unclemac
Gold Member
- Oct 12, 2011
- 7,234
- 7,350
- Primary Interest:
- Beach & Shallow Water Hunting
Well I’ll tell you, I have been a bit preoccupied as of late. Ma passed away on the 18[SUP]th[/SUP] of December, just a short week before Christmas. She was 94 and had been ailing for a couple of years and darn near demanding to die. She was quite a character and well loved and respected by a lot of people, in fact the U.S. ambassador to Russia used to drop by her house to say “hi” when he would come to town. (God’s honest truth, that). One of the last things she said clearly, as she was laying there near comatose was…”I’m dam glad you can only die once”…making jokes up to the end, just like her…
Well anyway, she had a close bond with the five year old, they would always play cards together, even in the hospital before they sent her home to die, they were slapping cards down like a nun scolding an errant child. He tells her he is gonna miss her, not really understanding what “granny is going away” really means. She turns to him as says, “I’ll always be there.”…something like that. Now you got to understand something here, grandma was always saying that if she could come back, she would come back and if she did come back…we would know.
So after Xmas, I decide that what I really needed to do was take the boy down to the beach house (with his mothers permission of course) and walk the beach some like I used to do with ma ever since I was that age. She was the one that got me into beachcombing and treasure hunting in the first place after all and the reason I even bought a place at this beach is because of her. Well there I am walking the tide flats and the boy is up at the tide line by the cliffs climbing over and under the beach logs like boys like to do. I was about 100 feet away from him and I hear him yelling and screaming like he just got bit trying to break up a dog fight. And then I see him rolling this huge bright green float out from under a log. A green float the like a which I have never seen outside of a novelty shop before. The thing makes a basketball look like a grapefruit.
Now the reason I mention ma, is just this…her favorite thing to find at the beach was these glass floats from Japan. The one thing she always wanted to find was one of those really big ones but she never did. We haven’t found a glass float on that beach in 45 years even though we live there half the time and walk it every day. We find this one, the one she always wanted to find, the very first time we walk the beach after she passes …and it is bright green glass too, the very thing the five year old always picks up when he beachcombs. On top of that when I got back to town I tell “good luck boy” (my 23 year old) about it and he says…”last night I pulled a random book off grandmas shelf that I never saw before to read…it was a book on Japanese glass floats…and it opened to the section on the big ones so I read it.”
Believe what you want, but I know it was her…
Well anyway, she had a close bond with the five year old, they would always play cards together, even in the hospital before they sent her home to die, they were slapping cards down like a nun scolding an errant child. He tells her he is gonna miss her, not really understanding what “granny is going away” really means. She turns to him as says, “I’ll always be there.”…something like that. Now you got to understand something here, grandma was always saying that if she could come back, she would come back and if she did come back…we would know.
So after Xmas, I decide that what I really needed to do was take the boy down to the beach house (with his mothers permission of course) and walk the beach some like I used to do with ma ever since I was that age. She was the one that got me into beachcombing and treasure hunting in the first place after all and the reason I even bought a place at this beach is because of her. Well there I am walking the tide flats and the boy is up at the tide line by the cliffs climbing over and under the beach logs like boys like to do. I was about 100 feet away from him and I hear him yelling and screaming like he just got bit trying to break up a dog fight. And then I see him rolling this huge bright green float out from under a log. A green float the like a which I have never seen outside of a novelty shop before. The thing makes a basketball look like a grapefruit.
Now the reason I mention ma, is just this…her favorite thing to find at the beach was these glass floats from Japan. The one thing she always wanted to find was one of those really big ones but she never did. We haven’t found a glass float on that beach in 45 years even though we live there half the time and walk it every day. We find this one, the one she always wanted to find, the very first time we walk the beach after she passes …and it is bright green glass too, the very thing the five year old always picks up when he beachcombs. On top of that when I got back to town I tell “good luck boy” (my 23 year old) about it and he says…”last night I pulled a random book off grandmas shelf that I never saw before to read…it was a book on Japanese glass floats…and it opened to the section on the big ones so I read it.”
Believe what you want, but I know it was her…
