Beachcombing at Miramar by Richard Bode

Author:Richard Bode
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: SEL000000
ISBN: 9780759523890
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2001-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

ten

the stone skimmers

Midmorning—and the sun is so bright and glorious in the sky I can barely remember all the past days of windblown fog. A faint onshore breeze, cooled by the Japanese current, brushes my face, the light caress of a woman in the wind. As I walk the beach, I feel as if a great weight has been lifted from me, and I am ready to reach out beyond the boundaries of myself.

Far down the beach, I come upon two men—one gray-haired and the other balding—throwing stones into the sea. They are walking slowly, talking as they walk, pausing every few steps to search for another stone. When they find one, they fling it sidearm across the shallow water, watching it sink or hop.

As I watch them, I am overcome by an irresistible urge. I find a flat skimmer, worn smooth by the waves, and skip it across the calm surface of the sea. It hops three times. I am filled with delight; I haven’t lost the knack acquired so long ago.

As soon as one stone sinks, I look for another, then another. I pick up a near-perfect stone, one as round and thin as a blade. It skips five times. I don’t know how many decades have gone by since I skipped a stone five times.

I remember my oldest son, when he was only three or four, picking up stones and throwing them into a lake. I told him to stop; it didn’t do any good. Whenever I turned my back, he would pick up another stone and fling it into the water. Years later I walked with my grandsons beside that same lake and watched them throw stones, just as their father had. I didn’t try to interfere; by then I knew the futility of that. It is no more possible to keep boys from throwing stones than it is to keep dogs from barking or cats from arching their backs.

I don’t know where the impulse comes from—if I do it because it’s instinctive or because it gives me so much joy. Didn’t St. Paul caution the Corinthians to abstain from the kind of behavior that engages me now? “When I was a child,” he wrote in his first epistle, “I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

I once had a Sunday school teacher who preached those lines with all their gospel force. He had long before put away childish things and wanted the children under his tutelage to do the same. “When you grow up,” he said, “you will see through different eyes.” Now I am grown up; now it seems to me as if he misused the words of St. Paul. I don’t want to suppress the child in me; I want to preserve the child in me.

The two men who had been throwing stones turn and trudge through the heavy sand. They pass over the dunes; for a while I can see their heads bobbing on the other side.

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