beach-happenings

On my bum on the beach. Post-swim and in boxers.

Light slight footsteps approach. I don't need to look for I can feel the sand relay their vibrations. A slim boy approaches, but this doesn't say much as all of them are slim and their muscles, at least with adolescence, are unignorably cut. I feel fat and weak just thinking about the Ghanaian teens. The boy, in coordinated blues, stands above me with his left hand either hiding or exploring the bald caverns between his thighs. He's young. He strikes a pose.

Aside from the waves and the hand beneath his waistline, which picks and fingers with a mind of its own, everything stays still. The sun, the clouds, the sand, still still. The wind too is blowing, thus my hair enjoys a fluff and a bounce. Otherwise, all else is hushed.

He allows himself time to assume a role or some position through the silence. His eyes are fixed on my white skin and my bobbing mane. I look not his way, but I know all this nevertheless. The stillness and silence are not just obvious but permeating. Suddenly my baking mind alerts me to my very body's having also taken to the immobility.

"Do you have a pen?" he asks.

"No," I lie.

The previous form of existence resumes. The quiet is comfortable and the dialogue the awkwardness if there is any. Sometimes quiet needs to be acknowledged, and I am grateful to the boy in blue for letting it happen. The fidgety prepubescent hand, the waves, the wind and my hair continue in their accustomed groove.

"Then I will go," he asserts.

"Huh?"

"Then I will go."

And he go.

===== little saltwater swim ======

I'm with Borges' words on the beach, same spot, same position. Sandy legs crossed, hair now drying.

"I come to bathe," says the oldest.

He's twenty-three and I don't remember his day-name. Two smaller ones are with him but they either lack the courage or the English to speak. He clenches a hand-held stone nicely tamed by human grasp and nature's caress. The stone is an earthly yellow, a peaceful tone with a yielding softness. Imagine the skins of limbs it has roughed. It looks calm like a bar of soap.

I'm asked for my name and I give it.

I'm asked for my day-name and I give it.

My faith is requested, or perhaps demanded, and I weave my careful explanation of polite atheism and cultural relativity.

"But you must accept Jesus! He your SAVIOR! He will unite with you. Chapter 2 of the Book of Gene..."

I nod and explain again about the unconvincing and dispassionate relativity, but it seems he's an absolutist. It is of no use. His voice-noise and passion build. Having been to Church only once, and last Sunday at that, I am not yet accustomed to being spoken at heatedly about how my life is defined and how I should live it. I'm slightly chilled with fright. I begin agreeing with him otherwise I know this will go nowhere.

"Are you angry with me?" I interrupt.

"No no ha ha. This is just the way to say when you are pastor. Now I will pray for you."

His arms extend toward mine, as if at once offering me a cake and the lord's salvation. I give him mine so that they meet and my eyes dive deep into his. I can feel how badly he needs me to accept and be saved. It's been a while since I've felt something so real, though it's funny to me that what's real for him is fake for me, and yet there is something there that I can take. He is training to be an electrician and a pastor. His voice projects, his zeal rages once again, he is in full-fledged pastor-mode.

"Now I bathe."

He trots down the sand-bar to the sea, the very path along which, earlier today, I dragged a confused hundred pound sea-turtle from lagoon to ocean. He knows not of this but the sea-turtle, the old turtle-man and I remember. The turtle will soon forget as the underwaters afford it new memories, the old man too will forget once his anger over my not giving him money subsides, but I will always recall.

The pastor-electrician thrashes about in the sea, a graceful and light thrashing if it's possible to imagine, alternating with scoopings of wet sand which he applies down his pants to his parts with vigorous rubbing and smiling. I think then of the prepubescent boy and his hand down his pants. His was the absent-minded wander of a child, this the determined hand of a pastor-electrician, a hand with a deed to do.

"I want you to take me to America," as he leaves water for air, but the sand is inescapable.

"Only married Americans can take their Ghanaians home." I explain this in length and judging by the faces he makes he probably doesn't understand. Most of my conversations here involve the uttered phrase, "You understand?" with a Ghanaian accent at some point. Sometimes I ask it and sometimes it is asked of me. The answer is always "yes" and means "no."

Soon-after some silence and my refusal to give him money for electrical and pastoral training he left me. I remained alone on and in the sand and sun, but as usual, not for long...

-Only true episodes from a Saturday mid-afternoon, eastward along the coast past Prampram and New and Old Ningo.