Sunday
A pelican falls, sharp as a stone, meeting the water below in a silent splash that sends salty spray high into the air. My breath catches in my throat: I watch in awe, unspeakably touched by this dazzling display of beauty.
The breeze, gentler than usual but just as stickily warm, teases strands of my hair from their neat updo. The beach is the one place on earth where even my normally docile hair is rendered absolutely unmanageable - but I don't care. If I could live here, I wouldn't mind being totally bald.
I am sitting in my favorite position: curled in one of the Captain's chairs, my feet perched on the deck rail, facing the grey-green-blue expanse of the ocean. Seabirds wheel, noiseless and graceful, above my head - stately pelicans, grey gulls, and small, swooping white ones with black heads whose name I don't know. Though midsummer, it is Sunday, and so the beach is sparsely populated; a small group of simmers here, an abandoned canopy there.
"Hey, Ninny," Benjamin asked me earlier, as I stood on the deck watching faraway dolphins gliding through the waves. "Is there such things as mermaids?"
"Yup," I answered, my eyes still on the horizon. "Of course. They just don't like to show themselves to humans."
Being here, in my truest of homes, takes me back to my most essential self. For the moment I shed all the insecurities, the doubts, and the superficialities of the modern grown-up world. For one shimmering moment I am myself: Not Cindy, the adult, or Cindy Lynn, the child, or Ninny, the sister, or even Cynthia, the writer - I am none of these, and all of them, and more. Once, I wrote a poem about my grandfather's swing. "If ever a man were to love me/I think it would start on a swing," I wrote then - "For there, I am most truly Me." But I was forgetting, then, the even truer truth that is the sea, and what the sea does to me. No one could ever pretend to understand me who had not sat in silence by the ocean with me first - or at least been willing to try.
The breeze, gentler than usual but just as stickily warm, teases strands of my hair from their neat updo. The beach is the one place on earth where even my normally docile hair is rendered absolutely unmanageable - but I don't care. If I could live here, I wouldn't mind being totally bald.
I am sitting in my favorite position: curled in one of the Captain's chairs, my feet perched on the deck rail, facing the grey-green-blue expanse of the ocean. Seabirds wheel, noiseless and graceful, above my head - stately pelicans, grey gulls, and small, swooping white ones with black heads whose name I don't know. Though midsummer, it is Sunday, and so the beach is sparsely populated; a small group of simmers here, an abandoned canopy there.
"Hey, Ninny," Benjamin asked me earlier, as I stood on the deck watching faraway dolphins gliding through the waves. "Is there such things as mermaids?"
"Yup," I answered, my eyes still on the horizon. "Of course. They just don't like to show themselves to humans."
Being here, in my truest of homes, takes me back to my most essential self. For the moment I shed all the insecurities, the doubts, and the superficialities of the modern grown-up world. For one shimmering moment I am myself: Not Cindy, the adult, or Cindy Lynn, the child, or Ninny, the sister, or even Cynthia, the writer - I am none of these, and all of them, and more. Once, I wrote a poem about my grandfather's swing. "If ever a man were to love me/I think it would start on a swing," I wrote then - "For there, I am most truly Me." But I was forgetting, then, the even truer truth that is the sea, and what the sea does to me. No one could ever pretend to understand me who had not sat in silence by the ocean with me first - or at least been willing to try.