Beach Story

Maybe you can tell that I am starting to weary a bit of hard-core life-cycle finance analytics.  My guess is that is it temporary but who knows?  In the interim, here is another story while we see what happens.  This story below is a wee bit dated. It comes from 2008 when I had the trifecta of divorce/move/econ_crash all at one time. This is a trifecta that I heartily do not recommend to anyone contemplating something similar.  While life has mellowed and improved immeasurably since then, I did just find this story in a hidden corner of my storage drive so I thought I'd roll it out.



Beach Story 2008
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Ok, so I spend too many days and nights worrying about normal stuff like divorce or whether I'll ever work again or how the kids will weather the crappy storm we're going thru or the nauseating steeps of precipitous economic crashes. Its all the normal ulcer-producing worries of mid-late middle age, right? The antidote always seems the same, though. Its kinda like the day I watched the twin towers fall. Instead of staring at the infinite loop of depressing video on the cable channel that should have been turned off sooner than it was, I spent that afternoon swimming with a four year old who couldn't care less about murderers or flaming exploding jets or mass destruction. All she wanted to do was jump off the edge of the pool about 500 times in a row. Its great stuff and it brings you back to the world with about as much effort as it takes to clip your nails. 

Like then, though today was less significant than it was seven years ago, I went to the water with little kids. There, we created sand sculptures of their favorite stuffed animals (rabbie and hippo) only to realize the second that they had been created, the second that they had come to life, that the water was coming to destroy them. What a great thing it was to watch those little girls combine rudimentary engineering (a double sea wall) with heavy doses of what can only be called magic (fairy circles, totems, sacred objects, incantations, arms stretched out to the sea to push back the tide with their little tiny life forces) to prevent the killing of their beloved security objects by the water that was about to overwhelm them. Of course it was futile. But they pushed back hard before the sea overran the flood walls and fairy circles; it took about an hour. And then, surprisingly to me, they cried when the ocean finally took its own, even though it was only sand at stake. But we held hands and threw shells into the Atlantic for the animals to take with them wherever they were going and we kept some sand and some of the shells that had been used to make and protect them. And all that time, who could have thought for a second about divorce or careers or crashing markets.