Please note: The prologue is located BELOW this post on the blog and probably should be read first...or not. But it is intended to be read first. Hence the name "prologue." Well, that makes sense. However due to technical difficulties it's...
Chapter One
The beach is where I have my epiphanies.
Mind you, I can’t count on one every day, and I can’t even predict when they are about to happen, which in any case would run counter to the nature to epiphanies anyway; all I know is, call them what you will, the beach is where I have them.
It could be simply because I’m there most mornings. The truth is, I find it hard to keep away. I was born and raised in Southwest Ohio. The closest we ever came to things nautical were subdivisions in the middle of cornfields centered around muddy ponds and given implausible, or possibly optimistic, monikers such as “Spinnaker’s Row.” Boat sales lots occasionally sprouted near tiny creekbeds which could be counted on to be bone dry for several months at a stretch. Care to take ‘er for a test run, buddy? We’ll ask that old feller with the long beard and lots of breeding pairs of livestock over there and see when the next rain’s coming. I grew up and grew used to feeding animals and growing vegetables, and hoping for downpours at appropriate intervals and toting buckets when they didn’t come, so the ocean – with its infinite and ever-changing quantities of water, continues to hold a lovely fascination for me even though I have lived in this small New Jersey town for going on 5 years now.
Forget the churches filled with congregations dressed in their Sunday best – well, not necessarily “Sunday best” in my case, since I attend Mass on Saturday evenings where the pews are full of people who slide in on their way to or from somewhere else, dressed the part: team members on their way to games, praying for victory, seniors dressed to the nines on their way to celebrate someone’s fiftieth anniversary, families still in shorts back from an afternoon’s picnic. No message for me from the Almighty there, not with the Twitchy Thompson family shuffling their stacks of Holy Cards like angels ready to ante up in a game of celestial Texas Hold’Em, not while PTA matrons whisper during the collection about the way the mayor looks at the girls who carry up the offertory gifts, not with overweight teacher-coaches sitting in massive self-righteousness while assault charges are pending over an incident involving fists at the last Little League game - and that was just with the team members’ mothers.
Nope, for me it’s definitely the beach, so it’s no surprise that my story, the story of the village of Old Neck and its Fishing and Gardening Club, should begin, precisely, on the beach.
Old Neck. Our town really isn’t named Old Neck. Officially it’s Polled Neck, founded in the late 1600’s, a vacation town in its glory days back in the last century but sliding decidedly downhill in the past fifty years or so, losing most of the younger, prosperous vacationers to glitzier “down the shore” localities such as Atlantic City, and funkier joints like Seaside. In its heyday Polled Neck had entertained Cabinet members, provided movie stars with quiet spots for weekend trysts, even - rumor had it – served as a hideaway for pirates and privateers ducking into its back bay to take on fresh water at Reed Pond before heading out again to the open ocean. It has a long history, does our little town, but as the more youthful, progressive members of the populace left to find greener pastures, so to speak, the balance of the demographic shifted decidedly in the direction of the over-fifty crowd, and some smart ass shortened its hallowed name to OLD Neck.
Old, Polled. It doesn’t matter. It has a lovely beach, and if our town is a little quieter than it used to be, we are all right with that. The seaside establishments have been busy enough to keep us more or less solvent during the summer and allow us to put a little money by for the slow season, and life goes on. As our friend Joe says, “it’s all good.” And it pretty much is, although with the recent economic downturn we are definitely living a little closer to the edge of the poverty line.
So , as always, back to the beach. This particular late spring morning found me ambling toward the rising sun with two of our dogs, Jasper the chocolate Labrador retriever and Coal the almost-lab, loudly wrestling each other to the sand, and Edna strolling along behind me at the end of her lead. I was zigzagging back and forth between searching the detritus at the high tide mark for beach glass, a rare commodity in these recycle-conscious days, and trying to find that “sweet spot” along the edge of the water where the sand is most comfortable for walking. Edna was following a line of her own, sniffing hopefully at beach vegetation and wilted seaweed in search of something edible, occasionally blowing at some strange piece of driftwood or horseshoe crab carcass that bobbled in the surf. Tiny shore birds skittered ahead of us. The beach was quiet that morning and the ocean was calm, the waves rolling smoothly over onto the sand like sated lovers.
I was savoring the smell of bacon drifting beachward from some occupied vacation cottage, and grinned to myself. Why does a seashore vacation make ordinarily health-conscious individuals want to consume pounds of bacon – perhaps it is the sight of bathers slathered in oil sizzling on the beach?
There you go. A little epiphany, but an epiphany nonetheless. Was it too small to keep – should I throw it back? I was idly trying to decide when in the distance I spotted a woman hurrying in my direction, shirt and pantlegs flapping in the offshore breeze. Jasper and Coal had recognized her and were racing in her direction, spurts of sand flying from beneath their paws. I recognized my friend Patsy. She appeared to be in some state of agitation: her usually neat, short brown hair was flapping over a hurriedly donned visor and her brown eyes, I could see as she drew closer, were huge. I tugged Edna’s head from a particularly appealing patch of beach grass and adjusted our trajectory to meet her. She grabbed me by the wrist, panting. Her carefully manicured nails dug into my skin. As she stopped to catch her breath I said, “Hey, girl - did you find a body on the beach, or what?” Sometimes despite my best efforts my Ohio roots break through; the midwesterner’s alternative to nearly everything is “erwhut.”
“No Teddy,” she gasps, “it’s worse than that!”
I couldn’t magine anything worse than finding a “floater” and I was just about to tell her so when she added, “He’s in my birdbath!”
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