Oceans

A dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,                                

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth

And time and place are lost  

                                                                John Milton, Paradise Lost  (1667)    

I didn't think I was going to make it to the ocean this year, and I didn't know what I was going to do about that.  With the three kids and I all having completely different school vacation schedules, our annual tradition of spring break in St. Augustine has evaporated.  The last time we had been there was for New Year's 2002-2003.  The beach was no less beautiful for being cold, and the outdoor hot tubs were evening more inviting, and the Ancient City beckoned with tiny white lights shimmering everywhere, but the teenagers pronouced it too chilly for a beach vacation.   

Of course, the ocean does not have the same meaning for them that it does for me.  They take it completely for granted, having been there every year as a family.  They take the family for granted, too.  But I don't.  

When I was in kindergarten and first grade, we lived a couple of blocks from the beach, in Vero Beach,  for the second half of the school year.  My father was trying to get going in the construction business; we moved into the house that he built for usin April or May of my first grade year. After school let out we headed back to Ohio.  My mother and baby brother were killed in a car accident the following October and we never returned to live in our house.  Florida became for me that magical place where my family had lived together for part of the abbreviated time that we had.  

When I was 15, I started going back, to spend a week or two of spring break with my grandparents, who spent the winters there.  I was usually alone -- my brother and cousins had different vacations -- and I walked for hours and hours on the beach.  It became one of the treasured places where I had time with my grandparents, who lived next door to us in Ohio and had taken such good care of me after my mother died.  Regardless of the condition of my family -- which was repeatedly reconfigured, with the death of my first stepmother, my father's remarriage, and the resultant new set of step-siblings and a half-brother -- the power of the ocean was relentless.  

My grandparents were there for the last time the winter after my boys were born.  My grandfather was close to death, so my husband and I took our three-month old twins down to spend a week with him.  He was moving in and out of periods of dementia -- in the evenings I listened to him ramble on, late into the night, about his business worries (he thought it was the 1930s); in the mornings I bathed and played with the babies in his room during his periods of lucidity; and in the afternoons I walked on the beach.  It was really cold and windy, but we took the babies down to dip their toes in the ocean, telling them that their grandfather had played in it as a boy and someday they would, too.

The next year we initiated our annual family trek to St. Augustine.  Sometimes I wondered where my sanity had gone -- packing up a double stroller and 2 Port-a-Cribs to drive 16 hours to spend a week in a condo where I couldn't find anything and shop in a grocery where I REALLY couldn't find anything was hardly relaxing.  But those little kids sure loved the beach -- every shell and washed-up ray equalled adventure.  As they grew, the ocean was at once a source of  peace and playtime and terror; peace at 6:00 a.m. when I took my walks, playtime in the mornings when the kids ran around in the shallow waves and collected shells and starfish, and terror as they grew older and scoffed at my warnings of the undertow.   

Now that we are in this period of transition-to-adulthood, everything is changing, and beach vacations are no exception.  Teenagers stay up all night and sleep all day, and have to be practically dragged down to the ocean (the pool is just so much more convenient!).  And they are in constant motion -- long and lazy family days, let alone weeks, are almost memories from the past.  

But I did get lucky, as it turns out.  I've been to THREE sets of beaches this summer: Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Pacific.  It seems that, while I have a lot to miss, I have nothing much to complain about.  The Atlantic was at rest the whole week we were there, much to the chargin of the would-be surfers, and Lake Michigan was a sheer surface of glass.  But the Pacific; that was something else entirely:  

Cannon Beach, Oregon

Walked: 4 miles.