Three days sunning (shading), swimming, and sexing on Florida Bay, where the water means that the Crayola seagreen crayon isn't a lie. Long Island Sound just isn't that color. Stiff northeasterly winds clouded the water, so no snorkeling, and clouded the sky, but not much, and brought up the surf, just slightly. I sat, more or less bundled, under palm and hammock trees, and read, and listened to the waves and the wind in the leaves, and gazed at the water, and swam, and watched manatees, and went parasailing, and had a lovely time.
The place was teeming with French. One family was French Canadian and spoke English but one couple would have been entirely lost if much of the staff hadn't been Haitian. RDC came back from a stroll on the dock and said something that made me jump up and run to the dock. Only on my return did I think to ask the couple, "Excusez-moi, parlez-vous l'anglais? Il y a [should have been "ont"] les vaches de la mer, là. Quatre ou cinq." They thanked me, "Vous êtes trés gentile."
I don't know how to say "manatee" in French [le lamantin], and I don't know how "cows of the sea" translated since the fauna is only American. Whether the Frenchies thought manatee or dolphin or seal, they knew I meant something worth looking at, and went to look. The four or five seacows were feeding on the various seaweed, breathing, bobbing up to look at us, blowing out through their whiskers. They are peculiar creatures.
We saw ospreys and pelicans and herons and egrets and terns and gulls and a bald eagle. Another thing I liked about being on the bay side is the very low, uninhabited, rocky but treed, bits of land across the bay. I am not used to ocean to the horizon but to seeing the tailings of Long Island across the beach from me, and though I like limitless ocean just fine on Cape Cod or San Francisco or Ft. Lauderdale, having a bounded horizon makes me feel safer.
RDC was disappointed that, from parasailing's vantage point, we didn't see anything big in the bay like dolphins or turtles, and I would have liked to see either of them but of sharks I am happier ignorant.
RDC2 was reading this. He asked me if I would join him for his daily half hour of reading, and he read this and I read Wuthering Heights. (I don't know why that occurred to me as a suitable beach reread.) After his 25 minutes had slowly ticked away, I picked up the book and read it that evening. It was your usual Spinelli: someone against society, someone against himself. (I do not expect RDC2, not quite 11, to read Dicey's Song or contribute another form of conflict to her eighth grade teacher's list.)
I asked RDC2 about Zinkoff and his comprehension seemed fine, which was reassuring. But if you asked the author to differentiate between Zinkoff and the kid in Crash, I don't think Jerry Spinelli could.
We left Wednesday and spent the evening with RDC's family, and then I caught an early morning flight home. It was possibly not relaxing to get up at 5:15, but I managed. Up, pee, brush teeth, dress, kiss kiss, leave. Drive. Drive more. The rental car place was easy to find and the return painless. The painful bit was waiting at the gate without falling asleep, but I paid $34 for an upgrade to Economy Plus, which got me a golden ticket for early boarding, a seat in the second row for early deplaning, and leg room. A blanket, Wuthering Heights, eyemask, earplugs, water bottle. That and a few rollings of eyes with my one, only one, hooray! seatmate about the two unruly children and their nearly equally immature adults in the row ahead of me got me to Denver.
In Denver, I had my house and my bird. No sea. I like RDC's family, but, other than my mother-in-law, in small doses. DMB gathered family and friends and I was glad to see almost everyone, but one's own family inanities, however vexing, are at least familiar. I don't need to be a psychic to surmise that a man is likelier to name a son after his dead brother than after himself; and it's best that I don't spend more time around, than I have patience for, mindless prattle; and I cannot imagine what lightning bolt would be necessary for me to tolerate, let alone enjoy, one particular person's company. But I always like talking with Roz, and admiring Kay's rigott' cake and her knitting and gifts for a cousin's new granddaughter; and I'm glad I kept my piehole shut about the psychic because I like that person and spouse just fine, and hearing how much another cousin is enjoying her single freedom, and learning what this one and that are doing in school and his steamrollered sculptures and her history of propaganda class.
RDC2 and I might have had a pillow fight with a bear (him) and a dinosaur (me). The bear's head might have become a quarter detached from its body. I fetched RDC's travel sewing kit from his suitcase and stitched it securely, thinking of Stuart's bear Wolf and Anne's nameless? occasionally headless bear (The Cat Ate My Gymsuit and Look Through My Window) and keeping to myself, again, how even if our thwackers were inappropriate, it was for RDC2 to decide how much unhappiness the reparable injury to the bear deserved. RDC2, upset not by the bear but by drama, held the bear's paw during its operation, and I showed-and-told about how to thread a needle, that you call the hole in a needle the eye, how to knot a double thread by wrapping it around a finger and rolling it off, why to place the knot internally, how to space stitches, and how to make a lock-knot, and also I omitted to show-and-tell about what I think of drama.
I said that this bear could be pope, since it had had a tracheotomy. RDC's Catholic grandmother, who as a former seamstress was watching my surgery closely and possibly pleased that I can do a basic sewing task even though I can't cook, laughed, thank goodness. When I asked if I could help cook or whether instead the Irish should stay out of the kitchen, RDC's aunt told about my garlic bread. So I got to tell Kay about my absence of portion perspective, about how the aunt had given me a loaf of bread, butter, and some garlic, and set me to make garlic bread. I know how much butter goes on a piece of bread, but how much garlic I do not. I used it all, however much it was. A lot. Everybody ate it, and I believe genuinely liked it, but that was some excessively garlicky garlic bread.
Later I was sent to fetch RDC2's early birthday present, and I did, but I did not carry it in my hand. I had it tucked into my waistband and lurched across the porch, not sure if I was a robot or George Bush with a lump in his back at a presidential debate (or both). Tactless again for a Republican aunt and uncle, but everyone else thought it was funny. Basically, anything that prolongs an expectant nearly-birthday boy's anticipation is comedy gold in my book.
My mother-in-law and I plotted our trouble-making swath when she visits me during one of RDC's trips. Massages definitely, and I will let her talk me into spa treatments during which we will gossip girlishly, and lots of window-shopping and frustrating sales clerks by the clothes we try on without intention to purchase. The trick will be finding overlapping indulgence foods. We will persevere.