Wednesday Beach Report

The wind is blowing here in its usual merciless way. Sand in the eyes. Waves too big for an underfed sea lion trying to haul out onto the sand to get warm. "Wait," I said to the man with a gaggle of kids. They were all carrying sticks in the harmless way that kids do. "Don't let them get too close." I think he thought I was worrying about the kids. I explained that we didn't want the kids to scare the sea lion back into the water. "It's cold," I said. "See how skinny it is. It's coming out of the water to get warm. I'm going to call the rescue hotline right now," I said, pulling out my cell phone. I became someone with authority to him then. He commanded his kids back from the surf. But it was too late. The sea lion was washed into the waves, too weak to even swim. Which I suppose made it a bad candidate for rescue in the first place. I consoled myself with that. And the fact that another family now knows about starving sea lions.

I had a dream last night. Flying like a kite in a tireless wind, I caught only the tail end of it before I woke, mumbling. I said something to my father. He said something to me. Something about my mother.

I don't remember my dreams often. But a night or two after I returned home from Iowa, I had a terrible nightmare. There were plot twists galore, betrayal by friends, and when I lay helpless on the floor, a zombie grabbed my foot and began to drag me away. Help me. Help me. Help me. I whimpered in a tiny voice that took every ounce of my strength. I've wondered if the zombie might be my mother. Weird, I know. But I don't believe in zombies, and she is the most recent loved one to have crossed into that other world. Maybe she wanted company.

On a more encouraging note, I came home from Iowa, and my son and his family came to visit the very next day. We went whale watching and the water was as flat as glass. We saw sea lions, and two kinds of dolphins, and gray whales.

Heron in the harbor

Dolphins, not sharks

whale's tale

Friday Beach Report /Dispatch from Los Angeles

It's hard to see in this photo, but all of the white thing are velella velella (by-the-wind sailors) In real life they're shiny and look a bit like discarded condoms, as if there'd been a safe sex orgy on the sand.

Today there were hundreds of washed up dead by-the-wind sailors. Who knows why they aren't blue. The question mark from the stalk of some kind of reed or tall grass is not staged. I guess the universe also wants to know why the velella velella aren't blue.

But I saw dolphins on my walk. So we haven't killed everything yet. A stroke of luck.

And I found a parking spot on La Brea Ave. (I'm writing this from L.A.) so that's lucky too. I'm having a latteé at a nice little coffee place in preparation for my 24-hour break from caregiving. I'm hoping for a good night's sleep after my friend Elizabeth's fabulous book salon. Last night my mom yelled a lot in her sleep. This morning while I made my coffee, she was still at it. "Well!" she said, "I'm going to need the car!" Maybe she was trying to get to L.A. so she could be here waiting for me. That could be fun. She's a little unclear on this book salon thing though. Every time I tell her that I'm going to a book club, she thinks it's to a discuss a book I've written. Thanks, mom. I appreciate the vote of confidence.

So yeah, if you want to buy my book, scroll down.

I also highly recommend "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" by Anthony Marra. It is profoundly amazing and my favorite book salon selection so far.

So. A Seahorse Walks into a Bar...

Beach goer art 

When I walked by this piece of driftwood stuck into the sand today, I re-called one of the spontaneous games that popped up with the grandchildren this past weekend. I suppose not every grandma would begin a game with young grandchildren that begins with someone or something walking into a bar, but the game was essentially word play which all three of my grandchildren enjoy.

So, a crab walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Sorry. We don't serve crabs here." So the crab says, "Aw, c'mon, I won't be shellfish."

So, a fish walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Sorry. We don't serve fish here." So the fish says, "What's the catch?"

So, a whale walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Sorry. We don't serve whales here. So the whale says, "Hey, it's not a fluke that I'm here. I'm here on porpoise!"

So, a seahorse walks into a bar.....go ahead you finish it.

Yeah, grandchildren. We had "tea by the sea," which is the best excuse ever for eating lots of sweets with lunch.

We took a whale watching boat ride, but did not, unfortunately, find any whales. There were, however, bottle nose dolphins. The ocean was mindbogglingly blue.

Today there were clouds that looked like dollops of whipped cream. Beauty. Whether it's art or nature or grandchildren, I'm always amazed.

