Roxiticus Memoir: Weekend at the Beach

Sunday, August 8, 2010
Around 11:30am

At the beach early, and feeling good. Maybe it's because I got my beach office set up this morning, or the way the ocean air smells so sweet, but I'm much less tense than I was yesterday.

I was more than a bit sick to my stomach yesterday afternoon at the beach, typical of how my gut seizes up during tax time.

Today I'm feeling as if I could spend the rest of the summer right here in my beach chair. As much as our girls enjoy their early summer weeks at Annie's Playhouse camp in Far Hills, NJ, I love the unscheduled play time we have at the beach and can feel our whole family settling in to that relaxed routine.

Plenty of time to get aggressively back to school and back to work in September.

Maybe 1pm

Yellow flag today (tropical storm Colin stirring things up), but it hasn't stopped the girls from enjoying the aftermath of the waves. For me, this may be the nicest beach day of the summer so far.

Coming up on two months since my mom died, I'm still struggling with not having a mother to talk to anymore. I dream about her, nothing bad or particularly deep, but I wake up forgetting that she's gone and then missing her all over again.

From Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr:

"The burden of value with which we are at present loading interpersonal relationships is too heavy for those fragile craft to carry. Our expectation that satisfying intimate relationships should, ideally, provide happiness and that, if they do not, there must be something wrong with those relationships, seems to be exaggerated."

There's a world of difference between reading those words today, when I have a satisfying relationship with Rex, as well as the "extended" relationships created through that bond by having our children, London and Maddie vs. 1988 when it came out and I was in college and in an unsatisfying relationship with MoneyPenny vs. returning to it in 1991 when I was alone, actually experiencing solitude for four years (though not knowing when, or if, my solitude would end).

1:30ish

London just had her life saved by the lifeguard. While I was sitting in my beach chair with Maddie, London was in the ocean with Rex. She had started out only in up to her knees, but a big wave knocked her down, she got caught in a riptide and had to be pulled. So we're all a bit shaken, and thankful, but otherwise OK.

I saw the lifeguard jump down from his chair and start running, and I just had a feeling. When I stood up I saw Rex swimming out and I knew.

Thank you, God, and thank you, Bay Head lifeguard, for saving my daughter's life.