I’ve never really been a beach person. I don’t much care for sand, for one thing, and my Scotch-Polish heritage means I’m not big on sunbathing either, for obvious reasons. As far as I’m concerned, there are only two valid reasons to go to the beach at all: to play volleyball, or to swim. (Unless you have kids, in which case “letting the little buggers run wild outdoors for a couple of hours while you sit under an umbrella and try desperately to claw back some quiet time for yourself” also counts.) But sometimes, when the weather was good and my mood was just so and I had a day off that most other people didn’t have, I would sometimes take advantage of my proximity to the coastline and actually visit, say, Fort DeSoto or St. Pete Beach or even all the way down to Siesta Key for an afternoon of flopping about in warm salt water until my eyes burned.
But as the great American poet Tom Kiefer so prophetically observed, you often don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone. Beach swimming is all but impossible in California, which you’d never know based on the fact that the Beach Boys never mentioned having to put on rubber wetsuits before hopping on a surfboard, but nevertheless, it is so. (On a somewhat-recent trip to San Diego, all the surfers at Ocean Beach were wearing wetsuits, suggesting that swimming would have definitely been a no-go. Of course, it was March, so that could also have something to do with it.) I cannot go swimming at the beach here, and as a result, swimming at the beach sounds like the most enticing thing ever.
Of course, I visited a lovely beach in Italy last year and went for a short swim. It was … fine. And I know perfectly well that if I were to move back to St. Petersburg tomorrow, I’d probably stop caring about the damn beach before I even got clear of baggage claim. It’s just how I am. Still, I miss it now, and that’s the point.