Post Holiday Beach Report/Love Letter

On this page we call today is a sky of chalk rubbed pale,
a lone surfer,
the morning soft and cool.
There will be dolphins, I said, and
there were-- tinted green in the translucent curtain of a wave's curl.
And willets rest, one-legged, while my heart rides
a single track toward you.

Breathe. Lift Your Hearts.

My mom and I in 1968 or thereabouts--which means that she was in her mid-40s in this photo--almost two decades younger than I am right now. 

Breeeeeeathe. Lift your heart. This is what the yoga teacher said.

Breathing. Hearts lifted. Then backs arching for the dive back into the water. This is what the dolphins did as I walked on the beach after yoga.

There were dozens of dolphins in clusters of five or six or seven cavorting more recklessly than I've seen before unless I've been out on a boat. Completely out of the water, splashing, and diving, their dorsal fins appearing and disappearing as if an immense paddle wheel was out there in the blue-green deep.

October here in Margaritaville is more summer than summer. June gloom--which can stretch on and on--has been blown away by the dry winds, and we are left with an infinity of blue.

My mother is thrilled when it's warm and sunny. She likes to sit in the sun in her tank top. When it's gloomy and damp, she wears long underwear under her pants and a t-shirt and a sweater over the tank. "Sunny California!" she scoffs then. "Ha! Where's the sun?" The temperatures listed in the L.A. Times give her false hope. It's always a good ten degrees hotter there.

This afternoon she chatted with her sister on the phone as I sat upstairs in my room reading. I was engrossed in "The Feast of Love" by Charles Baxter. Transported by the novel's big proclamations about love, transported my my mother's voice--louder and stronger than I've heard it in years--I found that I was picturing her in our house in Iowa, stretching the long curling cord on the wall phone in our kitchen as she reached for her coffee cup or her pack of cigarettes. I was in my girlhood room lying across the old four-poster bed, reading--but also thinking I should be listening. This loud voice, this enthusiasm--what was she talking about? Wasn't there something I should be learning from these grown-up women? But I was reading.

There's something in the air here. We are breathing, opening our hearts to our past and future selves, diving in and out of the present.

A double marine mammal morning here in Margaritaville

There were dolphins arcing in and out of the surf this morning. I walked along the sand just a a few feet from them until they outpaced me. A few seconds after I turned back, I spotted two seals, or maybe sea lions, diving through the waves. To the south god-fingers of light spread through the clouds, and to the north the coastline was swaddled in mist. The ocean itself was cellophane--blue layered over green layered over silver. A color without a name. Lucky, lucky, lucky. The word repeated itself and I listened. The capriciousness of the universe sometimes seems most evident in the weather. Superstorm Sandy wreaking havoc and misery while I make footprints in sand so smooth it looks as though some beach version of a Zamboni has whisked across it. There is no reason as far as I can tell.

The misfortunes of the east coast have caused me to pull the "earthquake protection" guy's card from my rollodex. Time to anchor my towering bookshelves and old armoires. Time to think about storing some water, check the batteries in my lanterns, and figure out where the battery phone charger went after last December's windstorm. But I am never prepared, really, when the bad stuff happens. I prefer to dwell on the smooth sand murmuring about luck and marveling at dolphins.

The heroes whose job it is to respond to disaster, the men and women whose jobs require drills to man lifeboats, escort passengers from crippled planes, race gurneys down hallways are as exotic to me as dolphins. Because my daughter C and her husband are both sailors in the tall ship world, I found myself staring at my computer screen in the wee dark hours watching the waves wash over the HMS Bounty after Sandy hit it. I thought of how many times these submerged sailors might have run the lifeboat drill, and I thought of  the hours of training required to be a Coastguard rescue swimmer or helicopter pilot. I wondered what it must be like to be in an upside down canopied lifeboat praying for rescue. Or to be washed under and not make it to the lifeboat. But I couldn't visit that scenario for long.

My daughters and I sometimes talk about having superpowers. All of my children are crazily brave in ways I cannot imagine. It seems to me that they really do have superpowers. My superpower? It might be finding lost babies. I've found three, so far, in my life and shepherded each of them back where they belonged. So, hey, all you wandering toddlers out there......never fear.

photo credit: paintingsilove.com

I've got an idea....

Let's go down to the beach and look at the big waves.

And let's invite the family.

Look! Dolphins!!!

