The last time I visited the beach house that I so loved as a
child that my grandparents owned, a man, my grandmother’s husband nearly died.
Two times.
It had been over 20 years since I had last seen the house,
situated on a hill overlooking the ocean, a broad view that makes dinner there
lovely until someone chokes.
Maybe the sunset has something to do with it, watching it
from the deck, but I always seem to associate the sea with death. That seems
unsubstantiated, given that so many happy memories came from there, and still
do. It’s beautiful, it’s the beach. But I still look at the water and see
death, my grandfather’s mainly, who used to live at the same house that my
grandmother lives now with the man who isn’t my grandfather.
It’s better to digest the memories and shit them out
sometimes. They all eventually go to the sea anyway.
I know that watching the sea, from any angle, any place, makes
me feel like grandpa is still there, floating around, though probably by now
he’s just become sand somewhere. But memories in water always float, always ebb
and flow onto rocks where you once stuck your finger in a sea anemone to make
it close around your finger like a vagina.
I always liked doing that, even though I didn’t like
vaginas.
I remember hot dogs and marshmallows and big fires built by
men. I remember being buried up to my neck in the sand. I remember building
long canals in the sand from a stream that flowed out of nowhere, building them
up until they eventually broke, because twigs and seagull feathers can only
hold so much.
I remember grandpa sitting on a lawn chair just shy of the
garage, smoking, and giving me a BB gun to shoot at cans a few feet away.
I remember riding in my grandparents motorhome, all along highway
1, on our way to Disneyland, crossing down always along the ocean, eating cold
fried chicken out of a plastic bag and loving every minute of it. The way the road
curved, as the land did, always against the restraint of the sea.
Nothing has changed with the sea and yet everything has
changed and will change again and again and again.
Grandpa’s gone and he’s here, everywhere.
This is what I love about the sea: the constant stability of change, refreshing
each memory with each crushing wave, a violence that instills a calm, at least
in me, that such a thing exists, always being alive.