Of Unicorns and Firemen

{{While I think of words to write, this is what I’ve written…}}

{{Sometimes I really miss this place…}}

Yesterday, the girls and I walked to the beach. We’ve discovered the most wonderful “secret” passageways leading down to Sunset Cliffs and are spending our time exploring them. There are rusty, rickety metal stairways, cement blocks crumbling into the sea, huge boulders piling the beach, “Do Not Enter” and “Beware” signs, and labyrinth evil count villas perched on hillsides, which naturally, we avoid at all costs.

Lucky for us, these mysterious lanes to the sea are just two blocks from our home and it’s been loads of fun scrambling down rocks and dirt, avoiding the surging tide, and tinkering in shallow pools to frolic with sea anemones. This most rugged stretch of beach is my heartsong and depending on the light, the ocean looks like diamonds or coal. If you’re a children’s writer, noodling on your next fantastical plot point, as I am, this seascape is the best thing in the whole wide world for imagination generation.

Anyway, as I was saying, Toots (the evil count creator) and Booger (the “Beware”-sign ignorer) were making our way to the sea lanes, when we happened upon a big red firetruck full of beefy and handsome fireguys, which the girls being girls, waved to enthusiastically. The firemen, all of who popped their heads out a window to wave back, smiled paternally at the two little girls so obviously besmirched with the truck and the attention.

‘Twas a beautiful thing, too. The girls full of rapt adoration and awe for the firetruck and men saving lives, and the beefcakes all tender and gooshy because the girls reminded them of their own daughters at home.

Then Booger, normally the shy one, lifted her dress and flashed Barbie Snow Princess underwear to the entire gaggle of firemen.

We made it through the stunned silence and confusion and hands not waving anymore, and ended up having a perfectly delicious adventure tossing pebbles into frothed waves hiding all manner of mermaids and salt water unicorns.

The moral: Sometimes you just gotta move on. There may be rust and crumbling, and there you are on a road, when an unexpected flash is given or gotten, but a unicorn is usually right around the corner.