Random

The beach is quiet in the early morning. Early is 7:30am. We finish our coffees and complete a bit of work. I’m writing something though I don’t know how to define the pages yet. It is hard work and the beach calms me. This morning we were sitting alone; there was no one else in chairs or on towels or blankets. Walkers and runners moved quietly along the sand with some grace; I note that the tide has begun to come in and soon where we now sit will be flooded with water and we will move our chairs back a yard or two.
            Most enjoyable is to watch children at the water. I see them run down the beach—apparently young children do not walk and almost always head out in a run to and from the water’s edge. The littlest children just plop themselves down in the shallowest part and shout out loud their joy. Often there are adults following them down, but the ocean here especially in low tide is shallow and the danger of drowning low. The children splash about, slapping their hands in the water, turning over to lie on their bellies and allow the tired waves to wash over them. Theirs is an innocence I enjoy. Older children dive into the waves splitting the waters with their arms and head. Theirs is a happiness I envy.
             Slowly the beach comes alive. Umbrellas and beach chairs are planted in the sand by attendants from the beachside hotels. We have not ventured into one of the supposedly rentable chairs yet: we set up our rickety beach chairs from the Airbnb and they are sufficient. Surf schools set up their canvas tents and unpack the rentable surfboards. When the tide is high enough and the waves roll in more forcefully than they do now, the schools become active and as high tide waves in mightily there can be thirty or forty surfers out their attempting to stand up on their boards and ride the waves. Most surfers manage only a few seconds upright and to my mind, limiting as it is, the effort seems greater than the pleasure. Ord maybe the effort is the pleasure but usually the surfer falls awkwardly off the board and into the wave and the board flies upwards only to be pulled back by the cord wrapped about the surfer’s ankle. And I consider that maybe the surfers are playing in the water the same as do the children, splashing about and diving into the waves and allowing them to wash over them. Occasionally, someone with greater skill surfs in twisting and turning about on a high wave. Even so, the ride last ten seconds . . .  

I’m trying to write here and unlock something though I do not know what that something might be. I’m vomiting up whatever seems to be in my mind hoping the force will unblock the reservoir. Austerlitz says, “But now I found writing such hard going that it often to takes me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the word I had employed.” I know the sentiment well, but I recall that Austerlitz is responding to severe trauma and I am just merely frustrated. Every word Austerlitz puts down, he says, sounds false and hollow but mine just seem empty. I think of Prufrock’s worry when he wonders if she will say, laying her head upon the pillow, “That is not what I meant at all;/That is not it, at all.” Sometimes when I cannot find the words to say I let someone else talk for me. And sometimes I read so that someone can help me learn what to say.

I read in the paper today that a spacecraft the size of a phone booth has landed on the moon. I wonder who of a certain age would know what size that might be since phone booths no longer exist except in television shows or films. I am certain that my daughters, aged 35 and 30, have never seen a phone booth and certainly have not tried to make a phone call in one. Phone booths today travel with us, as it were. Sometimes people even make calls on them. Many beach goers carry their phones photographing themselves—selfies and videos, as they voyage down the beach, sometimes on foot and sometimes on horseback. Very few arrive to the ocean without their phone. It intrigues me. Making a video and taking photos seem to validate the experience yet seem to me to be a substitute for it. Ah, but I am aging and crotchety, and sometimes can’t make sense of the choices of a generation that is not mine. Hell, I can’t understand the choices of my generation either! And I discover that my own choices are not immediately comprehensible, and then I have to write a story to understand myself.