The beach at Ocean Park

I always wanted a Richard Diebenkorn painting of his neighborhood

On days when I’m working at my home

When I look for an escape

There is a walk past the church

Past the defunct Starbucks where on the second floor

James Turrell once experimented with light

Past the Library

Past the Boarding House surf shop

Left on Ocean Park Boulevard

To Ocean Park beach

There is always some kind of theater going on there.

Theater that has little to do with the ocean.

A melange of people – like New York’s central park

A sandbox with toys between concrete and the sea.

An interstitial space with much license and little dialogue

Under the boardwalk, down by the sea….

A string of stages - slack wire walkers balancing, undulating in metronomic gyrations, before diving spread eagled into the sand.

… even so …

It’s the cold Pacific where not many people go into the ocean

The sounds of the waves barely filters through voices.

Seagull screams come in torrents of alarm, usually unseen.

Weight lifters in understated competition with one another.

But not much attention from ten year olds or parents carrying an overload of orange, green, blue, red beach paraphernalia.

A stream of sandy foot traffic crossing

A short distance further along the concrete path - there is a fenced space of the beach - it says “wild area “- its a place left to be wild - to see what happens, to see if it will return to whatever it was before we came here.

The smooth beach blown up into small dunes, carved by the wind , sea greenery grown in random tufts, stunted by the wind.

Long ago when I was much younger, I wanted to hike north along the water’s edge for the length of California - along cliffs and beaches, through upscale beachfront yards, across wide river mouths, never away from the ocean. Never did it, and probably never will.