Charming

NOTE: I initially drafted this piece in 1996 when my basset Hermia was a puppy. The ninth anniversary of her trip to the Rainbow Bridge occurs soon, so I decided to pull out the essay and polish it up.

In the late 1960’s when I was about 12 years old, my parents sent my younger sister and me to Charm School at Sears (before it moved to the mall). At that time in the South—I grew up in Baton Rouge—it was important for young girls to learn how to comport themselves properly in order to prepare them for the marriage market, that is catch a husband.

We learned to walk like ladies, stand like ladies, sit like ladies, groom ourselves likes ladies, and other such pertinent “strategies” to make ourselves attractive to potential husbands. At the end of this training, we had a graduation of sorts, a fashion show where we got to model an outfit of our choice from Sears. In addition, we could purchase at a discount one outfit of our choice, whether we modeled it or not.

I have always loved pajamas. To my parents’ dismay, I decided I wanted to model pajamas. I had chosen a pink nylon sleeveless knee-length nightie with a matching robe. My parents and the Charm School Instructor begged and pleaded with me to model street clothes. My parents assured me that they would buy me the pajamas with the Sears discount. I was unmoved and modelled the pajamas. To my parents’ credit, they did not pull rank and force me to model street clothes, but let me have my own way. They even bought me the pajamas!

I remembered this episode when I enrolled the eight-month-old Hermia in an obedience school—fortunately not at Sears!--which I referred to as “Puppy Charm School.” (By the way, obedience school instructors wince when they find a basset hound in their class. Bassets are not stupid but stubborn. Even with the reward of food, bassets are loathe to do something they don’t really want to do.) The doggy pupils practiced tasks such as sitting, staying, heeling, and coming when called in order to make them better citizens of the human world, just as my sister and I learned to walk, stand, sit, and groom ourselves like ladies to a different end.

The last session of Puppy Charm School consisted of a “graduation,” similar to our graduation from Sears Charm School. As the canines went through their paces for their admiring humans, I imagined my Hermia sitting, staying, heeling, and coming when called while wearing pink pajamas!

LAGNIAPPE: My husband, who is also my editor, would say that I am as stubborn as a basset, which I will take as a compliment, even though he did not intend it that way! :-)

Living With My Inner Beach

As promised in “Finding My Inner Beach,” here is the sequel, “Living With My Inner Beach.” As I write, I contemplate the past seven weeks of an extended stay on Folly Beach, facing the prospect of heading back north to mountains and lakes in a week.

The Power

This year, the power of the water and beach has struck me more forcefully than previously. From our condo, I look out upon the Atlantic Ocean. On calm, clear days, I see the diamonds dancing on the surface, knowing the strength that lurks beneath the beauty. On windy days, I see the power churning the surface, see the surf swell and break. The foamy crests spill at different points, coming together like falling dominoes tipped at different points in the line. Sometimes, the waves curl like Elvis’s lip.

An excerpt from my diary: “Today as I walked the beach at sunset, I noticed I was focusing on the waves and not looking at the ocean as a whole—like the saying, ‘You can’t see the forest for the trees,’ I couldn’t see the ocean for the waves.”

On one beach walk, I came across a sizeable dead bird. As it was low tide, I knew the water would come in and sweep the body out to sea—carry out the carrion. The event gave me a new understanding of the cleansing power of the tide.

After sunny days, the people and dogs leave the beach looking like the ocean surface on calm days, full of small footprint ripples. Then, the wind sweeps through, scouring the churned sand to a smooth surface again. Sometimes, people write messages in the sand, usually love notes. During one beach walk, I found a maze drawn in the sand with “Family” written in the middle.

The Shells

I made a resolution this year only to bring in shells that potentially have a function. Of course, I broke that resolution, but not too badly. I am including a picture of shells gathered this year and their functions. My favorite one is the toothpick holder. However, other uses include holders for a kitchen scrubby, potpourri, candles, change, used tea bags and rings. Shells can also serve as a rest for chopsticks and pens and pencils and as a soap dish.

