10.21.2002 - 1:48 p.m.

Saturday afternoon found me with Kelly on a cold beach, sifting the shell line at the water�s edge for shark teeth.

I wasn�t very good at finding them. I kept sifting the way I sift puzzle pieces, moving my fingers aimlessly through, watching, waiting for my eyes to fix on The Piece I Am Looking For. I am very good at puzzles. It is almost an instinct with me, to pick up on the pattern or shape or color and just kind of see the relevant piece without really paying attention. But shark teeth are black, and surprisingly small, which wasn�t at all how I�d pictured them, and not often particularly triangular, either. My eyes weren�t calibrated properly for the search.

But it was a good day on the water, brisk and sweeping and smelling of living and dying sea creatures, and it was good exercise walking through the sand and on the shell beds and hopping back from the bigger bay waves. One got my left shoe anyway, but that was only to be expected.

We talked a while with an older man in waders who was very good at tooth-spotting. I think maybe the park payed him to help tourists find their souvenirs on the beach. Well, Kelly talked with him, about nor�easters and tide patterns and working at state parks, and I kept sifting through damp pebbles and shell fragments, listening but not listening. Every so often they would break off a little for a comment about how this must be boring me, or for Kelly to explain that this was my first time at Calvert Cliffs. I kept telling them I wasn�t bored. I thought they were talking about interesting stuff, I just don�t have much of a frame of reference to appreciate it properly. And I wasn�t in the mood to pester them with enough questions to build the frame of reference. I just wanted to find a damn shark tooth, which I finally did, a small one Kelly said was from a lemon shark. Before we left him, our companion gave me a tiger shark tooth, three times as large as any that Kelly or I had found, still sharp and saw-edged enough that I could imagine it as part of a layered set in the mouth of a very dangerous fish. I don�t know why, exactly, but there is something about shark teeth that tempts one to turn them into necklaces or rearview mirror ornaments. Maybe if I think of the right way to suspend it, I�ll succumb.

(It just occurred to me, that word must come from �succubus,� or from whatever the Latin root of succubus is�right, back to the entry�)

Spent last night writing rather than doing laundry, fixing up a story I wrote last week. Have been writing sad stories lately; I am playing with a set of moods I am tired of dwelling on in real life, and I am playing with the definition of a happy ending. For instance, if most of a story is really hard on a character, how small of an ending improvement is required before a reader will walk away thinking of it as happy just because it is better in comparison? I think the sadness of an ending is often what makes it feel real; I want to get away from my tendency to punch the ending with some over-dramatic line. I try to solve too much with my endings. I do that in here a lot, too, I�ve noticed.

Not that it�s bad, exactly. It�s just that I don�t like having unconscious habits.

-stonebridge

previous | next