indian summer

I run into Barb and Chris today, swimming back into shore ..while I'm swimming out to sea. They ask me where my fins are ..and I tell them in the trunk of my car ..I didn’t think the waves looked big enough. They tell me I’m not going to get very far without them. That’s OK, I tell myself ~ I’m content to just float around here out anyway ~ looking up at the sky and letting the swells roll by. On shore there’s a dude, in a beer-fueled frenzy, throwing rocks, the size of bowling balls, into a pattern that looks like the shape of a skull. Father down, the signs of yesterday’s dredging operation have disappeared. I’m not even sure where it was anymore. They were trying to free a sailboat that’d gotten washed up and buried in the sand. There was a great big trench about 40 feet in diameter, and 8 feet deep. The tide must’ve come in and sealed it over. I feel even more disoriented when that huge old seal-rock that I’m looking for is gone ~ until I realize it was never there ..it’s in Laguna Beach. I make note of this as just another instance of my mind playing tricks on me ~ transposing something from the past into my notion of what should be in the present.