Tuesday morning

21 February 2017

— in the pre dawn, occasional car lights floating along behind the trees

Good Morning All, 

I have come to realize, if belatedly, that some of these prefatory natters are taking the form of what J.D. Salinger once referred to as prose home movies. In my case, more like prose home snapshots, as though I were putting together a family photo album to go along with the actual photographs. (And while doing so, I have every hope of not embarrassing the family too much!)

My plan this morning when firing up this computer had not been to produce any sort of old prose photos. My plan had been to talk in a general way about the nature of beaches, places I have always loved for their confluence of wind and wave and weather above sand and shell and sea, and then follow that up in a particular way with a couple of paragraphs about beaches being a central metaphor for how I typically view life.

That did not happen. With luck, I will get back to it on the morrow. In the meantime, here are a few old snaps of Mozambique taken with our trusty old workhorse Pentax 1200:

In the early 1970s, Britta and I would from time to time toss her pup-tent, a sack of groceries, a bottle or three of wine, and whatever books we were reading into the People’s Car, her white VW Bug, SD892, and head for a weekend at the beach in Pointa do Ouro at the very southern tip of Mozambique. Back then, it was still pretty much undiscovered.

Tucked in under the palms was one smallish restaurant with white-painted wrought iron chairs and tables on the patio where in the evening breezes we could get cold Laurentina beer, garlic steak sandwiches, and--when the tide was right--steamed clams. Maybe a dozen small cabins surrounded the restaurant, but they were out of our price range. All’s we really needed were the outdoor showers and facilities not too far from where we pitched the tent under the banana trees.

There were undulating dunes sustaining coarse grass and below them a hundred yards of pure white sand down to the Indian Ocean, to the azure blue of the water and the translucent  jade-green in the furl of the waves when the surf was up. This was the place where they filmed The Perfect Wave.

We often had the beach to ourselves, or—if not—we would have it to ourselves if we ran a couple of hundred yards left or right, splashing through the shallow back tide. For some one only five-foot-two, Britta was pretty fast, up on her toes, calves flexing and relaxing, her arms pumping, her red hair streaming and dancing out behind.

I can tell you without shame that from my first sighting of her arriving along the third baseline at the 4^th of July 1970 softball game in Mbabane, Britta was never ever less than fetching. In winter, in scarves and mittens and baggy coats, she was still fetching. On a tropical beach in an aqua bikini setting off her tan, she seemed the very apotheosis, the manifestation, the incarnation, whatever, of the word.

Her just standing there in the sunlight, breathing, could make me want to arrest her for indecent assault, that or make me want to climb four or five wrungs up an invisible ladder of sheer bliss. But I was never quick enough for either before she’d get a head start on me and then turn half-sideways to shout back above the sound of the surf and the spray, admonishing me to get the lead out. Her eyes, which could be a lovely blue in dim or northern light, were usually the most emerald green in the bright light of that beach, and they seemed to be saying—or so it seemed to my eyes: “Well, okay, maybe, but only if you can catch me.”

At such times, I was usually torn on the one hand between wanting to prolong the beauty of her tanned, lithesome figure in such graceful motion, her toes barely touching the tidal foam before lifting from it as though she were actually running on the water, and on the other hand feeling damn near on fire in my ardency to make the dive for an ankle that would send the water spraying up all around us and end us up in a breathless, laughing heap.

There were … huh? What? No, of course not! Are you crazy? Right there in the tidal flats in broad daylight? The missionary’s daughter and the natural grandchild of Arthur Dimmesdale? No way! But there were lots of inviting hollows up in those dunes where we could set up an umbrella, spread the blanket, read a bit, make love, sleep some, wake some, read and make love some more.

Of course all that happened going on forty odd years ago, and I can assure you I probably do not recall those weekends more than two or three times a week now.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. T-c-h-a-i-k-o-v-s-k-y.