Water

L and I went up to to top of the Oakland Hills today, near the origin of the Sausal Creek watershed.  Can you see my house down there below?

It's my birthday, I've decided to start thinking of it as "one year closer to complete realization" rather than "one year closer to the grave."

Anyway, looking at the San Francisco Bay reminds my of another Bay long ago.  Little known (and perhaps totally uninteresting) fact:  I spent every weekend of my childhood summers on Saint Leonard's Creek, a small estuary off the Patuxant River, itself a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.  We're talking Maryland in the 60's, here:  humid, hot, wild, and just beginning to consider an end to segregation.  My father, George, is a boat enthusiast.  We had a series of motorboats, that were moored at a southern Yacht club known as White Sands.  White Sands was a polynesian style development, two docks, vacation homes, jungly woodland trails, an abandoned mansion (with bats!), and horse stables.  I wandered, by sea and by land, with unsupervised preadolescent redneck children--the offspring of red faced men who had gained wealth through running car lots.  

The white men spent a lot of time sweating, shirtless in the bilge of their big boats, or perhaps convening together on the back of the boat, being served fried chicken and drinks by their wives.  This was not an avocation for sissies.

As children we swam in the warm brown semi-translucent water with the crabs, sea turtles, perch, and jelly fish.  The boys would do cannonballs off the tall houseboats, the girls would merely jump.  Then afterwards we would nurse our jellyfish stings with Adolf's Meat Tenderizer--MSG in a bottle--which somehow killed the pain.  And there were snakes, poisonous; copperheads on land, and cottonmouths in the water.  

It seems like I read this all, and much much more, in a novel now.