Surrealism and Sandcastles: Reflections from Seven Mile Beach

 

Talk about surreal—and serendipity. First, the latter: we never imagined taking a beach-resort Caribbean vacation until we learned that friends of ours, about our age, take one every year in Aruba. After being denied our Jazz Cruise because Ann broke her shoulder three days before departure—and loving the water (though not so much the sun)—we did some investigating and decided to go away for six days to a resort on Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman Island. Our choice was based on previous visits on cruise ships and the rave reviews of that beach, plus the Caymans are close by air, only an hour plus from Miami.  Also, serendipity again: a distant relative lives there. On our last visit, we met Melanie—but not her preteen son, Jackson, or her husband, JR, as we did this time around. I described the connection in this entry: Family Time: A Precious Gift.

We carefully planned to spend most of the days in those clear Caribbean waters, outfitting ourselves with neck-to-foot sun-blocking attire. Ann dutifully wore hers. I wore most of mine—but not all. I paid the price with sunburns in the few places I missed with sunscreen.

 

Here’s where the surreal part begins. We were also there to celebrate Ann’s 84th birthday. Together, we still feel like a couple of kids at times, but at a beach resort mostly catering to families and young couples, it felt like going to a costume party dressed as the couple in Grant Wood's “American Gothic,” only to find everyone else didn’t get the costume party message, all about forty years younger.

 

A frequent beach visitor

Yet people were respectful of our encroaching decrepitude, often handing out “Oh, I don’t believe it!” when Ann challenged them to guess her age. That forced careful underestimations: 59? 65?, even one daring a 73. The lesson here: if you really want to feel ancient in your 80s, go to a Caribbean beach resort where nearly everyone could be your child—or even your grandchild.

One such couple—beautiful and young—took an interest in us “oldsters” during one of our extended intervals of splashing and floating in those clean, clear waters. They were genuinely incredulous that we were in our eighties and stunned when we told them we’d been married 55 years. They’d only met three months earlier in Jacksonville. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also taking a pre-honeymoon trip, as we did in Puerto Rico in 1970 before we were married. They were captivated by the stories we shared: of that trip, of what keeps us together—love and mutual respect. Naturally, Ann told them we were celebrating her 84th birthday.

They were sitting not far from us under the shade of a chaise lounge (as were we). Ann had left the beach; I told her I’d follow soon. Imagine my surprise when, a little while later, a hotel waitress approached carrying two frozen piña coladas, looking for a birthday “girl”—not thinking she meant the other half of me. Our benefactors were gone. Ann was gone. So I asked the waitress to find someone else deserving on the beach, while I took one and drank a toast to them—and to my wife. We saw the young couple the next morning before they left, and we thanked them. Ah, to be young again, taking one last swim only a couple of hours before their flight home.

Jax, Me, Melanie, Ann

 

Speaking of age—if we were indeed much younger and looking for a life of sun, sand, and water—the Caymans would be a very attractive place to find employment and live. That’s what my second cousin once removed, Melanie, and husband did, now becoming citizens of the Caymans.  She, and her son, “Jax,” gave us tour of most of the island. For Jax, the highlight was the baseball field, where he’s developed into an all-star for his age. Baseball takes a back seat to soccer and cricket in this British Overseas Territory, but Jax has made international traveling teams. In fact, he’ll be in Tampa soon for a tournament, and in October we’ll see him in the World Comes to the Palm Beaches, to be held at the spring training facilities of the Nationals and the Astros.

Jax wins a HR bat

While we were there, he won the Cayman Islands Home Run Derby for his age group. Remarkably, this happened shortly after our island tour (not a single traffic light—only roundabouts!). We asked if he wanted to rest up for the challenging evening, but he said, not necessary, he was confident he’d win. The power of positive thinking: win he did—with 15 dingers!

As mentioned, the UK holds responsibility for the islands’ defense and foreign relations. I suppose it has no strategic value to our rapacious president—beyond yet another prosaic Trump faux-fancy hotel. So rest easy, Caymanians: unless uranium or gold are discovered on your island, you’re probably safe from delusional manifest destiny.

