The cloud layer over Laguna Beach fragments into individual clouds, revealing the pale blue sky above and beyond.
Alex Andersen drives through the canyon, rounding each turn and slowing down as the road narrows to a single lane going each way. He finds a vacant space in the parking lot, parks, walks to the pay station, punches in his space number and inserts his credit card. The machine prints a receipt, which he places on the dashboard. He takes the wheeled red and white cooler out of the back. Lauren Andersen takes Mark and Erika out of their car seats.
Mark wants to ride on top of the cooler but both parents tell him that he is now too big to do so. Lauren adds that he might fall off and hit his head.
Alex notices a common theme among the bumper stickers adorning the nearby cars. He imagines his children, a few years older, asking, “daddy, what’s Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax?” He would respond, truthfully, that it helps prevent surfers from slipping off their surfboards and by doing so thus delay the discussion of sex to a more developmentally appropriate age.
The cooler’s fat plastic wheels grind against the pebbles, sand and grit of the parking lot. Alex, the cooler’s black handle in his left hand, checks his texts and email one last time with his right hand before turning his data off and putting his cell phone back in his pocket.
He and his wife lead their son and daughter down Ocean Avenue, stopping at a cafe to get pastries for the children and to-go coffee cups for the grownups. Erika is uncharacteristically indecisive, wanting first a poppyseed muffin, then an almond croissant, then a cheese danish. She settles on a piece of coffee cake. Mark gets a poppyseed muffin.
They walk down to where Ocean Avenue meets PCH. Alex presses the pedestrian crossing button. Alex and Lauren have made sure to teach their children about waiting for the green light and looking both ways before crossing the street.
Alex reflects as they wait for the light, reflects as he looks out at the blue ocean. Neither of his foster homes were within a thousand miles of the ocean. He remembers the cramped apartment, the metal detectors at the elementary school entrance, the loud overheard arguments, being told that he would have to go somewhere else with another mommy and daddy, the way in which a young child can experience fear more intensely than an adult can experience any sensation.
He remembers the decision to leave that town and never come back, and how he felt as he drove down the highway with every single one of his possessions in the backseat or the trunk. The late nights studying and the later nights just meeting deadlines. And the even later nights with crying babies who refused to go to sleep for more than an hour at a time.
The light turns green and as they cross the road Alex thinks that this day at the beach, more than the house or the car or any physical or fungible possession, is what he has spent the last decade working so hard to build.
Midmorning, the clouds fading from patches to whisps and the sky’s blue deepening.
Footprints lead from an unoccupied pair of sandals to the water.
Pieces of smooth, rounded sea glass on the foamy wet sand.
Phil Edwards, scanning the beach from north to south with his metal detector, crosses the path of J.R. Nguyen, scanning the beach from south to north with his metal detector. Their eyes meet in instant mutual recognition and they walk towards each other.
“Find anything good today?” Nguyen asks.
“You know, today really hasn’t been my day. Just an old rusty fishing lure. You?”
Nguyen shows him a small, somewhat rusted model of a tailfinned midcentury car. “This was just about twenty minutes ago. Yesterday, a few coins and a nice watch but the glass was cracked.”
“I knew a guy,” Edwards says, “who once found an Omega Seamaster. Now, do you know why it’s called a Seamaster?”
“Waterproof?”
“Yes. But not just waterproof. It’s made for divers and is waterproof up to 300 meters below the surface. But that person, whoever it was, presumably decided to take it off before going into the water and forgot where it was. My friend found it under two feet of sand. He said it was in very good condition after he cleaned it.”
“How much did he get for it?” asks Nguyen. “A couple thousand?”
“He never sold it,” Edwards responds. “He still has it today and wears it when detecting.”
“I see. I have a few things I don’t sell either. One time on this beach I find a silver half-dollar coin from 1914. I could sell but I don’t.” He takes a drink from a blue and orange CSU Fullerton water bottle.
“I’ve found a few old coins at Seal Beach. I’ve found a few old copper wartime nickels and a few quarters from back when they had silver in them. Some hundred-yen coins as well but I don’t know much about those.”
“This week,” Nguyen says,” I find a few keychains on the beach, one with six keys. The keys were rusty and probably old. Maybe very old. Once I find a brand-new keychain with a phone number on it. I call the number and return it.”
“Ever find a wedding ring?”
“Not a diamond ring yet but a few golden bands.”
The conversation continues as they scan the beach together and later as they walk to lunch at Rasta Taco, their shared mania bridging the gaps of age, culture, native language and national origin.
A barefoot seven year-old boy runs down the beach, laughing and yelling with a complete lack of adult reserve, followed by his parents’ eyes. He stops all of a sudden and looks down at a mottled reddish crab. He is fascinated. His eyes follow the crab’s sideways movement, which strikes him as the way an alien would traverse a distant planet. He has seen several space movies in recent weeks and they have stayed with him.
That crab, he thinks, must see him as an alien creature, a giant monster, a Godzilla that might step on it at any moment.
His eyes look down at the crab’s beady black eyes atop protruding eyestalks. His own eyes, he thinks, must seem absolutely bizarre to it, his own walking gate beyond strange, his entire existence almost incomprehensible.
He looks at his own hand and then at the crab’s claws.
As his mother and father walk towards him, he has an intimation of life’s variety and strangeness that he lacks the vocabulary to describe.
Jason, wetsuit-clad and waist-high in water, checks the time on the Seiko dive watch his sisters had gotten him for Christmas. 10:04. Where did the time go?
Into that world, he thinks, that blue-green world, that world of salt and spray, that world that gives human beings some approximation of true flight.
He wades back to the beach with his surfboard. The beach, now sunny, lacks that specific quality, lent by morning light through clouds, that makes him think of all the new day’s possibilities. That has faded now.
Jason thinks, with whimsy, that he is retracing the steps of that very distant ancestor who crawled out of the sea to beget reptiles, birds and mammals. He puts on his sandals and walks towards the outdoor shower, reminding himself that today he parked near Diver’s Cove.
In the parking lot Jason the surfer becomes Jason the paralegal, who has to fill up the gas tank and pick up his laundry and check the PO box and stop by AT&T on the way home.
He drives inland. Hey, he tells himself, there’s always next weekend.
Author’s Note: Would you believe that Earthly Delights is now read in 18 different countries? A special shoutout to my new readers in India, Ireland, Nigeria, The Philippines and Thailand.
As always, thanks so much for reading.
thought provoking. well done.