New Zealand Beauty

(Sunday, March 22, 2009).

Bottles of sunscreen lie strewn like shrapnel around us, but there's always a spot you missed, and I cover the reddening balls of Roberta's feet with a towel while she sleeps.

The tide has covered the cricket pitch, but the game goes on, father bowling full tosses to his son, aimed at the small wooden stumps sticking out of the latest wave. After missing four times in a row the batsman runs off in a tiff, to be replaced by his uncle, and return again in two minutes, smiling again and eager to keep wicket.

Down the beach, near the cafe resounding with a jazz combo playing Miles Davis, birds gather around a towel protruding from the sand. A man is lying on his back, buried except for his head, and has food lying on his stomach. The birds creep closer, but he raises a hand out of the sand and they fall back, opening their wings and flying backwards in the stiff onshore wind. The crowd grows and grows until there is a flapping cloud, billowing in the air, making no progress, but never stopping.

I occasionally have wondered how the scene in American Beauty was shot. The one with the plastic bag, playing in the wind. They must have done this and then computer edited one of the birds to look like a plastic bag.

I wander past, leaving Footsteps behind in the wet sand. There is something down at the end of the beach. There's always something at the end of the beach. Children playing in kayaks watch me crouch down in the sand, washing the dirt off a gorgeous seashell. An earlobe sized swirl of maroon, silver, and white. Worthless but beautiful without a second, I hold it against the sand and admire it until its twin washes up to my feet, floating in a gentle wave, and I hold a pair of earrings in my hands.