At the end of our Summer visit to see tía D in Dominican Republic – our first time there since the pandemic began – we spent a Monday at Sosúa Beach.
It’s a stunning beach, but also a party beach, so being with the kids, early on a Monday morning was a good time to be there. It was one of those moments when the present and past are meshed together thanks to intense sights, sounds, smells, for me tracing back to my first visit when the boys were smaller and I was first blown away by its beauty, and for C, tracing back to his many visits as a child and teenager.
The sea is shallow for a long way out. And clear. JNH with his imagination in full-gear as it often is explores the “nothing”, daunted by the thought of that sea stretching on for what seems like forever, and taking some solace even delight in the “something” that he encounters about 20 meters out – a little cluster of rocks on the seabed.
CMH dives in and out near the water’s edge, getting sunburnt on his bare back having neglected to put suncream on. C and I go back and forth between swimming and sitting on the green plastic loungers with a small “Presidente"-branded table between us holding a bottle of rum, our sunglasses, and the sun-cream that CMH should have put on.
Then a man comes along the beach selling oysters. C has talked many times of the oysters on Sosua beach, and here they are, so we order a plate: the seller cracks them open and squeezes lime over them and because of the time, and the place, and who I am with and their sea saltiness they are more than delicious, I can still conjure that taste to this day.
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The past three Fridays while JMH has been playing soccer on Astoria field I’ve walked along Shore Boulevard by East River in the dark (with enough people passing by in pairs or jogging that it feels safe). Each time I’ve spotted a heron down by the water’s edge, blurry as a feint ghost, his body like a stone and neck like a ripple as he steps along looking for fish. The grays merge and diverge – concrete wall, stones, sea-glass, winter tree branches, moonlight and city lights on the water’s surface, and heron.
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On a recent journey back from a work visit to the Netherlands I bought a copy of Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam. Through a simple train journey from Columbo to the North of Sri Lanka the book speaks of the layers of the civil war, or more precisely the war's aftermath as lived by people who did and who did not experience it.
It has a style of writing, not exactly stream of consciousness, but stream of related-ness perhaps you could say, with a third person narrator and without quotations, that reminded me of Teju Cole’s “Open City”, a style that has a thinking-while-walking rhythm to it that I like a lot. Arudpragasam was glad when on a World BookClub podcast conversation with Harriett Gilbert (who happens to be one of my former journalism teachers – each time I listen to those podcasts takes me right back into those classrooms in my 20s) – one of the callers asked him to explain more about his style. He said his style is a lot about the ability to control and shape time, in ways that day-to-day life, particularly hyper-distracted day-to-day-life, doesn’t allow.
“Part of what I want to do in writing is to give moments in life that are deserving of time, the time they deserve, time that life doesn’t actually give them.”
