For B.A.F.

She has so many questions this summer. What are rocks? Where does water get made? What is your favorite type of gold? But where does it come from? Why is the (shallow) water yellow? Why are those balls (buoys) in the ocean? What happens if a boat flies away? What is that pink wand (umbrella base) for? Why do motors leak water? Why is that cloud following me? How do you see yourself? No Mama. How do you see your whole self.

The questions have multiplied since my daughter packed up her things from her pre-school cubby hole in June, as if the summer has been fertile ground. It is true, that the days are longer, that there is more sky to see. Maybe this.

It being the summer of interrogations, today she has many things to ask. This is particularly so because she is interested in festivities.  What is my new number? is her first question. Then, is today my real birthday? Or are we just celebrating? Can it be both? But why? What do you want to play for your birthday? But do you prefer a back massage?

It is my real birthday today and we are also celebrating.

I am throwing back to the 15^th-century use of this word. I am singing praises, and they are joyous and solemn and have something to do with remembrance and ceremony. In what has become a yearly thing, I am traveling. I am away from my phone. I am reading a book. I have sun in my face. I am drinking wine. I am with favorite people. I am being thoroughly dramatic, because this is inherent to my life process. (Though one yoga teacher once told me – save the drama for your mama – a recent thought from from another that also resonates – if there is no drama … are you even training? This is an important distinction to make about forms of dramatic energy. ) Drama as less melodrama, more ceremony, ritual, drama like dressing up for this part on this day.

Dramatic flare like this:

Today: I awake at 12:30 in the morning but it is not yet my birthday. I consider my mother, still in labor. I wake at 2:45 in the morning. Still she was in labor. I was born at the indecent hour of 3:46 am. This is also a number with dramatic flare.

I wake for the day before seven and officially, I was born.

Today’s dramatic approach:

I go for a run while the house is asleep. I am listening to music from when I was sixteen. It is the music I had on a CD called “PuMp Up MIX!” that I once considered race-day lucky. For fear of judgment I will not admit to the songs that were on there. I can neither confirm nor deny any Eminem or Nickelback.

I am running and think I am awesome so decide to run one extra mile. Also, I consider how my total mileage for this run this would once have amounted to something akin to a warm-up (distance, not pace). I consider the muscular adolescents competing in Paris.

I am grateful for my brown hair. I decide to take up surfing. I have started writing a second book.

I come home and my son asks why Mama sweh-tee. My daughter presses her cheek against mine and I can see the first freckles on her face, which have just made an appearance this summer. My son wrestles me to the floor in his expression of “I love you.” They belt out, together, a happy birthday song, my son following his sister’s lead, she is singing from her belly, it is loud, she still knows she can find soul energy here, inside her, that it doesn’t matter what her voice sounds like. It is joy. It is cele-mourning, as in, songs of praise and solemnity.

Cele-mourning a time and place will never again be that feels like the pinnacle of my life as I sit in the kitchen with mediocre coffee, sweaty from a morning run, my children scouring the house for signs of anything resembling cake.

What exactly is the source of this dramatic climax? A pandemic? (Been there!) A mid-life crisis? Climate change? 40 is still one year away, as if a form of last call. Psychologically I’ve hit 40 anyway, I tell a cousin, that I am hovering somewhere around 42.

We spend the day at the beach. This is something I like to do and, in the country in which I live, is a form of national pastime. This is particularly so in August, the way complaining is a form of patriotism in France (not my idea, it comes from a French ex), or the way that buying stuff is profoundly American.

Beach-going is so central to the Portuguese psyche that it is a mandated prescription for all sorts of ailments. I take my son to a pediatric ear-nose-and-throat doctor to address seven months of recurring ear infections. Faça praia. I take my daughter to the doctor for recurring styes. Faça praia. Being accustomed to a medical system that would rather perforate eardrums and laser off bacterial infections from eyelids, the beach prescription is scandalous and I am interested.

A few months ago I took a taxi ride from my favorite Bahamian taxi driver and he, too, was aware of the beach remedy, having been prescribed a submersion in the Caribbean sea when he was ailing from Covid, and it worked, he told me.

