On the Other Hand, It Wasn't All That Bad

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  Jellyfish
  

  
     Dear Joanie,

    Tonight I'm back at the Carillon, and everyone--Shelby  Poodle and Dougie--is sound asleep and I will be soon, too.

    But I wanted to say this about my childhood. It wasn't all that bad. I do have many memories that echo the nostalgia of those who grew up in a more stable home. My beach days and nights, of course, where I swam and walked, and tanned (dangerously), and talked to myself and stared out for hours at the vast Gulf Of Mexico with its warm currents and nibbling fish and jellyfish and Portuguese Man o' Wars, which gave us the thrill of living dangerously as well. Picking blackberries and going crabbing and letting the cool breezes sweep over my sleepy self as I lay down in a rickety old beach cabin with huge wide screened in windows and an ice box that looked like a refrigerator, but really was an ice box. We'd buy huge blocks of ice to put in it to keep our Cokes and tuna fish sandwiches cold. Padre Island and, later, the Bolivar Peninsula near Galveston were the fair seedtimes of my soul, as Wordsworth so beautifully said about his childhood.

    I loved playing kickball with the neighbor kids, catching fireflies in a jar, collecting all kinds of seashells, and best of all, finding sand dollars during the winter months on the Gulf. When we took the ferry to Galveston, the porpoises would frolic in front of the boats and lead us all the way the the landing, while the pelicans swooped down for fish and the sea gulls screeched at everything and the jellyfish floated in the wake of the ferry.

A Postcard from the 1950s when we would have been taking the ferry.

    I loved--and still do love--sitting in a cafe on the Intracoastal Canal and watching the barges and tugboats make their way to the East Coast. I thrived on the large Gulf shrimp, french fries, hush puppies, gumbo, guacamole, and the watermelon that grew in the sandy fields on the peninsula. 

    When I got tall enough to stand on the shore side of a seine (I'd never, ever be tall enough to stand in the deep water),  I'd join about eight other people holding the seine first in a straight line our into the Gulf, then holding on really tight while the tall ones, mostly men, would begin to move in an arc toward the shore, until, reaching it, we all dropped the huge net to see what bounty the Gulf had given us. We got mostly redfish and crabs. By law, we'd have to throw back any shrimp that managed to get caught in the net, and through caring and caution, we'd throw back the baby shark and the turtles. 

This is a picture of men seining on the Gulf of Mexico.

    Padre Island has been a big resort area for decades now, but when I was a little girl, there was nothing there but a single lane road and some jetties reaching out into the Gulf. The shore was sculpted with grassy sand dunes and the possibilities for building castles and digging tunnels and burying one another in sand were endless.

    There is some irony in the fact that I've spent most of my adult life in a land-locked state, where I've turned to the mountains to feed my soul. But salt water still runs through my veins.

    It wasn't all hardship, my childhood.  

Portuguese Man O' War

    Love,

    GG Katie