Y'all. It is so beautiful here it almost hurts to walk around in the rain. Streets paved with flagstones, earthquake bolts, ironwork. It's stunning and old and tony. The sideways houses manage to be patrician and shabby. I took a walk today and got distracted following the sound of bagpipes that stopped abruptly just as I reached where I thought they were coming from.
We ate roasted oysters tonight at a cinderblock shack that's been roasting them for over 70 years. The wooden tables have uneven squares cut out of the middle of them, underneath which lurks a trashcan, and the cook comes around with a bucket or a shovel and dumps piles of freshly roasted oysters across the table for you. As you consume the oysters, harvesting them by carefully prying apart just-separated shells, you toss the shells in the trash.
It's a scene I've been part of, off and on, since I was a kid.
My brother is pretty awesome. Like any sibling, I know enough about him that I could probably tell you a little more than just "awesome", but we'll stick with that for public consumption. Tonight, I thought about how well he's mastered the art of ritual. This weekend, this birthday celebratory weekend, has a lot of known points of contact. Meals will be consumed, people will shop, oysters will be eaten. Every time it happens, there's a hand reaching across all the years we've done it before, years where I wasn't there and years I was, moments where new people were introduced and yet everything remained the same in its essence.
He's caught on to this, somehow, caught onto the way the structure of sameness allows everyone a moment to remember everything that came before and yet still be right here right now.
Happy birthday. It's a really really beautiful place, the coast of South Carolina. Check it out sometime.
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