Swimming with the Fishes

Today being the first day I've had to go have some fun, my first priority was to hit the beach - even if I did have to go without my surfboard. My car hugged the sharp turns leading me up and down the dusty mountains roads into Malibu. Happy to find a "free" parallel parking spot on the road, I grabbed by cowgirl hat and beach towel and headed down to the waters of a very beautiful Zuma Beach. (parallel parking with oncoming traffic will necessitate a whole other blog.)

Passing a series of occupied volleyball nets staffed with college-aged Barbies and Kens, I found the perfect spot to lay my one and only white bath towel from Target perpendicular to the crashing waves. The beach was fairly uncrowded when I arrived around 11 am - late for Florida beach-goers, early for So Cal. Within the next hour I was surrounded by young prom queens maximizing the last few days before school starts.

Did you know that tomorrow is Rick Springfield's birthday? I wouldn't have known either except one of the girls behind me was bragging to her friends that she was invited to his party. Her parents are friends of the family. I would have laughed at her, inside of course, except I was too proud of her for actually knowing who he was - being that she was too way young to be "Jesse's Girl." She was more like "Jesse's Granddaughter."

Oddly enough, I never got hot lying out, reading the latest issue of PC World Magazine (don't ask). But I decided to go for a swim anyway. I already knew the water was cold based on the nasty expletives coming out of these beautiful girls' mouths as they returned to their towels. The smooth, perfectly blue water is deceptively cold. It took my breath away. Three foot waves crashed hard right on the shore so it was swim for your life in between the sets and pray you don't get crushed on the way back in.

As soon as I decided I'd had enough of swimming in an ice box, I heard screams coming from the shore. Looking to my right I saw several fins bobbing up and down in the water. My first thought: the one time I don't have my surfboard and there are sharks in the water. But they weren't sharks. They were dolphins. HUGE dolphins - bigger than any I'd seen on the East Coast. They swam towards me with lightening speed and several other people dove into the water to swim out to them. They headed parallel to the shore until they saw us - about a dozen of us treading water with great anticipation. They made a U-turn and headed back the way they came, surfacing every few seconds to reveal their location.

It didn't matter what I did the rest of that day. I thawed out on my towel, then drove home so I could wash it and have something clean to dry myself off with when I got out of the shower.