ON MOUNTAINS (And some other remarks on geographical preference)

The Diary of Sean O'Connor: A Literary Diary of Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Prosimetra re: Contemplations, Daydreams and Notes

What I believe is my earliest memory begins in the ocean (or was it a bay, a sea, or a gulf? I haven’t the slightest idea regarding the scene’s specifics; I know it’s not one of the Great Lakes because my parents never took me there…), and I’m standing in this water or perhaps walking, in between my mother and father, each of them holding one of my hands, as the low tide was either nearing the furthest it would recede out or just beginning its return in towards the shoreline. (Where is my younger brother in this memory? Perhaps someone is watching him back on the beach? Or babysitting him elsewhere? Or, for some reason beyond my knowledge did I block him out of the memory? I hope not! Was he not yet born? If so, that would make me a one year old at the time; I doubt I possess the capacity to recall life from when I was a mere one year old, though I did read of a woman named Lucy Boyd who told NBC News reporter Bill Briggs she believes her first memory to be of when “she was not quite 2.” Apparently recalling life at one year old however is quite rare. In any event, while there is much I fail to piece together about the enigmatic aspects of this memory, what strikes me most about it is how awestruck I felt in reaction to the water’s shallowness and how far away we seemed from where the waves crashed. I also felt immense jollity as I fixated on the vastness, wideness, and openness of this stunning body of water.

As I aged, through childhood, adolescence, and even early adulthood, my love for the ocean (which was augmented by an extremely lucky string of beach vacations my parents took my siblings and I on) persisted and deepened, and I advanced from desire to live by an ocean to fulfilling that desire — twice!

For awhile, when I was 19, back in the autumn of 2006, having recently dropped out of college, I lived in South Beach, in a small efficiency, I believe, on Bay Road, not more than a forty minute walk from the ocean, where the water looked as emerald-turquoise as the water of Caribbean often does.

At one point I worked for Wings Beachwear, one block from the beach, so on my breaks I’d sometimes walk closer to the water and stare while (though it disgusts me to recall and admit) smoking…usually unfiltered Lucky Strikes or my own hand-rolled cigarettes. For a short time I believed myself to be “living the dream” in “paradise,” fulfilling a dimension of my life’s purpose (simply to live close to the beach) which I’d clung to for virtually my entire life up to that point! (As drawn to the beach as I was, I only ended up in South Beach to follow a girl I thought I was in love with who lived there. I left that beautiful island for New Jersey for the same reason when she transferred to Boston University as she’d only be a three hour train ride or so away).

I also lived, with my wife Ashley, before we were husband and wife, for awhile (back in 2009, when I was 23,) in southern California, just a half hour or so north of San Diego, not more than a fifteen minute drive from the beach. I quickly deemed this area the most beautiful on Earth, outdoing Southern Florida and the Caribbean. All of San Diego county (where Oceanside and San Diego both are) possesses a stunningly complex and sophisticated mix of mountains, valleys, beach, urbanity, rural open space, and diverse plants and population; it has cosmopolitan and earthy essences to it — a special richness which induced within me then, and induces still, as I think back on it, a boiling and almost religious adoration…a feeling van Gogh seems, at least for me, to have captured in “The Starry Night” — reverence for the majestic universe! (“majestic” is my wife’s word for it).

My most intense memory of California...

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