The Island

“Maybe you'll write about us in your blog,” the bespectacled man said. I turned around, bewildered. Beside me, Atch was sitting on a piece of driftwood in the sand, doing his drunken master thing and insisting that some of the rechargeable batteries still had power in them.

“She will.” Atch slurred empathically, before I even had a chance to open my mouth.

The man continued, “My wife, she's blog-crazy. She reads all blogs.”

I gave the bespectacled man an embarrassed grin. “Maybe I will,” I amended.

In my arms, Eli was whining. On the sand, Atch finally gave up trying to stuff the batteries into the camera.”They're all dead, Aif,” he mumbled, fumes of Tanduay 15-years carried by eddies of ocean air to my face. I wanted to tell him “I told you so”, but the bespectacled man was still lounging on the railing behind us, playing host.

It was the afternoon of our first day on the island resort, Atch's company's summer outing. His colleagues were scattered all over the sandbar: soaking, kayaking, snorkelling, drinking. Woog was showing off his new swimming skills and was half-floating under the stone bridge of whose railings the resort manager was now resting his prodigious bulk on.

This guy doesn't know me, I told myself, transferring Eli's 10-ton weight to my other arm, he's guessing I might have a blog, probably on the off-chance he'll get free publicity.

And isn't he the same guy who overcharged us on the kayak rental nearly ten years ago? I squinted, trying to remember, but my memory flitted away on the salty sea breeze.

I was on this very same island one summer almost a decade ago, pre-Atch. With an ex-boyfriend, also pre-Atch. There were brightly-coloured starfish by the hundreds, then. And the kayaks didn't have half patched-up holes, or missing paddles, or absent lifevests. And the tennis court didn't look like an overgrown Celtic ruin, and the sand around the “floating” cottages was free of squilchy grey mulch.

Still, I didn't want to offend our host. I was here as a guest of the guests, after all. I was here for Woog and Eli, the former having the time of his life, the latter having set foot on the seashore for the first time.

Where am I again?

Poor Eli. He wailed on the aqua-bike. He screamed aboard one of the kayaks. And now the cold waves and the whipping sea wind were giving him second thoughts. Give it a chance, pet, I urged him silently.


Woog, meanwhile, dug a hole in the sand and asked me to bury him. We gathered and discarded countless shells and other sea creature skeletons before it finally turned dark, and we headed back to the lodge where I equally cajoled, bullied and manhandled the boys to shower and change.

That evening, Atch sweated off the alcohol at the grill, fanning at the hot coals under the beef while a tropical storm raged outside, and lightning fandango-ed across the sky.

“Boot!” Eli exclaimed, pointing to the moored jetski. “Boot!” he squealed at the three anchored outrigger watercraft. He and Woog passed the time getting in the way of food preparation and popping mixed nuts into their non-stop mouths. At least Atch's officemates found my sons cute and adorable. Or maybe they were only being polite.

We woke the next morning to a mildly sunny day, and despite my desperate urging, the boys hardly bothered with breakfast before trooping to the sand, buckets and shovels in hand. Like a miniature sumo wrestler, Eli stomped down on every sandcastle Woog tried to build, and Woog wailed each time, pushing his brother away with his feet. Finally Atch pulled the baby aside and dug a depression on the sand for him to trample on.

Across the sandbar, the loans collector and the office manager were gingerly lifting sea urchins from the water with a paddle and laying them on a kayak. Woog ran off to see them at work, facinated by the spiny black balls undulating on the hot pink plastic. But they weren't spiny for long. The gatherers broke off the poisonous but strangely fragile points and hauled the creatures away in one of Woog's pails. “The new bucket meal,” the loans teller announced. Apparently, they tasted very well with rum, whiskey or beer. “Raw too,” the office manager added. One of the spines had pierced his palm and he went off to find a pair of tweezers.

The urchin with the urchins

Would they have harvested sea urchins if there were plenty of starfish around? I wondered. For that matter, would they have eaten starfish? Urk.

Lunch was uneventful, though I saw no sign of sea urchin flesh on the table. Later, everyone packed up to board one of the pumpboats that would take us back to the mainland. “Boot!” Eli gurgled sleepily. He and Woog seemed none the worse for wear after their island adventure.

But the boys slept all throughout the two-and-a-half-hour road trip back home, Woog cramping my left shoulder and the top of Eli's head lodged hard under my chin. This is the beginning of the end, I thought. And I bade a wistful farewell to summer days when I would go away to the beach to unwind, splash, soak up the sun and have fun. It's my babies' turn now. And I never felt more of a parent than I did at that very moment. A very exhausted, ancient and windswept parent, but a parent nonetheless.

Back home, Atch swore loudly when he found a dent at the rear of the car, something he had tiredly overlooked when he claimed it at the port where we had parked. And I swore just as loud when I put on a shirt that brushed against my fiery red back. In my zeal to protect the children from the sun, I had smothered them in sunscreen and forgot to put some on myself. Behold, here grimaces a sunburnt parent.

And Atch plans to take us to another island next summer. Oh, help.

*****

Much later, I remembered the bespectacled man, and in fairness to him, I did write this post. So there.