Father and Son Excursion
From our journey to the Oregon coast – September 18.
Well here, Wednesday afternoon, sunshine unexpectedly streaming in through the memorized windows, egg-shell blue sky flooding the heavenly horizon. This on a day predicted wild and menacing with storms off the Pacific. Early in our journey there was to be sure fear and real loathing at the downpour and wet splooshed up and dulling the windshield on Highway 26. Our prospects, 30 minutes into this adventure, were grim. But, don’t we all – most of us, get to go further down the road. Whatever road we’re traveling. And as we – the boy and I – did today the scatters of pale blue patches nudged their way through the cloud cover. By the time we made the left turn onto Route 6 and our southwesterly plunge through a cut of the coastal range mountains and on toward Tillamook, the sun was all about, gracing us with hope and wonder.
We found ourselves in a thrift store, Pacific City library connected mid-afternoon, who brought us this splendid day, the blue breeze, mountainous white clouds, the song of stray gulls? I point out the café across the street and we will be there early tomorrow for breakfast and one of my favorite foods on the planet – their to-die-for marionberry scones. Haven’t had one, that’s your loss. Don’t cry about it, get your ass to this town. The parking lot of the thrift store, and we have come there seeking to address Spenser’s jones for yet one more DVD and/or VHS and I for sure will revel in a large selection of used books, the lot is home to a cat that you have to see to believe. Descended from a long line of feline
queens, royalty, the markings, the glow of the golden fur, the clear never-look away eyes, well Goddess doesn’t cut it. And here just inside the store’s door is a “wanted” poster, a mimeographed sheet, it’s explained to me by the lady behind the counter who I have already discerned has a piss poor attitude, she explains the library overloads want the cat out, the cat, I did not know, an official adoptee of the store of thrift many years back, the cat clean and friendly and from my point of view a draw to and for the place, anyway the heavies that oversee the library want the cat vacated and this mimeograph sheet says something like the people and felines united will never be defeated, something like that, and I didn’t read enough – glasses back in my cargo pocket – to know if they were looking for money or a sit-in or be-in or mill-in or angry letters but it’s one of those things I shake my head over – Why? – what’d that cat ever do other than look amazingly cool. So we don’t see the cat and we both buy some thrifty stuff and we scour the lot without success then get in the Camry and tool over to the Kiwanda parking lot and I coax the boy down to the sand to watch mostly unsuccessful surfers and right there he says he wants to come back, he is already taken, or is that overtaken?, which is nice as the kid ain’t much for the ocean,
though he is generally awed by the view coming back up and over and down the long hill, the Pacific and its rolling and breaking frothy white waves endless, over up against and out beyond the long arm of Cape Lookout to the north, and right here I want to say out loud “Ain’t Life Grand’.
And now, it’s night, check out and possibly find the milky way on the dark deck, or at least read some Ray Bradbury.
Great stream of consciousness writing — was right there with you!
Thanks Susan.
The REAL Deal
You got it. Thanks.