 

My guide for descending further into surrealism during our beach vacation was the book I brought with me: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, a writer I highly admire. This trilogy of novellas—“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”—is unlike his more traditional novels I read before, The Brooklyn Follies and Baumgartner.

It’s hard to pin down the genre of The Trilogy, perhaps a cross between the detective novel and literature of the absurd.  It reminded me a little of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, but far more abstract, with the voice of an unreliable narrator reminiscent of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime.

 

 

Ironically, I had found a good used UK paperback edition published by Faber and Faber, which adopted British spelling conventions: appropriate, given that I was reading it in a UK Territory. Still, it's a distinctly American work—memoir-like, and dreamlike. Its themes slip through the fingers of your mind, like the fine sand of Seven Mile Beach. It served my goal perfectly: reading something immersive enough to escape our unreal day-to-day political nightmare by entering an alternative imaginary world devoid of anything political.

I was partly drawn to it for its New York City setting and Auster’s sensibility, which often aligns with mine. There’s a comfort in such familiarity. Indeed, I was immediately smitten by the opening pages, as the unnamed narrator describes Quinn, a mystery writer using the pseudonym William Wilson, and his love of aimless city walks. I described one of my own (albeit, purposeful) NYC five-mile walks in this 2022 entry. 

 

Quinn, however, walks randomly—letting the city guide him. If ever there was an example of internal narrative, this is it. I quote Auster, as this captures the essence of all three stories and the spirit of the city:  “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one front foot in front of the other, and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.”

Reading that, I thought of Thomas Wolfe’s short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” Auster gives clear attribution to many great American writers—particularly Poe, whose story “William Wilson” also features a narrator haunted by an alter ego.  Auster lived for a while on the Upper West Side (his novel Baumgartner was set on 85th Street – the same street I lived on long ago -- between Columbus and Amsterdam).  West 84th Street, between Riverside Drive and Broadway, was renamed "Edgar Allan Poe Street” to commemorate Poe's connection to the area. As Poe had lived at 206 West 84th Street I speculate that Auster felt a close connection to Poe, in spirit as well as geographically.

He expands on the concept of the unreliable narrator across all three novellas, with characters shifting identities, even including one named Paul Auster. The Trilogy is a prime example of metafiction. He brings in the process of writing itself, referencing greats like Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau—his story “Ghosts” identifying them as such.

Auster blurs the lines between fiction and reality—much like the times we now live in, where news can read like parody. Characters search for truth, only to find themselves swallowed by existential questions. This culminates in “The Locked Room,” where the unnamed narrator’s missing childhood friend, presumed dead, Fanshawe—the “real” novelist in The Trilogy—reappears. Fanshawe’s wife is now married to the narrator, who’s been hired to be Fanshawe’s Boswell. How’s that for circular thinking?

The narrator has writer’s block writing the biography: “I had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been – but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one improvised image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude – living perhaps breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located in my skull.“

Earlier in the same story, Auster casts a dispiriting light on memoir writing—something I’m personally grappling with: “Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so-and-so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle with that bridge – none of that tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this, we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end, we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.” 

I can argue that it was through his fiction that Auster gained “access to himself.”  The line between memoir and fiction is faint, one gaining access to the essence of one’s life in characters of one’s creation in fiction.  The memoir I am writing includes some of my short stories for precisely that reason.

My beat-up paperback, heavily marked, looks at me now as a challenge to keep writing—to keep reflecting on The Trilogy. To what end? Only that it’s good (for me) to leave a record of my reactions to this important work.  I’ll say no more about it now, other than that reading it during this trip left an indelible impression—just like the Caymans. The rest of my scribbled observations will remain between those pages, maybe for me to revisit, maybe for my progeny to muse about.

The turquoise waters of the Caribbean proved to be more than just a beautiful backdrop; they were a balm for the soul. This eclectic trip culminated in a celebration dinner to mark Ann’s birthday, fresh fish caught near the island and a little piece of birthday cake.

 

It's Summertime, Summertime, Sum Sum Summertime

 

Oh, the sweet innocence of The Jamies’ song, their one and only big hit from 1958, that opening line nicely summing up my years as a high school somnambulist. I paid dearly for my penchant to “to live and have some thrills,” as another part of the song goes.

