Mom caught a glimpse of the sea from the highway, a bright blue sea that looked so inviting. Then she made a shocking admission, even though she had lived a stone’s throw from it, she very rarely went to the beach because she was told that that’s where bad people hung out…people with loose morals. Mom’s brothers, who probably did their fair share of hanging out at the beach, would only permit and her cousins to go to the area of the sea where it met the river since it wasn’t technically “the beach”.
“Wait a second” I said. “We have pictures of dad at the beach when he was younger. What’s so immoral about the beach?” Mom only said that her brothers forbade it, and back then she was in no position to challenge them. She remembers going there with them and seeing women who, in an attempt to be modest, would go into the water with their white sundresses on completely oblivious to the fact that you could see “everything” when they got out; a 1950’s version of a wet t-shirt contest.
Dad had his own memory of the beach. He was about eighteen and he and some friends had driven to Lignano on the Adriatic coast to spend the day full of sun, sand and surf. Dad caught the eye of some older German woman who approached his and asked him if he could teach her daughter to swim. Dad claims that he didn’t indulge the woman’s request for fear of two things: dad doesn’t exactly know how to swim and probably would have drowned the poor girl; and, dad was not keen on teaching a teenage girl how to swim in front of her mother. What would happen if dad touched the girl in the wrong place…he didn’t want to experience the fury of a German mother.
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