September 12: Life's a Beach

Saturday I decided to fend off stressed-outedness and an impending cold by going swimming at the beach. It's crazy warm these days, and how many chances will I have left, right? So I drove and drove and drove, through Amish country, past the Dollar General with a hitching post (complete with team and wagon), through S-double-A's hometown, till I finally found my beach. Aaaaaand...it was closed. Having driven all this way, I went back to the other beach, which I had feared would be too crowded. Ha! There were maybe seven other people there. Peace and quiet at last.

I swam around some, but found the water too fishy and dirty and sort of slimy to be really enticing, so I went back up and just sat in the shallows, letting the water push me around Eventually two girls, both about 11 years old, came over and started talking to me. And talking, and talking, and lying through their cherubic preadolescent teeth. Both had nearly drowned, they said--one of them has apparently nearly drowned seven or eight times, to hear her tell of it, but she can hardly be blamed for the time the alligator kept pulling her under water by her swimsuit straps. She just kept on talking:

Girl: One time, when I was little baby, I actually did drown, basically.
Tornadia: Mmmm.
Girl: I was like, [baby voice] ooh, fishies! And I took off the life jacket, like you know, this? And I jumped in the water and nobody noticed. And then I was just sitting on the bottom of the lake, 'cause I was a baby, I didn't know you couldn't do that. I was just sitting like WAY down on the bottom, looking at the fish, and I totally drowned. I like stopped breathing and everything. And everybody was freaking out.
Tornadia: Wow. That's...
Girl: But then my uncle? He got this stick that was like floating by in the water, and he like pounded on my chest with it, and I came back to life.
Tornadia: Oooh, look! Waves! You should totally go play in them.

At some point, Girl B--the non-alligator-drowned one--ran up to get something from her beach blanket. A minute later she came rampaging back down, splashed into the shallows, and said "Um, no offense, but we're not supposed to talk to strangers." I agreed that was a very sensible rule, while Girl A--Revived With A Stick Girl--insisted I was no longer a stranger. "Oh yes I am!" I chirped. "You don't even know my name! Or where I live! Really, a stranger! I'm going to go swim now." So I did. And when I finished paddling the length of the slimy gross water a couple of times, the girls' mother and her boyfriend had rejoined them in the water, where moms was now announcing VERY LOUDLY that she didn't care if it was in CHURCH, because even in church people could turn out to be CHILD MOLESTORS, and she knew there was a CHILD MOLESTOR around because there was a CHILD MOLESTOR at a church in Springfield, I mean of course it was a Catholic church, but they could be anywhere.

So....great! I'll just sit here, watching these boats! Trying to look as non-molestery as possible!

I know I shouldn't take it personally, that she didn't really mean to say that I AM a child predator, just that I COULD BE. Which is, in its most theoretical, entirely true. I kept kind of looking over at her when they first started talking to me, in part because I thought she might rescue me from them, and in part because I thought she'd surely notice and call them off. But she didn't, for a good twenty minutes or so, while she and her skeevy boyfriend made out on the beach.

And the more I though about it, the more it kind of bugged me, because A, she probably IS right that there could be child molesters and children shouldn't talk to strangers, but on the B hand, I was minding my own business when her lying little brats started pestering ME. So how about "Don't talk to strangers, because you might be bugging them? Because seriously, parents of the world should know: When your kids walks up to a stranger sitting alone at lunch, or browsing in a store, or on a beach, and starts yammering away about this one time? when they were little? and they were driving down the street and there was a tornado and it dropped a tree right on top of their car and cut it in half, but it went right between the front seat and the back seat and their mom kept driving and didn't even notice the back seat was chopped off?--well, statistically, the odds are much greater that she just wants to go back to her lunch or shopping or daydreaming than to take your tale-telling kids off your hands.

Oh--and if your kid has nearly drowned, like, 30 times? Or is even just telling people she's drowned? You might want to keep an eye on her at the beach. Or keep a nice life-reviving stick around, I guess.