 

Fast forward more than sixty years. In one’s retirement one would think those halcyon thoughts of carefree abandonment could be rekindled.  Now, it’s the new responsibility of merely staying healthy. “It's summertime (ba-bam-bam)” so now we plan our brief trips around the realities of trying to see out kids, both more than a thousand miles away with their spouses (we also have a grand-dog who we will meet in August). 

 

Those plans now are burdened by the overpopulated and digitized world of today.  I need not go into all the details but suffice it to say, being an octogenarian, competing for space in a world which would not be recognizable in 1958, has its challenges. However, along with its frustrations, there are some throwbacks to the civilized past. One young lady noticing we were having trouble hearing the so called loudspeaker over the airport din, volunteered to act as an interpreter.  It’s not that my hearing is bad; it’s the audio-multitasking part.  So, lest this entry becomes the sour grapes that I could easily write, I publically say thank you to the people who care.  Still, it is a crazy world.

 

We flew up to a regional airport, HPN, from our regional airport, PBI, that in itself a delicate feat given all sorts of possible delays, but managed to get there only an hour late to pick up a car I had reserved with Avis/Budget (now merged for the greater good of the shareholders) and after a half hour of waiting for my checked in advance car, all license and payment information provided on line, an uncaring employee, after clattering away at his computer, tossed me the keys to a Toyota 4-Runner although I had rented a mid-sized car, not a truck. “Take it or leave it” he said.  “It’s the only vehicles for rent from anyone.”

 

So, we gathered our luggage and pole vaulted into our truck after finally finding in a parking lot to which we had to drag our suitcases and off we went on the old Merritt Parkway, always under construction and always stop and go traffic finally arriving at our hotel, one that is near our old boat now owned and beautifully maintained by our son Jonathan and daughter-in-law Tracie. We’ve stayed at this Marriott on and off for 25 years, seeking it out as a hurricane haven when we were living on the boat ourselves each summer. But the hotel has regressed with smaller rooms, no shelving and a refrigerator that never worked. Needless to say, it was packed with no options.

 

Our older son Chris and his significant other Megan drove down the next day from the Boston area to stay at the same hotel and finally, our little family was able to get together, one of the high points of the trip for us.

 

Captain Jonathan had a nice surprise ready for us all the next day, engines revved for a cruise, casting off the lines as soon as we all boarded.  The weather had been threatening and we were not expecting it.

 Here he is on the Bridge above.

 

We passed the house in which we lived before moving to Florida, exactly in the center of this photograph, the two-story home.

 

 

After the weekend, all took leave except for Jonathan who works remotely and ourselves who were hoping to recapture more of our old boating life.  Sitting on the boat in the harbor it was if no time had passed other than we are now just visitors. Those thoughts went through me as I sat looking out, Ann on the couch reading, her ponytail flowing over the cushion (the refrains of The Big Bopper repeat in my head still, “Chantilly lace and a pretty face / And a ponytail hangin' down / A wiggle in her walk and a giggle in her talk / Make the world go 'round.”) 

 

With no one down at the docks, it is eerily quiet. There is now a persistent east wind bringing in clouds, some cool temperatures, and an occasional light shower.  The door to the boat is open and I ingest the cool humid flow.  This easterly wind induces random slapping of waves on the hull and the chines, the only sounds I hear, continuous, and if I sat here forever, and the wind never shifted, that slapping would be in a one to one relation with eternity.  Reveries now shift to reality.

 Aside from visiting our family, having some excellent meals, we were able to see our old boating friends, Ray and Sue.  All of us in some way have had our health issues, probably Ray and me with the most serious ones, indebted to our wives for keeping us going. 

 

 

And Ann managed to see our close friend, Betty, for lunch and reminisce about their 50 year friendship.  I had hired Betty as a copyeditor way back in the early 1970s but for the last twenty five years she has free lanced as one of the leading and most sought after copy editors in scientific publishing.  That was not her academic background, but it just came naturally to her.

