The Rip Tide
Father's Day, you should know, is most profitably spent flat on one's back with the kind of fever that gives one the oh Dear I'm not doing this well at ALL-feeling whenever one has to elevate to a standing position. And it's not bad to garnish that with a little episode of air-conditioner installation (wait until the ibuprofen kicks in -- you don't want to faint carrying that thing) for maximum effect. This bestows upon one the greatest gift one can receive on this meaningless Hallmark-iday; the gift of justified self-pity. When one is sharing a household with a nursing mother, this is a precious commodity indeed, one well beyond the means of an underperformer such as yours truly. So, sick as a dog, but perversely loving how helpless and hapless being sick as a dog made me -- that was my weekend. I hope you have enjoyed this excursion into Wombat Emotional Logic.
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As a young child -- before my family moved down to the Gulf Coast -- we would spend a week every late-summer occupying a cheap but lovable efficiency in the ramshackle Owens Motel, out on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My memories of family beach-blanketry are nothing if not typical American scenes; not even pre-adolescent, I was young enough to be enthralled by endless days digging pits and making castles with my sister and my dad, or hunting for sand-crabs in the surf line.
I also remember going swimming past the breakers, when I got a little bigger, and learning about the rip tide. If one didn't watch carefully (and even, really, if one did), the powerful cross-cutting current that ran down the beach would inevitably move one along with it. One started out by going out to play in the waves directly in front of one's family encampment, the familiar umbrella and day-glo hues of the lawn chairs providing a landmark, a homing signal for eight-year-old eyes. But after you'd paddled and splashed and top-floated over or through or under a dozen or so waves, if you turned around you'd find yourself looking at the wrong umbrella, some kite-flying couple you didn't remember, a guy casting into the surf where you thought your sister was making mudpies. The rip tide would have moved you "downstream" from where you thought you were -- and you'd turn your head to the right and sure enough, there, fifty yards to your north, were all those familiar little figures.
No big deal (as long as you weren't also being nudged further out to sea -- which the rip current could also accomplish, not being precisely parallel to the beach), but the effect was always a bit of a shock when you first noticed.
Right now I'm having the rip-tide feeling about life. When I'm working hard to dog paddle through my days --- treading water, as it were -- the current keeps moving me anyway. The end of the day finds me exhausted, and while I'm far from feeling that it's to no purpose -- indeed, the purpose of it all is clear enough -- I just feel further and further down the beach, away from the landmarks I had expected to swim back to.
Luckily, these two keep moving down the beach with me, for which I shall thank them here and (with luck), many times in the future.
