On Somers Beach, Part Two.

We came out of the ti-tree tunnel and walked onto that beach of memories, the two teenagers the age I was then, seeing with eyes I once gazed through, not yet carrying the burden of having seen too many things. It was as if I were accompanying my own past, times two. They went off with their sister and their mother on a walk along the sand to the yacht club, where a giant arc of shoreline cuts right in close the clubhouse, buttressed by a wall of stone. I did what I often do on beaches these days. I fell asleep.

*

It had been a torrid January day. I had spent most of it floating around on a sea as flat as a tennis court on an old tyre inner tube. Then I'd returned to the old rambling house that my parents rented each summer for a fortnight. That year I'd made it, through seniority, since a couple of siblings had left home, to the double-room bungalow that was an annex to the old house. It was all old stained timber and panelled walls and a picture window overlooking the bay and it was my quiet refuge where I would lie and read Cannery Row or TV Week, depending on my mood, as the late afternoon sun crawled up the wall. There was a third building on the last remaining two acres of the property; a cottage for the caretaker who looked after holiday bookings on behalf its owner, the Anglican Church. The caretaker was a pleasant plumpish Dutch woman, Mrs van something, with a red face and a mop of silver hair and two teenagers of her own. One afternoon she invited me and my sister to 'come over tonight for the concert', knowing that the big house was not equipped with a television set. Out of politeness we went over and watched Elvis Presley arrive in a helicopter and perform in a lamé suit like a kind of semi-camp Liberace while Mrs van Houten served little Dutch pancakes.

*

I woke up out of Aloha From Hawaii (1973) and onto Somers Beach (2022). Presley has been dead 45 years but my own teenagers know more of his songs than I did then; one of them has several on his Spotify playlist including little-known gems such as I Met Her Today, as bittersweet a song as has ever been recorded.