 

The week flew by and before we knew it, we were back on the jammed Merritt Parkway, returning to White Plains Airport, and although I promised not to bitch, I must scratch this one.  Finally getting our truck back into the lot, and having lunch at the airport (which used to have a very nice restaurant but now catering to bar hoppers and fast foodians), we reluctantly went into the “pen” to get through TSA.  This airport has a holding area, as if you are cattle, totally disorganized, and dependent on prior connections / aircraft. 

 

 

Happily for us, our fully booked JB A320 flight arrived on time from Orlando and, a miracle, they called for boarding the aircraft on time. People were sitting or lying all over the floor it was so packed.  Grateful for this little gift, we stood, and got on line.  After committing ourselves, an announcement was made that they had no pilot for the plane.  But he was taking a limousine from JFK to HPN so 175 people had to wait for his arrival and hope his vehicle isn’t involved in a traffic issue.  Altogether crazy but given other horror stories of traveling post Covid, we are grateful, and, in particular, to see our “kids” no matter what.

 

So come on and change your ways

It's summertime (ba-bam-bam)

 

Milestones

This past weekend marked a milestone birthday for my wife, Ann.  It was also another milestone; after 19 months of relative isolation, we were able to see our son Jonathan and his wife Tracie, and two weekends before our other son, Chris and his significant other, Megan, celebrated Mother’s Day with us.  All of this was feasible because of the effectiveness of the vaccination.  If only we could pull together as a nation and truly make COVID a plague of the past.

We drove Chris and Megan up to The Dive Bar for their famous lobster rolls their first full day and afterwards we walked along the Juno Beach boardwalk, enjoying a beautiful sunny Florida day while watching all the fishermen casting their lines.  A lot of swimming and sunbathing ensued by the sun starved Bostonians and on Sunday, we all loved a sumptuous Mother’s Day brunch.  Unfortunately, it was only a long weekend visit and they had to return before Ann’s birthday.

Jon flew in a few days before her big day and finally on Friday, Tracie joined us.  As a treat to our daughter in law, we made reservations for a High Tea Luncheon at Teacups and Treasures, an experience Ann particularly wanted to share with her.  Obediently, as Ann made it an unconditional invitation, Jonathan and I accompanied them although we noted we were the only men in the entire restaurant!

It turned out that half the restaurant was dedicated to little girl birthday parties, one very large group gathered together behind some clever screening.  All were in their most fancy party dresses.  Even their squealing and giggling wasn’t the least annoying.  Luckily we were at the entire other end of the room and had our own little corner to enjoy our incredibly delicious meal.  I never knew having a freshly brewed pot of tea, a delectable soup and scones, small tea sandwiches and delicious miniaturized desserts could be so much fun!  Seeing how delighted Tracie and Ann were made it all the more worthwhile.

The following day --  Ann’s big birthday celebration -- found us driving up the exquisitely manicured entryway to The Breakers Hotel, for their Sunday Brunch, ridiculously priced, all patrons unmasked, even when getting up to the buffet (after all, this is Florida), but it was an experience to mark a very special occasion.

A word about Ann, who I love dearly.  What times we have shared during our long 51 year marriage.  She and I remarked that indeed, life is but a dream, we are hardly aware of the day to day details, only the major memories lingering, and suddenly we are here, now acutely aware of our days.  Our son, Chris after visiting two weeks ago, wrote a moving tribute to her upon his return home, and I take the liberty of quoting part as it is a great character study, capturing Ann:

When I arrived home and began my work-from-home life, I realized there was a sadness, one that had taken root since my departure. I missed my mother. I missed her stories she shared with us, her frenetic energies and breadth of conversation. I missed how she charmed hostesses and waiters and her spontaneous laugh, a laugh that said “I’m here and love it, dammit!” She loved my father through thick and thin and put up with my brother and my own oddities. She kept a flock of life-long girlfriends near her chest, loyal and loving.  Literature transmuted their essence to her: she read everything from Jane Fonda to Jane Austin. She traveled and played and cruised across oceans, still short by fifty countries compared to my brother, she joked.

It was a lovely couple of weeks, seeing our “kids” at long last.  May it be only one such incident on the path to “normal,” if that is still feasible in this country.