attention to every little thing, I treat each beach day as if it might be my last.
I returned home and told a neighbor excitedly that we saw dolphins. “I know”, she says, I read it on such and so’s face book page” (she means the friend who was with me at the beach). I am disappointed. I have no beef with the people who transmit their lives to their friends and family, it is a form of communication for them, and they are welcome to it. But I would like the choice to communicate my life in the way I want. I don’t know the solution to this – I am not disturbed by it enough to designate myself a Facebook Free zone, but I do wonder if it isn’t a kind of invasion of my privacy. I mean, there may be people to whom I want to describe my experience myself, and there may be some I don’t want to know that I was even at the beach instead of home trying to meet my deadline.
For those of you who might wonder what a skimmer is – here is a photo. Black Skimmer, Rynchops niger. The skimmer is one of the oddest birds I have ever seen, and one of the most elegant too.
Black Skimmer
A couple of weeks ago, I turned on my porch lights at sundown as I usually do. I noticed that the light on one side didn’t come on. I assumed the bulb was fused, and went to take it out, when I saw that the light sconce was full of twigs and leaves. Over the next few days, a tiny brown bird was seen by everyone frantically flying back and forth with more twigs and leaves. I figured I could do without the porch light till she had moved out.
Nearing the end of my five mile walk through the green humid woods of Tallahassee, I noticed something on my sunglasses slightly obscuring my vision. I took them off and wiped them on my sweat-soaked t-shirt. Joe and I kept walking, the gang of children including my son running ahead of us appeared and disappeared among the trees, like woodland creatures. I had swum an hour that morning with another friend, done a respectable amount of editing, had my four-month teeth cleaning, and couldn’t refuse a long walk with my friend in my barefoot shoes. My t-shirt must have left a streak of sweat on my sunglasses, I thought, and I took them off an wiped them again. We kept walking. Five miles is a long distance, and after a swim and a dental visit, it can seem endless. Just as I said despairingly to Joe, “is this ever going to end?” we saw the park entrance at the end of the final stretch. I wiped my glasses one more time, without success. The right side was a blur. We herded the kids into the car, and as I began to drive, I realized that I had not just a blur, but no sight at all in my right eye. All I could see was a spiky neon sign in purples and blues on the periphery of my vision, and when I turned to take a better look, I couldn’t catch it, like some memory you can’t quite grasp. It was bright and clear as long as I didn’t try to look at it directly. It was very beautiful. It always is. I always wish it would last longer. It is my own private, tiny, exquisite hallucination.
My next book, Kashmir Blues (Westland/Tranqubar), will be published later this year. It made me acutely aware that I was finished with that book, but did not yet have another in the works. Life was taking too much time, all the daily eating and walking and children and cats…%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1C1GGLS_enUS359US359%26um%3D1&ei=s3RsS6b1F5TEM9CVxeQE "maxroach")