Burial At Sea, I See

We were at the beach again the other day, and something happened to trigger a beach memory from childhood. I don't remember what year it must have been, but I was little. We were at the beach house in Florida, and this was a public beach. That was a sometimes regrettable fact, although often enough it was rather pleasant to have all sorts there. Nobody wants to hear about the times when it was all right though, I'm sure.

One day when we were at the beach, a carload of tourists (who I have to assume were from Ohio or Iowa or some such place) stopped out in front of the house. You could drive onto the beach there, I ought to note. They stopped because there was a dead sea turtle there. The family of tourists proceeded to horse around with and pose for pictures in front of the turtle. We were quietly quite incensed from a distance, but took no direct action.

I still think of that sometimes when I am generally angry at people for their many collective faults. On the flip side was what made me think of that. It was something a little more pleasant. We were somewhere around Venice Beach here in California, and one of my friends had wound up near some kids who had found some kind of a ray or a skate. It had died some time ago, and evidently was rather desiccated. The kids grew fond up it, and wanted to keep it.

Once we found this out, it was an amusing wait for the inevitable bad news from the parents that this could not be so. As I expected, the kids somewhat solemnly returned the corpse of the sea creature back to its native realm, and though they heaved it into the waves with little force, it was caught by a rather sizable swell and succeeded in being brought out to sea rather than ignominiously returning again and again to the shore. It was a fine beach diversion.