The Humanity! The Humanity...!

6:00 PM.

It’s quiet. Too quiet.

I mean, tomorrow the kids start camps. Q, a soccer camp, where nobody’s going to speak English, and T, the dog training camp, where ditto. And they don’t mention it, they don’t fret about it – they just sit there across the coffee table from each other, Q making a giant maze on a piece of paper, and T making fashion dolls for each member of the family with interchangeable copies of our favorite shirts and outfits. No panic, no worry, no stress.

I, meanwhile, and a wreck. What’s wrong with these kids?

They’re tired enough, I guess. We just got back from a couple of hours at the beach, where they both did a bit of snorkeling and a lot of swimming, followed by a looooot of riding in the car (relative to the distance we traveled, anyway; a sunny Sunday late afternoon is not the time to try to drive Ashford Avenue). They’re probably a bit zonked. But on another level, I’m sure they’re excited. I know I am.

They will both be out of the house for hours and hours and hours.

Not that this hasn’t been great – we’re getting along remarkably well, considering the close quarters and the long hours. It’s nice when you don’t have to go to work for a while and can really get to know your family again, but it is taxing. Though it’s less so than it used to be; I find I’m much more patient, on average, than I was four years ago where the kids are concerned. (Q might not agree; two or three days ago I dropped the biggest shouting bomb on him I’ve probably ever dropped. Just three words (“Salí de aquí!” (Get out of here!)) – he was refusing to leave a room where his antics were causing T to shriek and howl, and I was home with them alone, and…Let’s speak no more of it.)

Anyway. Now it’s 10:08 PM, and the fit has hit the shan a little. Just before bed, Q complained of stomach pain and said his “nervios” had come back, and that he was worried. But we talked him down easily, saying that this was a big city, that the odds are that everybody else arrived at the camp without knowing many other kids, if any, that it was only going to be 4 hours tomorrow, and that this was soccer, after all, a language he speaks, and where he’s going to be valued and coveted as a teammate and as a friend. He went to bed and never came back out. T was even coaching him – she said “My first day of school, I said to a girl I didn’t know, ‘Hey, I like your drawing,’ and now she’s one of my very best friends. So maybe you could say, ‘Hey, I like your moves.’” Pretty darn adorable.

The day itself today was a fine one – a little walk up the street with the kids in the morning to see if we could buy some new buckets for the beach (couldn’t; sat in an air-conditioned McDonald’s and had sodie-pops as a consolation prize), followed by the US-Brazil women’s soccer game.

Look it up. Hoo, baby.

Then, we all piled into the car to go to a beach west of here where the snorkeling is kind of good. I mean “kind of” – there are rocks, and fish. And far fewer waves than the Condado beach. But the water’s cloudy and strewn with garbage from the many, many, MANY thousands of people who crowd this particular beach on weekends. It’s got a convenient parking lot, and bathrooms, and some picnic facilities, but oh my goodness – You could not move, that place was so crowded.

I’m not too familiar with crowded, urban beaches – maybe they’re all like this. And if they are, then that’s what it is that I don’t like: urban beaches with calm water and easy parking that makes them get hyper-crowded. But tell me: Does everybody do this stuff, or is it just here:

* Sit on the beach on beach chairs under a parasol, drinking beer, grilling, gossiping, napping, covered in sand and not really caring.

* Sit in the water, belly-button deep, within five or six feet of a cooler of beer, drinking beer after beer in a little circle of four or five adults, celebrating every drunk beer by filling the can with sea water and dumping if over one’s own head, or the head of one’s neighbor.

* Stand in the water, chest deep, doing the same thing.

* All within eighteen inches – OK, in the water, eighteen inches. But on the sand, not eighteen inches. No exaggeration: On the sand, you are, within eight feet, MAXIMUM - of someone else doing exactly the same thing.

Throw in the kids running and swimming around, the odd game of volleyball keep-‘em-up, and there you have it: Weekend beach fun.

Is that what it’s like everywhere? Is that "The Beach"? If so, I don’t dig it.

Don’t get me wrong: These are the nicest, friendliest bunch of people ever born. No one was rude to us, or bumped into us, or was in any way unkind to us. It’s not that. I think we were surrounded by very nice, open people. But we were SURROUNDED! They were everywhere! And their tolerance for litter, and propensity for producing it, really do rub me the wrong way. It’s just so much PEOPLE, so much humanity, all around us…! T feels the same way I do. She brought it up, unbidden, at supper, and I had to agree.

Anyway, we snorkeled some (Q, turns out, is pigeon-toed even while propelling himself through the water in swim fins), ate some fig newtons, called it a day. Paid for parking rather than circle endlessly looking for a mythical spot – that appears to be another sport that the locals enjoy. I paid the damn $10 just to be done with it.

Home, supper, Mr Bean, bed. Wish us luck: Up early tomorrow (I mean it this time) and off to camp. Fingers crossed…