Gidget at Fifty

I am a summer person. I am a beach person. I am a boat person. I am a sun person. I am a sand person. I am a water person. I am a ping pong playing person. I am a kayak person. I am beach chair on my back person. I am a I don't really care if sand gets in my car person. I am a dump all the beach toys at the front door and go into the house and take a hot shower after spending hours soaking in the sun and then barbecue burgers person. I am a salt on the face person. I am a sand in the shoes person. I am a sand on the floor person. I am a sand in the shower person.

It must go back to my childhood in San Clemente.

I remember the euphoric feeling of waking up in the top bunk of my little bedroom in the trailer in Capistrano Shores and seeing the sun through the louvered windows. The trailer sat perched on a seawall that was mere yards away from the ocean. The pounding surf would at times crash up over the top of the trailer. The salt spray coated the windbreak. When I was a child, my father, who also was a beach person, loved to dig his feet into the sand. I remember seeing him wiggle his toes as he sat in a beach chair talking.

The happiest days of my childhood were spent at the trailer in San Clemente. Hands down.
I was always happy there.
Happy.
It was home.

I loved standing by the ocean's edge as the waves whooshed up over my feet. My feet sinking deeper into the muddy sand. I loved the sound of the receding wave as it rushed back to the sea over the smooth, glistening rocks that sometimes would line the shore.
I loved the sand crabs we would dig up and watch try to burrow their way back into the wet sand - making tiny round air holes as the buried themselves.
My father told me stories of the sand crabs. There was Johnny. Amos. Sandy. I seem to recall that Amos lived in Transilvania. Johnny had a crush on me. My father regaled me for hours with these stories and the sand crabs seemed like playmates to me.

My father taught me to surf fish in San Clemente. He taught me how to thread a worm on a hook, cast the line and watch for the little shudder at the end of the pole while I reeled in a fish attached to the other end.
He taught me to scale a fish and clean it.

I remember my parents sitting around the round, redwood umbrella table with gin and tonics laughing with the Kavanaghs or our next door neighbors, the Muirs.
I remember the sound of the the shuffle board discs being pushed from one end of the yard to the other. I remember my mother painting the numbers on the cement into the triangular shaped squares.

Sandcastles as a child evolved into body surfing, bikinis, and orange Ban de Soleil sun tan oil at sixteen. Tan skin. Blonde streaked hair. There was nothing to equal it.

It was in San Clemente where I learned to play ping pong.
The sound of the little hollow ball on a table and against a paddle was like music to my ears. Still is.

Eventually, the beach in front of the trailer eroded so that enormous boulders had to be brought in. It changed the landscape of the place and the access to the water. It became a bit threatening especially for children.
Our single-wide turquoise trailer eventually looked a bit run down and out dated compared to the palatial double wides. The furniture began to disintegrated from the salt air and the paint peeled.
All this after my father dropped dead after his last weekend at the trailer in August of 1981. Mother lost interest. I never did.

Everything changes.
Erosion is a natural course of nature.
But the sand and the salt still make me happy. My bikini has been replaced by the one piece hide all "miracle suit" which feels like a girdle when I pull it on and isn't miraculous enough to hide my thighs. I wear a visor to control the glare. I had to buy sunglass readers and I rarely dip into the water any more. Gidget is in her fifties.
But I still live for summer and feel sixteen when I plop myself down into my beach chair to soak in the rays. I don't feel sixteen when I try to get back up. But I play a pretty good game of ping pong if I do say so myself.