Loose Leaf Notes

1. People-watching at the beach is like being at a Paris runway. As people  pass by I see the best bathing suits, shirts, sundresses and mostly hats, things that I never see in stores and that I would like to buy, if they weren’t alreay owned.

2. Slow dancing at the Surf Ballroom was the closest we got to boys without really doing much when we were in high school. Seeing people at the beach is the closest you can get to seeing people you don’t know naked. It can be a shock.

3. I brought three books. I aways think I’m going to read at the beach but my eyes want to be used to look for shells, even though I already have too many from our travels – Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands, Marco Island, the Carolinas and my hometown beach in Hull, Massachusetts.

4. Today I found a shell with the letter C, the first letter of my name, fossilized into it. I gave it to Joe and said, “This is our “going steady shell.” I told him the story of how one of my first boyfriends gave me a pin with the letter C on it that I had to give back when I found out that he took it from his sister whose name was Claire.

5. Our first day at Naples Beach was thick with fog. When we walked the shoreline we couldn’t see what was ahead and couldn’t see where we came from, as if walking in a bubble amidst the unknown. A metaphor for life?

6. How did I live without it? I brought three Tom Petty CDs for the drive down south but none of his best songs were on them, although the musician on Ameilia Island playing at Sliders where the bar seats were swings did play Free Fallin’ and Last Dance with Maryjane, which made me realize I need a Best Of Petty CD. He also played THIS.

7. Confession: I like to mark the best parts of books I love, but if it’s a book I don’t own, I sometimes put a small dot in pencil or black pen.  Someone marked the book I’m reading now, The Faraway Nearboy, with red dots. Not where I would have marked, but between my dots and the red ones, it feels like a conversation.

8. Here’s Something We Both Marked: “Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: Here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years’ War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your own sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper…

9. …Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children’s books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. All readers are Wu Daozi; all imaginative, engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish.” – The Faraway Nearby

10. Here in Naples you get a front row seat for sunset and everyone cheers when it’s done.

11. The ocean is still a tad cold here, so we went back to Marco Island Beach (20 minutes away) where we stayed last year. It was warm enough to swim and the only thing that got sunburned was my feet.

12. Now I know why they’re called Florida Fighting Conches. See why HERE.

13. I’ve always resonated with the beatnik generation, but I’m more of a beachnik at heart. _______________Thirteen Thursday