Photographer's note: These birds need a human with some photography skills.

A Whale of a Week, A Whale of a Love Affair, A Whale of a Visit, A Whale of a Trip, and Just Plain Whales

The last excursion of the "granddaughter week" was a whale watching trip. "I can't promise you we'll see whales," I told the girl who's been to Sea World twice. Ha. We were mugged by Humpbacks, which is whale watching boat parlance for being so surrounded that the boat can't move. Take that, Sea World. We saw Blue Whales, too. It's not a small event---seeing the world's largest animal--but it was the breathing of the Humpbacks, so close to us, so like immense human sighs, that surprised me.

And the dolphins again--this time a nursery pod with babies, hundreds of them the size of footballs. I love the things the guides tell us on these boat rides. The Common Dolphin cannot survive in captivity, they said. Without their family group, they perish in five days, they said. They loose their ability to echolocate.

Location can be everything in a love affair. The Man Who Loves Me, who I thought for a few days might not weather my change of location, was at the train station when the kid and I got off the boat. Immense human sigh.

Instead of driving halfway to Phoenix to hand off the granddaughter, her mom and her auntie came with the other kids to stay for three days and then take her home. They were good sports and did their own thing while I hung out waiting for plumbers and contractors to do this or that in my final push to finish up jobs at the house before I bring my mom to live with me.

Who am I when I'm with you? Are all of us changing our spots, doing the chameleon thing? The little girl/deep thinking budding psychologist turned into a less-than-charming martinet once the little brother and sister were back on the scene. Ah, well. Little human sigh. This just reinforces my plan to take those kids one at a time.

And so, with barely time to pack, I was back in the arms of The Man Who Loves Me. Echolocation working fine, thank you. Then onto a plane 12 hours later, and into a rental car, and driving for five hours, and then into my home town, which cannot be visited without a plunge into the past. See other blog, and peruse while thinking about the Common Dolphin. And imagine these steeples rising above the cornfields, rising above everything, visible from five miles or so away as you drive down the highway. And weird, how the photo won't load properly. But there it is--the fractured picture of a particular church that I thought might crumple and crush me, like Samson in the temple in the movie "The Ten Commandments," as I sat through dozens of masses as a secretly pregnant 16/17-year-old.

And so here I am, struggling a bit with my echolocation, in my hometown. But my mother is here, and next week, after a thirty-hour drive spread over an as yet undetermined number of days, I will return with her  to the land of the whales where I will listen for their sighs.

Do Not Change the Channel

Like many children, my grandchildren have been raised on TV and videos. Staring at a screen first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and plenty of time in between. I don't hanker for the chirp and drone of the TV in the background as company, and during visits from my son and his family, I would often turn the TV off when I found that no one was really watching it anyway. This visit things were different. I have no TV here at my new house. Yes, they came with their various small screens, but I think the ocean proved to be more mesmerizing. "Can we go back to the beach?" was the refrain of the past few days, and we grown-ups obliged.

We even took a boat ride to Anacapa, one of the The Channel Islands. A large sea lion lounged on the edge of a boat dock setting up the expectation for wildlife even before we left the harbor. Thirty minutes or so out into the ocean, the dolphins arrived. Dozens of them in the distance at first, and then scores mores, rocketing closer and closer until they were almost close enough to touch, racing along side of the boat or leaping out of the water. A couple of seals popped their heads up, too, and there were more sea lions than we could count on the rocks near Anacapa. Sea gulls hovered above, and squadrons of pelicans were so numerous they became practically became mundane.

I tried to mitigate the media's influence with my daughters, allowing only an occasional video or TV show when they were little and, starting with kindergarten they went to Waldorf School where TV, movies, videos, computers and electronic games of all kinds were discouraged altogether. I felt like I was only partially successful when I was in the thick of it all, and would have probably caved far more often if it weren't for the support of our Waldorf school community. It's so clear to me now that nature is the only real competitor for the pull of the media. And kids want to do things. Sitting means flipping a switch and waiting to be entertained. Being out in a boat on the water, chasing the waves, digging in the sand, playing outdoors, walking the dog, doing chores--there's a satisfaction to all of those things that doesn't seem to crave passiveness.

The flat blue water we were lucky to sail on yesterday was almost like a screen. And real live animals popped right out of it.  I love you, Mother Nature.