Foot of Grand Avenue

Our street emerges from the vast expanse of continent, somewhere east of Quincy Street, from mountain pass or flat plateau or narrow dried-up river-bed that leads to Texas and the Dakotas and Philadelphia, from rain-bright highways of the middle States, rutted Georgia roads, from shining, twin-streaked railroad tracks, from a never-never land of politics and visions, from a people too far apart to know each other ,and living too close together for tolerance.

Our street has to be as wide as three normal streets with the traffic it bears, of slow-moving memories, of racing, honking ambitions that rely upon their horns rather than their brakes for safety, of huge pedestrian throngs of daily and nocturnal images, of strange, disrupting beasts of fantasy and heritage that keep trotting diagonally across the way.

The dust of all these carriages and six-ply tires, those hooves and horns and timber-ends dragging in the dirt, this animated history, descends upon our house in soft protective layers, like the fragile moss that sheathes grey boulders from the surf-wash.

On warmer afternoons, when the burden of Grand Avenue stirs the fundamental dust to clouds of intangible commotion, we walk bare-footed to the beach, and we walk straight down the middle of the road, regardless of the houses and half-houses passing by on wheels, or the loud vehicular roar of contemporary fear.

At the foot of Grand, where the sun has warmed the sand all morning and the summer wind blows freshly from the surf, we lie with our heads together on one towel, turned seaward. This feeling of warmth above and below, of moving air, filled with pastel sounds, of the sea in front and the great absorbent blanket of sand about us, is a feeling of infinity, where space and time are a pair of sand-fleas hopping in the miniature dunes we sweep aside or build with our fingers.