My mother loved the ocean. When she was a kid in the Bronx, her dad used to give her, her older sister Henrietta, and her younger brother Sam a nickel each to take the streetcar to Coney Island in the summer, He gave Henrietta some extra change to buy them eachl a hot dog and a lemonade. They rode the subway both ways in their bathing suits, shoes, sox and shirts and carried a change purse and some towels. They came early and set up right next to the Amusement Park and stayed there all day, eight hours at a time, leaving at five to be home in time for their Father and dinner. They were tired and cranky and very, very hungry but my mother remembers those days as being very happy ones in a childhood otherwise overburdened with poor health and bad luck, maybe a mistaken choice or two but not by her.
The ocean never failed her. When, now married and a mother of two, she relocated to Los Angeles, she loved going to the beach almost more than anything, or at least most consistently so. She loved many things, the theater, movies, books, different foods, her family, her many friends. All of those things can comfort us in times of grief, even of rage.
But you don’t want to yell in blind rage at a friend, movies don’t lift you up and carry you gently sky first as you breathe and float, books don’t exhale salt and fish and rot and seaweed, an embarrassment of senses, the cold and the colder and the warm, the solitude and community with all creatures of the great wet Universe, you cannot always relax in the arms of family.
But…you can in the ocean. The ocean embraces you no matter who you are or what condition you are in. All three of the children became excellent ocean swimmers. Nobody told them to get out when their lips turned blue, so they didn’t. They shivered almost all the way home, recovering their natural color only as they climbed the three flights of stairs to the apartment.
My mother’s mother died when my mother was 8, her older sister Henrietta was eleven and her younger brother Sam, five. When they lost that mother to illness, they lost an entire world. Their father had a limited skill set, he could sew, well, he was in fact a tailor but with his poor English skills, his worn out clothes and the look of desperation in his eyes, he got a job hemming pants for a dry cleaners. He worked long hours. Neighbors helped, women in the building that he knew through, well, he knew them, sometimes lent a hand but mostly the children were on their own through the long humid days.
But of course, they were never alone, not really, not with the clean, everlasting rocking of the wonderful sea..
Note: this is not my other story, its supposed to be on prompt,
By Jackie Davis Martin
On February 8, 2025
Laura– this is a lovely story of your mother’s childhood – maybe not lovely to have lived, but lovely in your execution of the telling of it. There’s a part that reminds me of that evocative Edna St. Vincent Millay poem “We were very tired, we were very merry. . . .” etc. Don’t read it, tho. You won’t be able to get it out of your head.