Ocean Beach notes, made 11/5/2004,for use in my Mathematicians in Love novel. Walking there with daughter Isabel. Photos by Isabel.
Container ships chugging past toward the Golden Gate.
Little birds running like their legs are wheels, their bodies don’t move, how nice it would be to cup one in your hand and feel its heartbeat. The little white ones are plovers, the big ones with up-curved beaks are godwits. Here's some godwits digging in the sand.
The horizon line isn’t straight, its wavy, scalloped, undulating. Giant waves out there, far outsiders.
The waves closer in were smooth and clean, like slow gray hills, with perfect lips and spray blowing back off them towards the sea.
It was a marbled cloudy sky, with shafts of afternoon light coming down through rents in the cloud cover, pillars of light like fingers of God.
;)
Crossed the dunes and the beach grass. Tropical plants in the highway divider, cacti.
The coffee shop is called Java Beach, at the corner of Judah Street and La Playa. They have a checkered floor. Black leather couches. A character sitting there, older man in a flat hat and wearing a red carnation. People doing homework on laptops