Cruising & musing.

"Not Venice," I'd said. "Nowhere with too many people." He had agreed. That was why Sunday morning saw me, the kid and his brother piling into the Mitsubishi (his, not mine) and blasting both the air conditioning and the "Book of Mormon" soundtrack as we wound through Malibu Canyon on our way to Zuma Beach. Zuma, not Venice, because we specifically did not want to default to Venice on this day. We would soon learn that, a mere handful of miles down the coast from where we were at the moment it happened, 14 people were struck by lightning in a freak storm on Venice Beach. The odds of lightning striking a person on the California coast are 1 in 7.5 million. The 14 people on Venice Beach on Sunday afternoon were caught on the business end of a 105,000,000-to-1 set of circumstances. It happened while the boys and I were on the beach, but it didn't happen to us because we didn't want to go where there were too many people.

The astounding splits and cartwheels life does for the seemingly most arbitrary reasons are hard to get my head around sometimes.

We didn't know all that was happening while we were at the beach. We slathered our translucent bodies with pools of sunscreen and stripped off our outer layers and set about absorbing the coast. I ran right away into the brine, followed shortly by kiddo, who was a good sport about all the varieties of kelp I decked him out in.

(He didn't have much choice; I'm his best friend.)

I love swimming in the ocean, as long as I'm close enough to shore to touch the sandy bottom with my toes when I stretch my legs out. I'm a good swimmer, but I haven't figured out how to actually turn into a mermaid and breathe underwater (despite my best efforts since the days circa 1990 when I would sit on top of my parents' car, pretending it was a rock in the sea, and wistfully sing "Part Of Your World"), so "undertow" is one of the many, many items on my mental list of things I'm convinced might kill me.

"Lightning" is on there somewhere, but I love thunderstorms too much to let it rule my decisions frequently. Not a bit did I realize that lightning was a much greater threat to my person that day, and that later, after we'd glutted ourselves on barbecue salmon tacos at Gladstone's and le bestie's cool bro said, "Whoa... I just felt a raindrop," the dark cloud I pointed out had already assaulted 14 people on the beach-- one of them fatally so.

And all I did was play in the ocean and eat fish tacos.

Sometimes it's a coin toss, brothers and sisters.