Grab it When You Can

At 6;00 my clock radio comes on and the local announcer. talking much too fast and swallowing half his syllables, reads the overnight police report, gives the score of the Boston Red Sox game and less than ten words of weather prediction. I do my own prediction by opening my eyes and looking to see if a ray of sun is caressing the armoir at the foot of the bed. If it is, I'm up quickly and soon making coffee so that I can grab an hour's walk on the beach for it may get cloudy and rainy any time.

If all is dull gray I close my eyes and listen to the next half piece of classical music -- they rarely play whole symphonies or concertos or other longer pieces. This is a dumbed down attitude toward classical music always emphasizing how "relaxing" classical music is -- what would Shastikovitch say to that? You can bet they do not play his Leningrad Symphony, I've heard no Prokovief either and precious little Mahler [certainly not whole symphonies] and I doubt Bruchner has made it into their library ever. Grumble, grumble ...
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Today the streak of sun was bright and shiny as that famous new penny and I had a lovely walk on the beach, wishing I had taken my camera as I did one day about a week ago. The tide had been very high but now it was very low. At the high tide line were many conch shells, all more or less broken but all beautiful nevertheless. I would like to have photographed a variety of breakage patterns.

These pictures were from the day I did take the camera. The one above is juniper so loaded with berries you could flavor ten years of gin with them. Their frosty blue is lovely against the deep green. The picture below is from one of the high [all is relative] points where these roses were fragrant in the damp air and abuzz with bees wallowing in their golden centers. The view is across the inlet which a tiny bit further on disgorges into the broad bay that the nearly mile long beach partially embraces. For this I am happy to get up early. The near solitude is a plus, just the sound of breeze working it's way around my ears, the lapping percussion of the tide and the quite slap of my flipflops, oh, and the gulls, of course, although they are fairly quiet at that hour, many breakfasting on crabs that they attack very matter of factly.