Clara and the Ocean

     Several slender fingers of foam washed up on the white sands of Brandenton Beach and tickled Clara's little pink piggies.  It was Clara's first time at the beach and her first time seeing the ocean.

     "Hey! Don't!" she yelled down at the foam.  She looked up at the ocean and scowled. "'Dop it!"

     "Are you scolding the ocean?" I asked. "Good luck with that."

     She turned to run from the waves and fell, plop, into a puddle of cold sea-water.  Her shock and fury were tempered some by her interest in the way the water continuously eroded the sand sides of the hole she sat in.  Further up the beach, some little girls were digging in the sand with shovels and pails.  Clara wandered over and helped herself to a shovel.

     "She can play with that," one of the little girls said, meeting my eyes.

     "'Ank-you," Clara replied after a few prompts.  She was already intent on digging, awkwardly trying to mimic the way the older girls dug.  She seemed interested in the way the fine, white sand on top gave way to coarser, pulverized sea shells underneath, and soon became completely engrossed in her work.  The salty wind whipped her hair into her face and she pushed it away impatiently with pudgy toddler hands.

     When I was a kid, growing up on a high desert farm in Idaho, our beach was a strip of black mud lining one of the Snake River's gentler turns.  We dodged big, floating patches of river moss, laced with yellow scum, while we swam.  Dad let the cows water at our swimming hole for several summers and they crapped all over the place.  A calf died in the shallows.  

      You didn't think about what was in the river water while you swam.  It was so murky, you couldn't see your feet. When you came out of the water, most often you smelled like dead fish.

     One time I ran up and down our mud beach in my bathing suit, mimicking a commercial I'd seen on our little black and white TV, where a beautiful-bodied model ran about in the surf of some glorious California shore.  Out there on the desert farm, achieving personhood was always a struggle.  Desert nature and relationships so brutal you better buckle down to survive and not daydream about self-actualization.

     Green-blue water, clear as glass, roared in the background on Bradenton Beach.  Clara awkwardly tried to make the shovel dig deeper, and then suddenly tossed it to one side. With supreme absorption she smashed a face I had sculpted in a wet mound, and then stole a seashell I was using to write her name in the sand.

     "My turn!" she yelled, trying to make the seashell write the way I had.  Putting my hand over hers, I helped her make a picture of a dog.  She giggled--she loves dogs-- and then immediately destroyed the picture.

     Later, after lunch, we came back and built a whole series of turrets and towers using a pail and shovel Popi (Simon's dad) bought for Clara. I have to admit, I was as dazzled by the sand and salty wind and roar of the ocean as Clara seemed to be.  If I had my way, I'd live right on a beach and spend every day swimming in the waves.  Just letting time idle by, not being anybody.  As faceless and nameless to the ocean as a jellyfish.
     Some little boys were building a pit in the sand next to us.  Their parents and grandmother sat next to them in chairs that faced the sun, wearing bathing suits and sunglasses.  The grandmother took off her sunglasses to watch Clara.

     "Her name is Clara?" she shouted above the surf. "What a beautiful little girl.  And so sweet and gentle."

     Simon and I held Clara's hands and brought her into the surf.  This time she had no disdain for it.  Her cheeks were pink with sun as she shrieked and giggled in the waves.  I'd stripped off her soaked leggings and her legs were ruddy-looking in the cold saltwater.
     The ocean seemed to draw Clara in.  She wanted us to bring her out into the waves like the older kids, and we had to keep pulling her back.

     "We have to leave in five minutes," I told her after a long time splashing and playing.  I have no knowledge of oceans, only rivers, but it seemed to me the tide was starting to come in.

     "Yes," she nodded.  But when it was time to leave, she sat down in a shallow pit she had dug and refused to budge.  Promises of candy in the car and hot bubble baths back at Grammy and Popi's failed to sway her. She stared at her plump little feet, coated with sand as white as sugar, and hung her head. Finally we told her she could watch the Wizard of Oz with Popi on his TV, and she reluctantly got to her feet.  Her pull-up diaper was completely engorged with seawater and she was so exhausted after playing in the sunshine and wind that she was compelled to lay her head on Popi's shoulder for a bit.
     I hazarded a last glance at the ornate sand compound the little boys next to us had built.  Not knowing much about oceans, of course, but still understanding it would soon be gone, gone, gone.