GRIEF, FRIENDSHIP, JOY AND A COLONY OF CORMORANTS. WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE?
Cormorants and friends enjoying the sunshine (Author photo)
Hope your holiday was this fulfilling. This full of Life.
I hadn’t actually realized it was Labor Day. Just wanted to visit a friend who’s dealing with Bulbar ALS. Another mutual friend had lost her widely beloved husband several weeks ago and agreed to make the quick trip from San Francisco to Southern California so we could all do a little grieving — and a bit of talking, laughing and more — together.
This meant booking an early morning flight on Friday, beginning with figuring out how to summon a Lyft from Judith’s house to my place and thence to the airport. OK, everybody else in the world knows you just click on that little plus sign and a ‘second stop’ line appears. But those of us who grew up using a dial phone to call a taxi have to figure this out. By Googling “How to call a Lyft with extra stop,” watching a couple of bewildering, more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-hear videos made by people talking too loud and too fast — and finally discovering the little plus sign purely by accident.
It is not easy being Elderly (me, not Judith) in the Age of Technology.
It is, though, a wonder and a delight to discover a travel soulmate. We both just love airports. We know it’s weird. But we have loved airports forever. Judith, because she traveled alone when young and thus quickly learned to slip into the restroom, apply lipstick and go from there. Me, because airports have been associated with pure joy and adventure from the first one I ever met — a quonset hut in a Richmond, VA field — regardless of whether I was there for a harried business trip or a vacation in Amsterdam.
So we began with a leisurely latte and airport-special snack — gag, if you must — before taking off for a flight along the California coast. If a flight along the California coast doesn’t do your heart good, something is seriously wrong with your heart.
Early morning sunshine above San Francisco (Author photo)
We found our friend, who weighs about as much as two cormorants (more about them later; they don’t weight a lot) looking like she just stepped out of a fashion photo, and with a smile to match the sun.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Bulbar ALS, it robs you of the ability to swallow and, eventually, talk or eat — little things like that which would diminish enthusiasm for dressing beautifully, or smiling, for that matter, for most of us. My friend Lynne is not most of us.
Can you find anybody who looks sick? Or bereaved? (Author photo)
We had a brief visit in the sunshine of Lynne’s garden before heading to our hotel in La Jolla. Which brings me to the excuse for this brief essay, other than showing off my gorgeous friends, mentioning a lovely dinner with the two people who make End of Life Choices CA work, and sharing the view from Seat 34-A:
How can you not share a photo such as this one with the waves breaking toward nonchalant cormorants? Not to mention the other hundreds of nonchalant smaller birds on their own adjacent bit of beautiful coastline?
So impressed was I with my photographic skills (thanks, iPhone 16) that I looked up the species to make sure these are actually cormorants. (If they’re not, please do not deal that crushing blow in the comments.) Cormorants, of which there are about 40 species, go back to roughly the beginning of time as we know it. They are just about everywhere on planet earth they can hang out, dive underwater for their dinner (just about any kind of fish, including eels thankyouverymuch) and sun themselves at their leisure.
Although Wikipedia informs us that “the origin of the family is shrouded in uncertainties,” cormorants have been around since at least the Early Oligocene or the Late Paleogene, whichever came first — I’ve already admitted that it took a long time to figure out how to order a two-stop Lyft; I will not go into how ignorant I am of paleontology.
But what I do know is that these fascinating birds have populated the planet since long before we humans started warming up their oceans, and will in all probability be around long after we have all washed away. Or turned to dust, whichever you choose.
It is somehow comforting to think how little it matters that stupid men build golden monuments to themselves, or cruel men seek to dominate their fellow humans when Mother Nature, or the divinity of your choice, ordains that there will always be deep blue oceans crashing gracefully onto endless shorelines. And always, cormorants soaring above.
The rest is just noise.
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