The People

Both from the condo and while walking on the beach, I have seen a wide variety of people. On one morning walk, I noticed a woman and a young girl with a bicycle near the water’s edge. The woman would hold on to the back of the bike while the girl pedaled. When the woman would let go, the girl would lose her balance and stop. What an odd place to teach a child to ride a bicycle, but as my grandsons noted, if the girl fell on the sand, it wouldn’t hurt as much as if she fell on a sidewalk.

Watching dogs walk their people has been fascinating. Dogs of all sorts walk people of all sorts. Of course, larger dogs need fewer steps to move forward than smaller dogs. Frequently, the little legs of the smaller dogs seem to move as if the dogs are cartoon characters stuck on a slippery surface.

On one sunset walk, a young fisherman—probably in his 20’s—approached me and asked if I had found any sharks’ teeth. The fumes of alcohol emanating from him almost gave me a secondary drunk. He informed me he was hoping to catch a shark. I wished him luck and scurried on my way.

Returning from another sunset walk, I passed three Rasta-type guys with a dog and a half-gallon of Fireball. They took turns chugging from the bottle and offering “free Fireball” to anyone who passed, especially attractive young women. They didn’t ask me! I was relieved to be able to walk past them while they were distracted by other beachgoers.

On a more sober note, on one late-day beach walk, I noticed someone playing a guitar. She had no one gathered around her listening, but was sitting, singing and playing to herself and to the cosmos. It seemed to be a celebration of the beach, a private concert for the beach and for her soul.

Finding My Inner Beach

Early Western physiology held a theory that the human body is made up of four humours—earth, air or wind, water, and fire—with no mention of sand or beaches. I began my life with close ties to the first of the above humours (earth or dirt). For most of my young life, once a month, we drove to Fernwood, just outside of McComb, Mississippi, to visit my grandmother who lived much of her life working the earth as a sharecropper’s wife. As children, we judged a good day at play by the amount of dirt in the bathtub at the end of the day. The red clay of the piney woods of Southern Mississippi runs deep in my blood, in spite of all of those childhood baths. 

In my early childhood in South Louisiana, Daddy added water to the mix of humours, making the hybrid humour of mud. We boated on local rivers and vacationed every year at Lake Bruin in north Louisiana, spending entire days in, on, and near the water. Only our suntans prevented us from turning into human prunes. Daddy bought a motor boat, and we learned to water ski. Locally, we spent a lot of time on False River, an oxbow lake near Baton Rouge. Ultimately, Daddy bought a small camp on False River where we swam and fished off the pier, and he barbecued long past the time when his motor boat pulled its last skier.

Yet my life was still effectively bereft of an inner beach. Occasionally, we went to the man-made beaches of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Locally, in the summer we spent time at a tourist attraction, Thunderbird Beach, a combination of carnival rides and beach. In college, occasionally we would drive to the beaches of Pensacola. (Of course, beaches were secondary there.)

As an adult, as my quest for my inner beach continued, I moved away from the mud humour and back toward the earthy humour. I became a dedicated gardener, over the years planting kitchen gardens, edible flower gardens, ornamental flower gardens, and serious vegetable gardens. One year during my serious gardening phase, I fed myself all summer from my garden. That experience with self-sufficient gardening taught me that I did not want to follow that ideal dream of many hippies, after all, of buying a farm and living off the land. Serious gardening is physically demanding work! These days, modifying the old Greyhound Bus motto, we patronize farmer’s markets and leave the gardening to them. Still, I did not find my inner beach, in spite of the sandy soil of some of my gardens.

During this earthy, unbeachy time, I still dabbled in water. We took yearly kayaking trips at my family reunion. Inspired by these trips, I bought a kayak about 10 years ago and did some kayaking on local lakes.

After living 20 years in the mountains of Upstate New York, I finally found my way to the beach humour. Water and wind erode rock (which is not an original humour, although some people have rocks in their heads) to make sand. When you combine water and sand, you get beaches. At Schroon Lake, we have our own strand of strand, where I craft themed sand castles, depending on my whim.

In 2015, the beach humour in my life greatly expanded when we spent four weeks on the Atlantic Ocean at Folly Beach, South Carolina. Finally, I found my inner beach. In my next beach-themed blog, I will write about living with my inner beach.

The companion piece to this blog entry, “Beach, the metaphor,” relates an experience in which a summer school student finds her inner beach.