I know I said today I’d post David’s poem from our morning of poetry play, but I’m going to do that the next tomorrow. Today we went to Wildwood, the next town south from Stone Harbor, and outside of being another beach town, about as different as it could be. Wildwood has an enormous boardwalk, three piers of amusement park rides, water parks, motels that looked completely unchanged since the 50’s, scads of people, monster truck rides, and a complete lack of the kind of intellectual preoccupations David and I often spend our days slipping around in.
For example, this morning on our walk along the beach, David did his book report style recounting of the concepts about human evolution and the development of the cooperative brain through trade and specialization of skill from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Earlier, I’d shown him the latest draft of one of the three poems I’m working on right now, and he helped me edit out a few more words, generally a good move in any poem.
But this afternoon we went to Wildwood and lost ourselves in the sights and sounds and sun. This slide show doesn’t do the experience justice, because you can’t hear all the amplified voices telling you “We have barbecued chicken, we have fried flounder, come eat here,” and “Two for the price of one, two for the price of one, come in and buy.” We walked and looked and listened until we were thirsty and hungry and tired, went to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant run by a family David’s second cousin in St. John knows (it’s such a small world), came back to the house and watched a royally brilliant sunset. There’s a tiny bit of pink left in the quickly darkening sky, and the first star is out. Time for a wish.
Grace Mattern 