surfing alone

Breakfast on the beach.


I could do it every morning.  But I don't.


It is a five minute walk to the beach from my house.  Fifteen minutes more to the restaurants.


But I don't do it very often.  When I do, it reminds me why I chose to move to Melaque.  The sun.  The sand.  The cooling morning breeze. The rhythmic surge of the tide -- as if I had been tucked into some somnolent beast's circulatory system.


It is easy to see how the part-timers are seduced into the paradise myth.  I slip into myself now and then.


I stopped at one of the restaurants this morning after tapping the ATM for pesos.  And I had Goldilocks timing.


Starting on Friday (which will be of the Good variety this week), the vacant beach you see above will be chockablock with tourists.


But not your pale snowbird tourists.  These will be Mexican tourists.  For most of them semana santa (Holy Week; Easter Week) begins on Friday and runs through the rest of next week.


When I lived in Greece, no one paid much attention to Christmas.  But, Easter?  That was a different story.  It was the big religious holiday of the year. 


The same is true of Easter in Mexico.  It is the big event.  As long as you ignore the Buffet of Our Lady of the Painted Cape.


And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.  I understand why Christmas makes the northern European theological hit list.  The incarnation is an important point.  Lacking any deity qualifications, it just isn't going to happen to me, though.


But, resurrection?  Now, that is something I can celebrate -- and want a piece of.


Of course, that assumes the Mexican families on their way here have weighty religious thoughts on their mind.


They don't.  They will spend Sunday at mass and the rest of the week on the beach indulging in the sins of the sun.


Me?  I am going to enjoy my breakfast today -- and the surf's pounding solitude.