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The Outing
By Maria Trombetta
It was a hot summer day, perfect for the Boardwalk and the beach, except that nearly everyone was sick from eating too much ice cream. The folks who had escaped throwing up were smugly chewing their cotton candy and relaxing in the shade. But that’s not what the beach is about. I wanted someone to experience the ocean.
“Harry, do you want to go put your feet in the water?”
“I do.”
So we went.
We walked past the volleyball players and beer-drinking college kids, over hot, lumpy sand. I held Harry’s hand the whole way, worried that he would trip and fall, that his black Converse sneakers would snag on a piece of driftwood or a plastic bottle filled with sand. But he plodded along with steady enthusiasm, game for anything.
At the wet line where the seaweed clots up on the beach, I bent down to take off his shoes. As I pulled off his white tube socks, big flakes of skin came off of his ankles and feet. They looked patchy and painfully dry. Are all 81-year-old feet supposed to be this way? Shit. Maybe this was a bad idea.
“Do your feet hurt, Harry?”
“No.”
“What should we do?”
“Go in.”
OK then. Onward into the water.
The cold, quick rush of the wave hit our toes, bringing seaweed onto the tops of our feet. I swept it off of him, afraid that it would scare him, afraid that he would fall trying to shake it off.
He didn’t make a sound, just stood there, smiling.
I pointed at seagulls flying by, told him about the sea lions that swim under the wharf, explained that the same jellyfish we had seen in the aquarium could be anywhere out in the ocean that stretched in front of us.
He nodded.
I used to spend hours playing in the ocean, wading in until my lips turned blue and my toes were numb. It was powerful and scary and so different than me. I loved it.
But we didn’t have a lot of time today. The vans were already arriving to take us home. We walked back to our shoes after about five minutes and I silently cursed myself for not bringing a paper towel to dry his feet with.
“How was it, Harry?”
“Pretty good.”
“What did it feel like?”
“God.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Felt like God.”
OK. That was good enough for me.