The temperature was deliciously warm today, 80F (26C) and the water was not too bad either, so I swam and swam, catching wave after wave, although they were not strong, and only went halfway into shore, so I had to employ all my skills to catch them. The water was clear as the Caribbean, and I laughed at the little silver fish darting before me as I rode a wave. Making my way back out to the big waves, I observed two larger fish leap right out of the water in front of me. I wondered what they were racing from, and then a dark cormorant surfaced nearby, in the act of swallowing one of their compatriots.
Two men came out after I had been in for a while, with their boards too, but they were both useless, poor lambs, and of course they would never have asked me how it was done, being men, and I couldn't give them pointers, being a woman and knowing that they would think me facetious, or superior, or flirty, or something negative, such is the complexity of relations between the sexes. One was too scared to come all the way out to where the waves broke, but the other came way out and I caught him watching me carefully. He never did catch a wave, and when I finally went out he followed me out, just giving up, I took away all his potential luck.
An elderly woman came up the beach past me and went up to her husband sitting in his chair. I saw her asking him to come into the sea with her, and he protested that he had no swimsuit. From her gestures I could see that she said he should just go in up to his thighs, and she knelt carefully down and tenderly rolled up the legs of his khaki shorts for him. Then helped him out of his shirt, and off they went, his figure bent, hers much straighter, but both very old. At the water, she waded in until her body was fully submerged, except for her head, which never got wet, her hair still perfectly coiffed. While he waded in until his ankles, then waded back out on to dry sand where he stood and watched her cavorting happily. Perhaps she had just needed someone to watch her, to share in her delight. When she was finished, they walked back up to their chairs where they sat, facing one another, an unusual pattern of chairs, her feet up on his chair, chatting happily away. When I went home they were also packing up and he turned to me on the path with his old bent back, and his soft old cheeks, and said, "Another day in paradise, hm?"
I read a wonderfully disgruntled quote today about the meaning of life, in an amazing book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
"Indeed, what constitutes life? Day after day, we put up the brave struggle to play our role in this phantom comedy. We are good primates, so we spend most of our time maintaining and defending our territory, so that it will protect and gratify us; climbing - or trying not to slide down - the tribe's hierarchical ladder, and fornicating in every manner imaginable - even mere phantasms - as much for the pleasure of it as for the promised offspring. Thus we use up a considerable amount of our energy in intimidation and seduction, and these two strategies alone ensure the quest for territory, hierarchy and sex that gives life to our conatus. But none of this touches our consciousness. We talk about love, about good and evil, philosophy and civilization, and we cling to these respectable icons the way a tick clings to its nice big warm dog."
She goes on to say that it is Art that saves us. The pursuit of Art in all its forms. Yes!
I ran 2.8 miles, (4.5km) at 7.33 minutes per km, an improvement! Although the run was a series of mishaps: a) a frog made a stunning sideways leap away from my right foot as I was about to trample him! I was glad I didn't kill it, but it gave me an enormous fright, a little cry escaping from my lips!
b) The next circuit I raised a bump on the top of my head by misjudging the ducking of said head under a fallen tree across my path, which has been there for about two months already!
c) And I miscounted the laps, so that I thought I had run 5km, and when I tried to make it after I had discovered it was only 4, I couldn't actually get to 5, the best I could do was half a km!
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