THE LAST BEACH

After the last bomb I found myself on the last beach.

A long spindly stretch of sand hiding just beneath the early morning mist. The ocean lapped at it with quiet blue- white waves, while the breaking sun smeared it with melting red hues. It was good. But it was lonely. Was I to be the last one here? Even more puzzling, was I really here?

It's always said your life flashes across your consciousness at this point. Hollywood has been clever about it. Optical bursts too fast to focus, yet too authentic to deny. My beach suddenly detonated into long-lost faces and feelings. You know, like in some of your dreams. Only I was awake.

My Father's last weak smile from his hospital bed...my Mother's joyful tears as we re-visited the old neighborhood one more time... wisps of my kid brother, Jerry, Billy and Katy giggling as of old in those long ago Depression streets of Chicago...Sister Francis writing grand predictions on my 8th grade graduation picture...a blur of faculty-and-friend faces which populated the next many years. So many so remembered yet so dead.

It's the kind of beach you've never walked before, yet it's fiercely familiar. Firsts are inevitably pieces in these places. That important first date you rehearsed for...the first prom in which you tried so hard to excel...the first job, boss, car, home...the first girl you fell in rapture with, only later to learn she committed suicide at the age of 33 when she become pregnant by an un-named member of the president's cabinet.

I studied my beach. So all that was going on...?

Then later, real love. Joan... children...grandchildren...community...dreams...time...life itself. Nesting and nestling into love with each of them became the center of your galaxy. A remarkably un-remarkable galaxy so small and private, yet at the same time spinning within and resonating to the universe itself. How exactly such a life-long synergy? Very likely like a series of whirling concentric circles within which you stand. An extraordinary writer once strode this same beach, and gave these words to his experience --

"...My little friend just received a letter addressed in a funny kind of way. It read: Jane Crofut, Crofut farm, Grovers Corner, New Hampshire, New England, United States, North American continent, Western hemisphere, world, universe, the mind of God. And ya know what...? The letter reached her just the same!"