get along kid charlemagne.......

The summer is here with a vengeance, triple digits everyday. If the humidity was a little higher, it would feel like Louisiana did when I was little. It makes me think of the beach. 

  My mother loves the beach. I think it is the only place in the world that she is not worrying herself to death. When I was a very little girl, I would sometimes wake up in the bed in the back of this conversion van that she had in the late seventies. It was painted to look like the ocean, dark blues and the ocean floor, and had amazing array of 8 tracks in it (there was also another van in the early eighties in tones of taupe and brown) She would abruptly decide she wanted to go the beach. Any beach within a few hours drive was fine. All over Florida and Alabama. She would scoop me up out of my bed and put me in the back of the van, and head for the highway. 

  We lived in a multi-generational house where there were my grandparents and aunts and cousins everywhere in the house. My brother was so zoned out watching television, I think he barely noticed that me and my mother were gone. She didn't bother to pack anything, there were towels and tanning oil in the van. She would just buy us some beach clothes and sandals from the vendors on the beach. We would eat seafood in these little shack restaurants. She has always been incredible at eating crab legs (a feat that I have never managed to master) We slept in the queen size fold down bed in the back of the van, with the doors open to the beach. 
  
  I cannot say how many times I went to sleep in my bed to wake up to the sunrise over the ocean framed by the backdoors of an ocean blue van. My mother would carry me on her back like a little monkey in a nightgown until she found a flipflop stand, so I wouldn't burn my feet on the asphalt. I remember her being a whole different person when faced by the sea.

  I think about it now and I think that it was probably very dangerous. To sneak off without telling anyone where you where going, because you didn't know where you were going until you were halfway there. No cell phones, huge stretches of open southern roads in the middle of the night. Sleeping on the beach with a young child in the open like we did. 

  It was a different time, and later she told me that she didn't think that I would remember any of it. 

 I realize that she did it because she couldn't handle life with so many people in her face when she was missing her husband (as he was traveling all the time and then after he died) I think it was more an act of desperation than a holiday. I loved it that I was taken along when she didn't take anyone else along with her. 

  She stopped right about the time I turned ten. I still think of it when I hear certain songs, or see the ocean.