Picnic on the beach

Last night to celebrate the successful completion of Becca's first week of work and just because we could, we had a picnic dinner on the beach. I packed a bag and we got in the car and 10 minutes later were digging our toes into the sand. We bought what turned out to be an enormous cup of soda at movie theater prices from the beach stand and made excellent use of one of their few spare tables while the crowds walked, jogged, rollerbladed, and biked by. Three guys were practicing their volleyball skills: toss, bump, catch and return, toss, bump, catch and return. A few pigeons flew around. People trekked back from the surf in bathing suits and wet suits half stripped off, in skirts and hats and sunglasses with beach bags and towels and flip flops dangling from one hand. The sun was just going down so for those of us who forgot our prescription sunglasses, only the southeast half of the beach was viewable without squinting. Dinner was delightful, and there was even a playground nearby for some swinging and sliding.

Later in the evening in place of watching Jon Stewart or Colbert we listened to a 1969 Studs Terkel interview with Eva Barnes, a tavern owner who grew up in coal towns across the midwest, a meatpacker, an assembly line worker, an anti-Vietnam marcher, a mother, and a fascinating character. She told a story of her glorified youth in small towns where people had no money and not a few sorrows but would know and help one another. They would go on picnics, dozens of people together. Everyone would bring something, bread, pies, homebrew and moonshine, the boys would go fishing and make a huge pot of mulligan stew and the girls would pick berries. Everyone would share and everyone would eat and no money passed hands. She lamented that, as she saw it from 1969 Chicago, nothing like that happened anymore, that people didn't help their neighbors or even know them.

On the beach, on the shore side of the bike path under some palm trees, were 10 or so empty picnic tables and upon listening to Mrs. Barnes I longed for those tables to be full of people with food and cheer to share. I appreciate the food stand, and admire its elegance, its permanence, its usefulness, but its neatly spaced round tables each with an umbrella and four patio chairs do not substitute for the shared experience she remembers from her rural youth.

It is a different place, of course, and I place great value on how the dynamics of a place and macro attributes of a community, its size, its transience, its age distribution, can determine the culture that grows up in that place. I heard too many languages from the walkers to pretend that the vast and enormously desirable expanses of Santa Monica's beaches are a local resource only. Too many hundreds of people walked by in our hour at the beach to fairly compare it to a coal mining town in 1920s Illinois where people have lived together, worked together, known each others' lives for years when they go out to have a picnic together. But I would like to overlay the experience of breaking bread together on this already well used public space. Those picnic tables are just sitting there under the palm trees, empty.

Yesterday's run destination: Bergamot Station

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes, again
lunch: curry leftovers, again
dinner: ho dogs