Pelicans circle
© Bob Loomis 2007
Pelicans circle, fold their wings and plunge into the sea, pestered by gulls as they lunch on instant sushi. Dozens circle one spot where fish school . A surf fisherman aligns himself with the birds, hoping he’ll catch fish spinning off their orbit. As soon as he gets himself and his gear situated and casts his line out into the water, the entire mass of fish, pelicans and gulls shifts to a locus opposite where he was before he moved. He does not follow them.
More birds than people out today, yesterday’s sunbathers gone back to work, kids back to day care, weekend over, dogs home alone and barking at everything, bored and nervous till their masters return. One elderly couple strolls the strand and we lounge in our two-nights-for-the-price-of-one room, our 42nd wedding anniversary celebration one week late. We are just 200 yards from where a week ago we scattered the ashes of Bev’s younger brother Thomas Byrd, dead suddenly at 62, and sheer coincidence that his widow chose this beach for the final ceremony. Too late to change our reservation, so here we are once more.
At dusk, we head off to dinner and when Bev goes back to the room to get something, a crazy woman approaches and tells me her life story standing on the sidewalk above the beach where Tom’s ashes were tossed. I reply with what we have learned from our own experiences with mental illness, hoping it will give her reason to follow up on treatment.
Bev rejoins me, and I say farewell and we go to eat our anniversary dinner at a nearby restaurant that was a gin mill in Prohibition’s heyday. It has its ghost, say employees, the ghost of the wife of a man who once drank and partied with her in these rooms. We do not see the ghost, who apparently prefers to appear or otherwise make her presence known after business hours. But we do see a fine sunset and have a fine dinner. Thus, another year of partnership is toasted. We look forward to more fulfillment and more ghosts of anniversaries past in the coming years. In fact, in this very evening.
