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There’s No Place Like Home
Without my childhood house I felt like a turtle without a shell
I stumbled across a fleshy sea monster once on a California beach. It was a pale pinkish-gray, the color of tired Silly Putty. Dead, but not decayed, it lay sprawled out on the wet sand, a specimen of curiosity. Displayed without dignity.
It was maybe the size of a thick boarder collie. But its body was smooth and hairless, its skull, bald. Instead of skinny canine legs with paws, the creature had two enormous front flipper fins, and two smaller in back.
I paused to stare. A man in running shorts jogged toward me, spotted the creature, and practically jumped sideways to avoid it.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
I had no idea. He looked at it for a while, moved around it, but not too close. He said in all his years of running on the beach, he’d never seen anything like it. I said I was from the Midwest.
This was true. It was also true that I’d left that landlocked territory decades earlier, but I felt the need to explain, if not excuse, my ignorance about flotsam and jetsam. The man said he wished he had his phone so he could take pictures for his marine biologist friend to identify. Good phone cameras were still new back then. I had one with me on the beach that…