And so on my 39^th, ailing from a mildly breaking heart, the beach is an interesting idea.

We drive. On the way there, we continue listening to music that makes me a teenager. My son asks for “More!” Ace of Base – specifically ‘It’s a beautiful life’ for the chorus of ‘oh-oh-oh-ohs’ and my daughter likes everything Ja Rule, and in her car seat she is grooving. Is this all so outdated that it can be new again? If old is new and renewed, might there be little energetic difference?

Faça praia transforms the meaning of beach, and goes further than ordinary ‘beachgoing,’ because the directive is not to simply ‘go’, but to ‘do’ the beach. Nothing is passive. Beach becomes lifestyle, verb, cure-all.

We spend the morning on sand and in water, pretending we are mermaids, pretending we are pirates. We set up a snowball factory that makes mermaid treats. Payment is accepted in the form of shells. In all of this there is space for looking.

A small airplane flies overhead trailing a sign that reminds beachgoers, ‘Water is life, do not waste it.’ Doing beach as an exercise in social good, environmental connection, political resistance, act of consciousness.

I consider Portuguese beaching culture in light of the impending sense of doom called my 40^th birthday.

Possible learnings follow.

Sleep in, because there is no point in arriving early, because you’ll need energy to stay late. No one local arrives before peak heat at noon and no one leaves before dinner. In other words, what I take – though I am a morning person, also, it’s a long-game.

Do not be overly serious about the (parking) rules, because it is acceptable to park wherever your car will fit, so long as you are not disturbing others. If you know the rules you can find your freedom in breaking them.

Do not be overly serious about cholesterol, at least not while at the beach. There are other times to do this. My children have eaten bolas de berlim every beach day this summer, such that my son currently identifies the cream-filled donuts as part of a dedicated mealtime. In the fall they will fall away. Have what you can while you can, and really be with it.

Invest in infrastructure. We watch a family of five set up shop: wind guard, umbrella, chairs, all sorts of beach gear for sea sand and sky. The parents read a book in the shade, the kids play all day. A solid base to stay and play will make all the difference. (In my head I am translating this as the reason to take care of your body, no matter the age. This infrastructure we are born with is the only one we get).

Bring at least three generations. Infants roll around naked in the sand like pigs in mud, supervised by their older cousins, while their respective parents share a beer or a magazine or a surfboard, and those parents’ respective parents sit in the shade, with stories of how it used to be. I see someone who I assume is someone’s grandmother rake her hands through sand, dropping her findings, which are small and handled with fingertips, into an empty plastic water bottle. She enlists a young boy’s help. She is teaching him how to find small clam shells. She will sautee them tonight with lemon, wine, salt, garlic for whoever likes this. He will come to remember the recipe. (My translation, my how to use this now – consider the generations of people and ideas and writers and practices, consider the versions of yourself, to take with you for the ride).

Come as you are. Babies in birthday suits. Forget the plastic surgery of Miami Beach. Just a bathing suit of choice, if that, and you’re in a fine place.

I by mistake tell someone (the person who is selling our bolas de berlim) I am turning 29.

I tell my daughter that it’s just a number even though I indulge in wondering what it would be like if this number could stay another number.

In any case we see what we wish to see. I see a tree trunk, the way to my son it is a door. My daughter sees an eagle for a pigeon. To her it is ‘Fancy! I adore it!’ and someone else might say ‘extraordinarily tacky’. It is a pirate ship, not a fishing boat. It is mermaid food, not seaweed. It is a golden wonder, it is a purple ray, it is the world’s most precious shell.

I have become unconvinced in seeing what I am supposedly supposed to see.

She is right. Fancy! I adore it! And I step into 39 plus one day like a boss.

One week later a baby is born. He is brand new, I tell my daughter and my son. The questions are on. But why is he a boy? But why is it a cousin? But why can papas not have babies? But how are babies made? But how do they decide they want to be made? So then how is a pinecone made? Is that a life cycle? How is life?

The questions are circular. We dance with them in circles that bring more questions. I am a psychologically-42-year-old playing barefoot in the grass, finding seahorses in the sky, fielding self-reproducing questions.

But mama. How is life?

Something like this.