I was just now dozing on the couch, when I was shaken out of my torpor by scanning Facebook. That is some sad shit, torpor-shakingly speaking, given the banality that presumes, but what are you going to do?

Regardless of the intellectual worth of my pursuit, here’s what I found:

An original work by an undiscovered filmmaker, my aunt, chronicling one of the places that is a touchstone, I think, for most everyone in my extended family. In fact, I think because of Scituate, I will always prefer the ocean as the go-to place for getting gone. Vacations should either involve being in an ocean, being near an ocean or flying over one. Or, it’s not really a trip, is it? Some day in my life, I may make an exception to that rule to visit Chicago, but they tell me, the theys that say things, they say that Lake Michigan is like staring at the ocean with no end in sight.

We didn’t go anywhere for this long weekend. I labored a little on spreadsheets, but that was more of a sanity measure, because shit at work just keeps piling up to shit levels I cannot stand. It was fucking therapeutic to almost feel like I’m not drowning in paperwork.

But, the important part is we didn’t go anywhere, because we don’t fucking need to go anywhere. We live at the beach. Yeah, my touchstone from childhood on for happy is less than a mile down the road. Granted, it’s the other ocean on the other coast of this continent, but saline and rolling waves and I’m a proverbial pig in shit. Cold, wet shit. Oh, fuck, that’s not the metaphor that really sells that one.

In the ’60s and ’70s, though, the beach for me was south of Boston, north of Plymouth, where the rock isn’t actually on a beach, at the end of what felt like a long ride, including a pass on “Old Oaken Bucket Road,” in the Sand Hills section of Scituate. Scituate, AKA the Irish Riviera, where the riffraff from the big city, like my people, bought summer cottages to escape the heat and wile away the summer hours on beach chairs dug into off-white sands.

Google Maps (which wasn’t invented back in the olden days of my youth) says it’s about 21 miles door to door and under 40 minutes. But, in July, packed up in the station wagon for a month’s stay, Pat at the wheel and five kids sitting in the pecking order that used to be when it was legal to cram as many children as you could in a regular car, it was remote. The youngest, poor me, was either on the hump in the middle, or the way, way back with luggage and food. (I was thrilled when the oldest began getting their licenses and their own cars or traveled in teenage packs with friends. It meant breathing room.)

The thing about Scituate was it represented an oasis from all the other suck in a typical hard-working suck life. Pat, the mater, as a school teacher, was completely free in July. She had no responsibilities other than to ensure we, her children, didn’t succeed in killing ourselves or each other. If I ever remember her happy, and maybe I do a little, the memories would mostly be in Scituate.

In Scituate, she could read books for hours endlessly. In Scituate, she could dig her chair in among the circle of moms on the beach in bathing suits with zippers and terry cloth “beach coats” and talk to adults who weren’t co-workers or the dreaded “Superintendent.” Of course, Pat, being who she was, that also meant she could have the joy of deconstructing the generally banal chatter of the beach-based coffee klatch and moaning about it. The Algonquin Round Table it was not, the great wits of the day must have been assembled on another beach, and I think Pat enjoyed complaining, Dorothy Parker-style.

I think everything was just a little bit different in Scituate. Take, for example, our cousins. My mother’s older sister lived, still lives, and raised her family in the same town where we lived, but we didn’t see them much around town. But, the time-honored tradition, which had to do with geography and who in Pat’s family stayed in Massachusetts and ages and families, was laid down at some point by my grandfather, his oldest daughter got August at the cottage, and Pat got July. The other folks in the clan visited around our two families, including my grandfather himself.

I really don’t know the history or how that fateful decision was made, but it was immutable law that we would be there in July, and in the planning and execution no minute in July could be missed. Then, in the transition on July 31/August 1 the keys were tossed to the eldest daughter of Pat’s clan, and we headed back to town. Because of this time share, the two sisters and their families actually talked some of the time, in Scituate.

In fact, one fateful summer, I was even allowed to stay on into August with my cousins. That’s when I learned the mysteries of hip huggers and halter tops and smoking in the dark of the beach. I hadn’t actually outgrown my childish ways, as yet, but I tagged along after my worldly cousin and her beach crew.

That was kind of the best part of Scituate. A little bit of lawlessness. All rules were relaxed. A chunk of the time you were sharing beds with some combination of sisters, cousins and friends, children packed into a few rooms without any school or work schedule to dictate terms. Late nights of giggling, followed by long summer days at the beach. Waking up was just as stop gap before grabbing a towel off the clothesline and walking to the waves. Even meals, while planned and cooked just like in town, seemed more casual and on the fly. Hotdogs and maybe back to the beach for one last dip.

There were rituals you couldn’t ever do in town. Like the next door neighbors, the Towers, that was their name, the Towers had an outdoor shower. That shower was occasionally a perfectly allowable alternative to a Saturday-night bath in the claw-footed tub. And, that shower was more fun than bathing could ever be.

There was no heat. None of the cottages had heat. So on the right, cool nights, that meant fire. Nothing rivals marshmallows or grilled cheese sandwiches cooked up in a fireplace, not to mention the chance to play with fire.

Here I am, now, thousands of years later with my own home near the beach, a fireplace AND a wood stove. Of course, inflation and real estate costs being what they are, I have to walk almost three times further to get to the beach. But, we were spoiled way back when, where the beach was 0.3 miles by road to our address, which was the “long” way without the path by the Beach Association. With the beach chairs and towels and food for snacks and lunch and stopping at Thorton’s Market and traveling in a pack, it felt longer.

It still relaxes me to spend a day at the beach. Or maybe just an hour or two. Today, it’s crushing Pacific waves in water that today the surf report tells me topped out at 59 degrees. It ain’t surprising that surfing caught on in this neighborhood in a big way.

Likely, I will never surf. The control of centrifugal force and wax sticking an upright homo sapiens’ feet to a long chunk of fiberglass or wood is beyond my philosophical imaging. I can’t stand still on solid ground, so fuck standing on a log. But I can grab a board none the less and manage some fun “sponging.” I’m too old to worry about cool, but just like a the owner of our favorite surf shop pointed out (in a hushed mystic, you had to be there Californian tone) there isn’t any other feeling like the energy of a wave pushing you onward.

I think last weekend we actually may have converted some friends from Boston to our new, weekend, wave-based religion.

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, beach, California, family, ocean, Pacific_Ocean, Pat, Scituate, summer, sponging, bodyboard, travel, vacation