Three thick slices of banana bread went into the bag and off we went, as the sun was already getting too high. We found a nice spot next to some surfers—the heroes of the beach. (They come equipped with flotation devices, they are good swimmers, and they are always the ones that save the drowning person in the news stories.) Next step check for riptides, and set the children free.
My birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I will turn the ripe old age of thirty-seven. I had been thinking on that when a man and his two children arrived on the scene. They settled into their own activities in the vicinity. I did not pay them much mind, until I overheard the daughter say “Come on out dad!” and the man say “I just want to sit here for a few minutes.”
You know that sort of sixth sense, where like a prey animal you can sense that someone is either looking at you, or their energy is somehow projected toward you? Well, I was sensing that his laser eye beams were pointed at me. I started doing the opposite by trying to put this really impressive Great Wall of China around myself. Apparently my force field is only perceptible to me though.
“I am a Nile crocodile, the most aggressive animal on the planet, and I am approaching you,” my daughter said next to me in the shallow surf, walking on all-fours and scrunching up her nose into her best impression of viciousness. “Quick, feed me, so that I will be your friend.”
I found a shell, which magically transformed into a fish, and then the most aggressive animal on the planet was my best friend for life, and began protecting me from all sorts of terrifying creatures that suddenly appeared from the ocean—a great white shark, a hippo, and a kangaroo. I had no idea kangaroos could swim so well.
Then the man approached. He offered my son a shark’s tooth he found, which was nice. I sized him up. He was probably in his early fifties, average height with a sizeable beer belly, and a short beard smeared in grey. There was something to the air about him that struck me as fundamentalist Christian. The only way I can think to describe it is that he was not quite normal by looking as though he lived in la la land, with a subtle attitude of superiority. There is a contradictory look in the eyes of that sort—hollow, yet intense. He went back to searching through the patches of shells nearby, but he was lingering.
This makes it official, I thought. I’m becoming an old person.
I used to have the occasional young surfer chat me up—those ones with the snaky eyes and I-know-I’m-good-looking grins that made it almost certain that they were jerks. But this was my new phase of life: I had gone from attracting the good-looking but jerky surfer to attracting the beer-bellied fundamentalist Christian. I’m not saying I am wanting to go back to the jerky surfers…I’m just not sure I am ready for the fundamentalist Christian stage either.
I’ve really got to remember to wear my wedding ring, I thought when he made it back over, as anticipated. He started chatting about finding sharks teeth, and trying to act really knowledgeable as though I’d never imagined that a shark’s tooth could be found. He seemed fairly good natured, but was the know-it-all type, unaware that I grew up in Florida and the inland creeks here are full of fossilized sharks teeth. I was answering politely, because he seemed like a nice enough guy. He wandered away, and then wandered back. He changed the conversation attempts to sea glass. He was talking to me like I’d never heard of sea glass in my life.
Is there anyone that hasn’t heard of sea glass? I’m pretty sure people that have never stepped a foot on the beach in their lives have heard of sea glass. A new realization dawned on me.
Oh great. I now attract fundamentalist Christians with large beer bellies, and apparently I also look like an idiot.
I decided that maybe this guy was a recent divorcee, and maybe he hadn’t talked to a woman that wasn’t his ex-wife in a really long time, and he had forgotten how. I told myself I shouldn’t be judgmental, but as it turns out, I’m not good at not being judgmental. I started making up a storyline: His wife of fifteen years decided she could no longer stand the literal Bible ideologies, and made a run for it back to her hometown, forced to leave behind her already heavily indoctrinated children. Now her ex-husband is seeking a replacement.
He wandered off and wandered back. Now he was getting a little more personal—what side of town do I live on? Where did I park? My judgmental self decided that he had transitioned from sympathy-inducing recent divorcee seeking a mother-replacement for his kids, to creeper that wants to kidnap another wife for his collection.
It was time for the old “come on kids, let’s go take a walk down the beach and stretch our legs.” And then about fifty feet away we could suddenly have a new found interest in getting in the water, and continue our peaceful beach day.
As we were walking down the beach I eyed the other women around me. There were some young women with their super skinny bodies, and I remembered that stick-figure stage of my life that ran from about age fifteen to thirty. I definitely don’t want to go back to when I could fit my booty into a size small. Medium is healthy—medium is just fine.
My dawning thirty-seventh year doesn’t sound too bad, even if it does come with the beer-bellied fundamentalist. The age and stage is somewhat irrelevant—I’ve always felt like an eighty-year-old on the inside.
We settled down again, and I brushed the sand off my fingers as best I could before taking a big bite of that banana bread. With the wind in my hair and carbohydrates in my mouth, I decided all was probably as it should be.