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spatch took me to Gloucester for my birthday. It did not rain. It was as hot as the end of summer, but the sky was the clear paling blue of autumn and the sea mirrored over to match; depending on which way you stood as the sun tipped westward, the waves were gold or lavender where they came combing in. We walked the esplanade around the harbor where the bronze fisherman holds his wheel against the centuries and his bronze wife stands with her children staring down the sea; we climbed the boulders of Stage Fort Park and looked out past Ten Pound Island Light. The tide was out and the air smelled of deep salt and seaweed, the rocks uncovered with their shawls and shags of glistening dark wrack. I don't know the name for the black-and-white ducks bobbing out on the water, but cormorants kept going by in flight, long-necked as pterosaurs. I found a sculpture of a triton with a conch, chalky green with verdigris everywhere except his sun-struck shoulders. Someone had left a painted stone like an offering on his upturned flukes. We walked past salt marsh and a small independent cinema to get to dinner at
the Causeway, which served me more clam chowder and fried oysters than I could actually eat in one sitting. We missed our train and spent the next hour and a half roaming Gloucester after dark, which at first felt uncanny with the wind blowing between the streetlights and so many storefronts closed until next summer, but then we stumbled onto the main drag and a second movie house and a record store that was giving vinyl away on the honor system after hours and it felt more like a place people lived in as opposed to visited and maybe not so much like John L. Russell did the cinematography after all. My wristwatch committed suicide into the street but was recovered; it just needs a band that is not literally shredding. I finished Susan Cooper's
The Boggart Fights Back (2018) on the commuter train back to Boston and made notes to myself about a movie. We got home and
handful_ofdust had tagged me a bunch of
Sylvia Scarlett (1935). Rob took pictures of me and I post them because that's one of the ways I remember to live in my body. It was a low-key and a good birthday.
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Right off my wrist!
To be fair, we had both missed our train and were wandering around a seaside town in the off season, so it was thematic.