As my husband and I walk back to our boat after a long day of touring, we skirt the town’s public beach. My gaze rests on a family of five. The mother and grandmother wade in the waves, holding their gauze skirts up to their knees. The father, pants rolled up above his calves, stands where the waves break. Two brothers kick a soccer ball back and forth, scamper in and out of the waves. One is a sandy blond, the other a strawberry blond. I would call them three and five, perhaps four and six. They are buck naked, suggesting their romp in the Aegean waters off the coast of Crete is an unplanned frolic.
I remember a different beach of over sixty years ago as pebbly under my shoeless feet, the waves as tingly against my bare ankles, the ocean as chilling against my naked torso. My sister and I shrieked as we jumped in and out of the waves that seemed so big but no doubt really weren’t, our arms waving wildly in the air. She was the dark brunette, I the platinum blonde. We were five and three, and we were meeting an ocean — the North Sea, off the coast of Germany — for the first time. On shore stood our parents, watching and holding our clothes, wanting us to have fun and be safe (I now surmise) but loathe to participate, modest natives of the Kansas prairies that they were. Those moments formed my first memory of a thrill in my body, bliss in my soul.
My husband and I pause as he too watches the young swimmers. As we resume our walk, I tell him that I have half a mind to strip down to my underclothes and jump in the waves. He is a Southern California native who body-surfed the Pacific as I bobbed in the Atlantic in our childhood years. He says he shares my impulse. But we are American retirees on a Road Scholar trip to Greece, not shameless youngsters anymore. As we make our way back to our boat, we are mindful that we are expected in a few minutes for the Greek night presentation on board: dancing! music! Yet. Yet. There may be towels on the boat’s sundeck; the azure Aegean waves beckon; we can look up a video of Greek dancing.
Deborah Schmedemann
