The Island

My sister perches beside me on the South Bay Front sea wall, our legs dangling over the side, shoes and socks behind us on the pavement. My big toe draws circles in the dry sand. Balboa Island has never looked so good; it is one of those early autumn late afternoons. The sun’s a little higher, the number of sunbathers a lot lower, and there’s something in the air that says summer has seen its day. So have she and I—we’re technically the legal age for AARP membership.

We are part of the generation who in younger days evacuated summer’s sizzling suburban sidewalks to rock, roll and relax on the Island. My decade-older brother reveled in “Bal Week,” the Easter Break melee once patrolled by police cars and banned by parents. But my sister and I were there for the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when it was all groovy: every bronzing beauty was plastered to a beach towel, transistor radio her earring.

Although it’s a different place now to some degree—permanent residences have replaced summer beach cottages—those of us who flocked here to shelve hard shoes and pull out all the stops in Zorries feel the friendly ghosts that still walk the walk. Blindfold us and lead us to the Island Bridge; we can smell it—Dad’s donuts, frozen bananas, and Jolly Roger Bucaneer malts on the breeze. Put a bag over my head and I’d know I was riding that ferryboat across the bay to the fun zone.

We’ve since lost the elders of our family—the ones who made certain we got here every August without fail. Grandparents are long deceased. We chat about our mother and her sisters; all three resembled movie stars: Suzanne was Katharine Hepburn, Eileen, Ingrid Bergman, and Catherine, Grace Kelly with a dash of Lucille Ball. We idolized their easy togetherness while they barbequed Delany’s fresh swordfish on the front porch of whatever house we’d rented. The men stayed working in “town” (Los Angeles) until the weekends. Commute wasn’t a vocabulary word yet.
We smell someone’s gas grill up Apolena Street, and remember charcoal.

I don’t see any children. There are computers now, after school activities, league practices. It’s too early in the fall for UCI Anteaters who by October will bask in the sun like lizards, textbooks shut tightly beside them on the sand. Or will they? If not cyberspace, or MySpace, then “skin cancer” is the household word that clears beaches on such an afternoon. No problem; more for us in our wide-brimmed hats and 45-SPF. We acknowledge the irony of this, recalling our long ago ceremonial application of dark-tanning oil and ritualistic bronzing procedure. In those days, not even a bomb threat could have driven us from our beach towels where we sizzled, sipped Tab and popped Pez and Lido cookies, neither carcinoma nor carbohydrate care in the world.

Today we watch the harbor sea lions slither over bows and sterns of anchored boats. It’s a recent contentious situation for boat owners, this unchecked overpopulation of territorial slugs that inhabit their pleasure crafts. We remember swimming with our favorite cousins across this body of water, sans sea creatures, from South Bay Front to Balboa Peninsula. At night, our agile bodies sometimes left a shimmering wake of phosphorescence. Aunt Eileen would hail us from shore.

“Watch for traffic!” There was none. “Turn around; that’s enough for one night.” No it wasn’t.

We would crawl ashore on the peninsula, panting and gasping and clawing at the wet sand, pretending we had barely reached some desert island.


“We’ll come back on the ferry!” we cupped hand-shaped megaphones to our mouths and yelled back to her through the breezeless darkness. We were adventurers who thought we would always be like this. Instead, I no longer see those cousins. Families are so fractured now—my own children live in New York and Arizona while I will soon reside in Montana with a sister in California. For us, there is little hope of family vacation except by telephone.

This afternoon no one is swimming; there are no toddlers bearing inner tubes, and adventure-seekers are playing video games. If we turn, we can see flashing images through living-room windows on the boardwalk.

We don’t have much time. We need to remember where we parked and get on the freeway to drive opposite directions towards our separate and responsible lives filled with work, husbands, and an ailing father who can’t always remember Balboa, even though it was here that he spent summers as a child and as a young man met our mother.

We’ve talked of everything and nothing—all the nuts and bolts for which we, the new oldest generation of our family, must find the tools. We wax philosophic as we debate the passage of sweet time—the long and short of it. After debating the wisdom of waiting out traffic and lingering for dinner, reluctantly, we rise to leave. I sigh, brush from between my toes the same warm sand from which I once scooped shells, and wonder what I might hold in my hand now that would make me feel better about leaving.

“Where were you the happiest?” my sister wonders aloud as we face the setting sun, two aging seagulls who stand mesmerized by it at the water’s edge.

That’s easy.