Have you ever had a moment where you picked something up off the ground and felt the whole world in your hand? I had one a few days ago.
I was at my town beach. I’ve been there hundreds, maybe thousands of times — to swim, to sit, to think, to work. I know this sand, the warm southwest breeze that kicks up like clockwork in the afternoon, the jetty, the raft, and the rock that emerges through the falling tide.
When I close my eyes, I hear it exactly as I did forty-five years ago, when I was a lifeguard and taught swim lessons on this same stretch of sand. Children playing. Wind. Waves. The sound hasn’t changed. For eons.
I find that comforting. And a little cosmic.
I rolled onto my stomach, read a few more pages of my book, ran my fingers through the sand without thinking. A shell came up.
Its shape stopped me first — the hollow eyes, the jaw — a skull. . . like a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac . . . Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer, running through my head before I could stop it. Or maybe not a skull at all. A face in profile, looking off to the left, like she was watching something I couldn’t see. A gift from the sea. Then I looked closer, and it was the layers that held me: bands of gray, rust, black. What was alive left a record. The ocean added its own.
The calcium in it came from a star that died before the Earth existed. So did the calcium in my hand.
I could have tossed it away, without a closer look.
The universe, small enough to hold.
— Pete
Notes arrive on Sundays and some Wednesdays
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