Between The Devil And the Deep Blue Sea

When the wife invites the ladies over for Mahjong, I get out of the house. They're a great bunch, but they play the game like it's a blood sport. Fractious trash-talk melodies. Clacking, tile-smacking-the-table percussion. Wild ear-piercing laughter...

So I drove down to the beach, Ella Fitzgerald singing about the devil and the deep blue sea on my sound system. I parked and hobbled with my quad cane to the beach access and sat my old butt halfway down on the wooden stairway. I had my binoculars with me, to scan the ocean for migrating whales, but the first thing I saw was two girls, on the white sand on this cold day, peeling out of their bathing suits and bouncing out into the surf: plump, cherubic, gleeful girls, vibrant with the stuff of life.

One of them screamed as a wave dashed itself against her ripe flesh; the Pacific is frigid at this latitude in the winter. Her partner in crime dove into the churning white water and came up whooping. Gulls circled overhead, the lagoon just to the north of them flowed into the ocean, and I considered my binoculars.

Thirty, even twenty years ago the devil would have put thoughts in my head. I'd have turned those binoculars on them, or maybe even left my stairway and walked the beach for a better look. But old age beats the dirty devil, especially in a situation involving girls the age of my granddaughters. And now, a secretive and magnified peek would seem an intrusion, not so much into their nakedness, but into their sisterhood, their private communal vitality and joy. So I sat on my stairway and lifted the plastic lid from the strong coffee I'd bought on the drive down and scanned the steel-blue water for signs of the migration of the whales.

The girls in short order pranced back to shore, collected rumpled clothing, wrapped themselves in large towels, and began a shivering trek to my stairs. I slipped the binoculars behind me. When they were halfway up the first section of the stairway, the lead girl looked up and let out a shriek, clasped a hand to a cuffing of towel above her breasts and said to her friend: "Look, Emily, it's an old man!"

They giggled and padded around me, ascending, smelling of sea brine and faint diluted lotions, beads of ocean glistening on their skin like opals.

Old man my ass, I thought; but the devil tried to assert himself, and I swiveled to follow their climb, to watch the roundness of their rumps under soft terry cloth, and I said: "How was the skinny dipping, darlins?"

A duet of bird song laughter, then the shorter, chubbier of the two turned to me and said, "When we do it, it's called fatty dipping." And with that she untucked her towel and spread its wings wide, making her partner in naughtiness howl with merriment and spin her exposed friend around.

Their high-spirited chittering faded as they topped the stairway and flew out over the blufftop like doves, changing into angels as they reached the height of the rooftops of the old weather-beaten beach houses. And I turned back to the deep blue sea and sucked in a deep breath of salty air, put my forehead in my hand and said: "Oh darlins.'"