Mother loved the beach. She loved to swim in the surf, but one time I'll never forget. She'd been drinking her beer and there was a rip tide. She was screaming for help and somehow I went into the surf and helped her struggle back out of the water. I thought my mother was going to drown that day. My Daddy never liked the ocean. He wouldn't swim and was terrified of water since his father had thrown him off the Santa Monica Pier when he was a teenager. "Swim", he yelloed, "Swim, it's the only way you'll ever learn how," and somehow he managed to swim to shore.
This sounds like child abuse to me. When I was a girl mom took us to the Santa Monica pier almost every week in the summertime, so I am very familiar with how far of a drop it is to the water. I'm glad that mom loved the beach because I have lots of memories of good times there body surfing, building sand castles, and riding the carousel on the Santa Monica pier, pictured above. In those days, nobody had even heard of sunscreen. I came home sunburned and sandy every time.
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