Beachcombing

A couple times a year, if I play my cards right, I'm fortunate enough to spend some time on the Mendocino Coast in northern California. At different times of the year, I'm less fortunate and spend a few hours in my dentist's office where the woman who cleans my teeth not only tells me to floss regularly, she tells me of how her marriage is going and how her husband still hasn't found work. She asks me about my sons and wife, though I usually answer with only minimal detail. She has been cleaning my teeth for 13 years. At some point during my last visit she mentioned something about telling her husband that she thinks of some of her patients as second husbands, and that I was one of the good second husbands.

Before I saw her last week, though, when I walked into the small waiting room, I saw that there was a new photograph on the wall, a photograph of Balling Ball Beach on the aforementioned Mendocino Coast. I've been to that beach, where at low tide boulders shaped like, well, balling balls are visible. Seeing that photograph made me remember my last visit there, during high tide, unfortunately, and my encounter with Ann, an encounter noted in my trusty Moleskine. Here's what I wrote.

Walking on the beach, I encounter Ann, a woman whose first words to me are, "Do you have something on your mind, or are you just walking?" She is, she says, here with her husband, and they plan to move to the area from Southern California. He is an oceanographer who wants to buy a boat and is somewhere looking for one; she is a writer who dreams of writing the next Disney blockbuster.... She comments on my wedding ring and does not seem surprised that I am allowed to "wander," and she says that her husband does not mind if she wanders now and then. She seems to be about 60, though she says her husband just turned 50, the age at which she "met her true love."

There was more to the encounter, certainly. She had been walking her 2 dogs and approached me as I stood looking across an ocean; I am not sure of why she bothered to speak to me. Somewhere in our conversation we spoke about the difficulties of trying to write, so I must have mentioned that I've had some experience with both difficulties and writing. We shook hands early on, probably when we shared names. I doubt I shared any information about my wife.

And, yes, I know that is not much of a story. I probably did have something on my mind that day, maybe memories about looking out over that same ocean from the opposite direction. I do hope her husband found a good boat, and I hope Ann writers her blockbuster. I also hope that my dental hygienist's husband finds a good job sometime in the next six months.