If you look for it

Waves lap softly against the shore just below, but the main sound is the roar of surf from the Gulf of Mexico, what, some four miles directly across the Bay.

Mornings at the house I walked down front for Linda’s PCNH, either down the concrete steps and path, or out the back door and down Calhoun Avenue. There were always the chirps of early birds trysting, don’t hear that up here except now and then from the park trees, may be seagulls screaming; but more, it’s flights of six or eight pelicans flying by the balcony almost reach out and touch close. Clearer here but sometimes I heard the Gulf surf then too.

Regardless, my eye always counted on the green light of a channel buoy across the way and stirring. Stirring because sometimes a thing, sight or sound takes on a being of its own, a friend you can greet and be glad to see again. Daisy? Daisy? It may keep you mindful of who you are or bring present who you once were. Sound of the Gulf surf puts me at the jetties, it’s 1953; seventeen, I’ve finished my finals for graduation and escaped to the beach for a long afternoon that’s still available more than six decades later. Three score and two. Still there, I can see it from here, it’s just beyond the leftmost light this morning.

Knowing better, from prior experience, than to open my eyes in the tight enclosure, that’s where I went the hour or so I lived in the MRI tube at Cleveland Clinic that morning, to seventeen and the jetties. Despising the treadmill and recalling that place, I sometimes still close eyes and go there while plodding, hoping the clock keeps on ticking while I’m gone. We’re not walking this morning, so I’ll go downstairs to the gym and may get off at that same bus stop. Or I may climb down that cliff to the shore of Narragansett Bay in sound of the bell buoy. It’s all there if you look for it.

Monday: looking good.