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.

Walking With Whales and A Bird in the Hand

Having recently found out that my blood pressure continues to be a bit high and that my blood sugar is elevated as well, and that I have a severe vitamine D deficiency, I decided to step up my fitness routine by walking to the gym a couple days a week. I tried this a while back and found it too unpleasant with the 50-mile per hour traffic in my neighborhood, but I think I've now hit on the solution: Drive to the sand and then walk to the gym along the beach. Round trip is probably about two miles, and since I usually walk on the sand after the gym anyway and then have to walk back to my car in the gym parking lot, the new plan only requires that I leave the house 40 minutes earlier. Since I get back home about half an hour earlier, the extra net time that I leave my Mom alone is only 10 minutes.

So yesterday was the first morning of the new fitness plan, and about five  minutes into my walk, I spotted four gray whales swimming parellell to the shore, heading north as I walked south. Long after we passed one another, I could still see their spouts when I turned around to look. Margaritaville continues to astonish me just one year and two weeks since I bought my house here. The birds alone might have sufficed to let me know I'd found paradise. Pelicans still take my breath away. And just recently I've finally sorted the willets from the whimbrels, and the whimbrels from the curlews--and I think I've recently added a type of godwit (marbled?) to the list of shore birds I can identify. The first time I saw dophins during one of my walks, it felt like a miracle. The whales caught me completely off guard. I didn't know they swam that close to shore. For all I know, maybe they don't usually.

A couple of days ago, I came across an injured bird on the beach. Sure that I had entered some kind of bird rescue number in my phone, I began scrolling for it while standing back so as not to alarm the  creature in distress. Not finding the number right away, the big questions began to ask themselves: Would it be better for the bird to remain where it was? What if it got rescued and spent its last moments in some claustrophobic tiled room literally circling the drain? Shouldn't it be allowed to die under the sky next to the sound of the waves? But while I was agonizing and scrolling, a woman strode toward the bird with a long-handled net. Without slowing,she walked just past the bird, got behind it, and dropped the net over the top of it. A few seconds later, she reached under the net and scooped the bird into her arms. She finagled her net then--folded it or shortened the handle somehow--and then placed a cloth  over the bird who was carried off under her arm like a privledged chihuahua.

photo credit: travelocity

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.