...emblem of the beach: a little girl who just learned to walk, wearing a frilly white sunhat, pudgy fingers curled around a small green plastic beach pail, other hand grabbing fistfuls of sand gleefully thrown into the pail..
...two middle-aged men with metal detectors, each a shovel in the free hand, scouring the sands for objects of worth or of curiosity...
...charming curio: the ordinance most routinely flouted in the world appears on the stretch of coast between Westgate and Margate on a sign that reads "no dogs allowed on the beach"...
...middle-aged women with massive sunglasses, blowsy pants and floral shirts, bulbous beaded necklaces enlarged to conceal the fleshiness of their wrists and arms, chattering side by side with small dogs trotting ahead of them at a brisk pace...
...young girls and women walking briskly and with a feigned sense of purpose, dressed with leotard-like pants or jeans they try to wrap around their hips to accentuate their asses, shirts hung low to give passersby a glimpse, glancing to their left or right when passing every single reflective surface (car windows, glass store fronts) to satisfy their insecure selves that they look hotly irresistible or at least passably doable...
...shards of light like tiny spikes deflecting off blue plastic garbage lids, car mirrors, slants of bay- wave, piercing the iris with poignant disregard...
...the quiet bespeckled woman sitting alone on a stone bench close enough to the beach to feel its community; far enough to give her space, a sense of safety, and perspective, book in hand, glancing on thoughtful occasion at the shifting scenes outlaid before her as if for her alone...
...a tallish, handsome man in black slowly trudging along the promenade, black computer case slung over shoulder, his receptive immersion in the environment intermingling with thoughts of the woman he loves for whom he moves in his quest for patterened letter paper, his mind in a paradoxically serene turmoil, replaying her every word and gesture, teasing apart cryptic motions of head and of word, her eyes for him the marriage of bay and sky; of glinting light and little girls; of young beautiful women; of pensive bespeckled and quiet poets; of mature women who will afterwards go home and stitch socks for their grandchildren; of men and their quest for and fascination with mysteries they try to unravel; of the laws of the masses casually slung aside in favour of individual expression; of me and of you and the sum of all good things.
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