Summer
Tonight, as Greg and I sat on the beach, smoking under the moonlight we talked about how this had been OUR Summer. You know, the kind of Summer that inspires creative types like novelists to set a coming of age story against? It will be the Summer I reminisce about when I’m crinkly and aged, recapturing for a brief moment what I considered my glory days.
I’ll think about how liberating it felt to go barefoot anywhere and everywhere. The way the pebbles in my driveway felt against my sand covered soles. The comfort of good friends by twilight. The way I got that twinge of “Suffer in your jocks” when I saw people looking for parking in my street, knowing that I only had to walk 2 houses down to enjoy what they had driven all this way for.
It felt so good. We were all so free. Free from the stresses of the 9 to 5. Free with our bodies, barely covered in a thin layer of stretched lycra. Free from the world. There was only us, the sand and the water. Nothing seems to worry you when you’re laying face down in the Sun, enjoying the sounds of the lapping water and children playing. And even at night, as the Sun would disappear behind an amber vale, there was only the stillness of the bay and us in our banana lounges. We’d marvel at how surreal it felt. Listening to Otis Redding, we could have been on a stretch of beach between Da Nang and Hoi An, 1969.
Then the dark would come, and we’d leave our gear on the sand. The liberation of Summer inspired a new hope in the goodness of strangers that we knew wouldn’t steal our belongings. We’d head inside for a breakfast, lunch and dinner meal of fish n chips, to be washed down with a can of ice cold Coke from the freezer. Then back we’d go. Armed with glow sticks. Neon pink, purple, green or yellow bracelets adorned our wrists, and we’d paddle out past the second sand bar to where the water was deep enough to reach our chests. Time would pass so quickly, pruning up our skin as we talked and splashed and laughed. Then just as we’d think about heading in, it was a given that I’d be bitten by some insane aquatic beast that never seemed to bite anyone else. I’d Hasslehoff run back to the shore, leaving the others to wander in while I struggled with the wind to light up a cigarette.
And it was beautiful. The strange bites, the cigarettes I couldn’t light, the cool breeze that swept onto the sand from the bay that made me shiver. I loved it all. We loved it all. And I will love it again in 20 years time when it is only a distant memory of my youth. Goodbye sweet Summer. It was a blast.
Aspendale Beach, 2006.
And to think I almost wasn’t going to post an entry about that incident.
Behold the awesomeness of the cotton wool lawyer type wig we made! Godbless you, THE WAREHOUSE!