Orange Beach, AL

Last time it was all hag-hair seaweed and electric jelly fish and circling sharks, but this year the ocean was so clear and smooth it reminded me of this illustration in a children’s book I read a million years ago, a book of Bible stories painted in watercolor. There was one of kindly Jesus and his baffled apostles, Jesus standing up in a small boat on the Sea of Galilee, hands outstretched over the waters, cool and calm and reflecting all the thousand shades of sunset. The ocean reminded me of that, a quiet barely flowing thing, soft and liquid glass. At night the full moon turned the whole thing silver. It looked solid, like you could walk on it, go sprinting across the water and wind up somewhere else. But why would you want to? The night bright and clear, the ocean just like heaven coming down.

My brother, my parents, bellyiesfull of fried fish from a beer joint down the road where we got serenaded for two hours by a guy in University of Tennessee shirt and Umbros and flip-flops, singing Tracy Lawrence and Hootie and the Blowfish and Tim McGraw in a kind of redneck Layne Staley drawl, the exact meeting place between grunge and nineties country. His girlfriend watching from the bar, drinking Corona Light after Corona Light, bored but adoring, while we ate Bay scallops in butter sauce, plate after plate of oysters, fried shrimp, boiled shrimp, gumbo, snow crab, redfish, lemonfish, grouper, key lime pie.

Across the street a half-abandoned shack where you figure you could live your whole life and no one would ever bother you again. But being bothered is kind of the point of it all right? So we pile back in the car and my brother drives us back to the hotel, and I know there will be a family fight and someone will forget or ignore a crucial or trivial piece of information and we’ll all be screaming at each other soon enough.

But now full bellies, full moon, windows down, the long highway under palm trees, the blank black water on either side. You can listen to whatever music you want, it all sounds like heaven to me.