There is nothing so precious as today, and every day we collect the moments that we wander through. Today I am collecting people.
The artist sat outside a back-street coffee shop in her spaghetti-strapped ballgown, as raven-coloured as her hair. She was winter pale of skin, but seemed not to notice the February breeze that sauntered up the alley, between the backs of mansions that chose not to look upon each other. Her lips were red. She sketched in fluid lines, coloured wings in dark ink, drew creatures without shadows.
The young Asian man sat on the stones, drinking Red Bull, and playing on his phone. Peaked cap pulled low. White jacket gleaming. All attitude in his pose, and yet he was still. Yet again, for all his distance and stillness I felt unsettled by his presence. Why should that be? What was the difference between us, that set me so upon my guard? Race? Gender? Age? Incongruity perhaps? But why even that? What stereotypical view is so ingrained in my prejudice that a young man of whatever race or lack of dress sense should seem less “of” a place, this place, this southern shingle beach, than I am. He may have more claim to it than I do. This may be his home, and I the stranger…which is not true. Today, in this moment, the shingle is where we have both washed up, and it makes no distinction. We are both at home.
The long-haired lady, in her city clothes, stands by the water’s edge. Watches for a while. When she turns away, she scrapes her toe in a patch of sand, before she finds a stone to write with. She feels me watching, stands and shrugs an embarrassed smile. As she passes me by, she wishes me a good day, and when we note that it is too warm for February, she says Yes. There’s that. But still. Enjoy it anyway. I wait and wait to be sure she’s gone before I go to read what she left behind: a simple beating heart.
The athlete is squaring the portions of beach between the groynes. He wears shorts and a tee-shirt and simple trainers. Peaked hat against the light, that I am allowing to ruin my eyesight. He walks purposefully beside the concrete wall, turns right when he reaches the water, curves and bends with the waves to the next breakwater, right again to walk steadily back up the beach to the crossing point. Left, down to the water, follow its line, right, up, over, left, right, curve, right up. How many extra miles is he adding to this mile-and-a-bit promenade? How simple a routine!
The dog-lover carries an aging chocolate spaniel over the shingle. Sets him down, and throws pointless stones into the water, to encourage the animal to swim. It limps. Maybe the salt water helps.
The shingle sitters are spaced almost equally. We sit, perhaps, 50 metres apart. We face the sea. We do not speak. Not to each other, not to someone on the other end of cyber space. We simply set our faces to the sun and the sea. We have peeled off winter clothing. The banks support us to sit upright. We are held. The sun is at its winter height. Due South. Shedding its hundreds-and-thousands on the water. We sit. We watch. We do not speak. Do we even think? Whatever thoughts wash through those other minds will be hidden from me forever. I know nothing of those other sitters. Not name, not age, not race. I have no reason to know. I am both surprised to see them and not. In this moment we are united. We all listen to these one-time waves on the incoming tide. We all feel a shifting sea-breeze on our faces, and the warmth, and the daylight. We are all still. It feels like a mystical act. It feels like a religious ritual.
Perhaps it is.
We are, each of us, simply one more pebble on the beach. Integral and unimportant. Perhaps that is the inescapable fact that we are each acknowledging in the thoughts we do not speak. How small we are; and how inseparable from the whole.
Later...
The photographer settles his tripod, angles his lens towards the setting sun…until a wave breaks with sudden force and unexpected surge. He retreats to a higher vantage point. And waits.
People are gathering. Singly and in groups. Fewer couples than I would have expected, but this is not about romance. That is playing out in the commerciality of wine bars and restaurants towards the eastern pier, this is something more primal. We do not crowd each other. The sitting, the spacing, the waiting…it is a repeat of the earlier coming together, but there are many more of us now. Irregularly spaced, some close to the water’s edge, some sensibly away from it. But whether with companions or alone, we all sit facing the same direction – like an audience, or a congregation.
The word ritual comes to mind again, because we have come to bear witness, in a way that our many-generations-back ancestors may also have done, to the closing of a day. We have come to watch the daily sinking of the sun into the sea, and the dance of the starlings that rise either to
celebrate it’s demise, or to call it back, or simply to wish it godspeed until morning.
The hipster, with his well-groomed beard and man-bun hair, lights a joint. He is playing it cool, but is not fully present. He doesn’t listen to the white noise of surf, but to whatever is playing through his headphones. Why would he do that? What sorrows linger in the songs of wave and gull that he cannot bear to listen? What hurtful memories are stirred by the metallic chink of a lone mast cable? I am down wind of him and breathe in second-hand smoke alongside the salted air. When the show is over, he picks up 13 pebbles and walks down the bank to cast them away one by one. Number 7 is the one that deigns to skip across the surface. The others disappoint. Another unexpected breaker soaks his shoes and the backpack where he’d dropped it.
The murmuration begins as the sun breathes its last of the day. Swooping high in fluid ever-shifting patterns, or so low above the sea, that one wonders if that is a bathing – allowing the fret to dampen day-dusty feathers. A salt-water spa. But those are thoughts for another day. A day of collecting birds, or sky.
Today, it was people that I hunted with my net of memory. Today was a good day. A precious day.
