Unlike most people who go to Napa, our first outing wasn't to a tasting room. No sir. We have spent our years together walking on beaches from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts; from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. So we headed straight (well, with a small detour to Jack London's ranch) to the coast, and took the first beach road we saw.
The beach we found was a good kite-flying beach. Which is what you say when the wind is so stiff you could lean on it. It also possessed cute little bunny-hill waves, perfect for surfer dads to teach their soon-to-be surfer kids the rudiments, and several wet-suited dads were indeed out in the breakers with kids and boards. It wasn't a good beach for shells, glass, or birds and animals, though, which are my principal beach interests.
Nevertheless, it was a beach and we were there, so we walked down its bare sand, just at the edge of the waves' farthest reach. There was no possibility of finding shells--as I said, the beach was practically scoured clean, with only a dark, smooth, oval stone here and there along the sand to show that the ocean was giving up anything. Still, I kept my eyes down, out of habit as much as anything. We had walked awhile when, in a moment of what I can only call synecdoche because I am entirely incapable of remembering the word "serendipity" any time I'm trying to describe a serendipitous moment*, I saw an almost-perfect sand dollar at my feet—the largest one I've ever found in our years of beach-combing.
I took it as a happy omen for the next twenty-five years.
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*"K," I'll say, "what's that word, begins with an "s," means "happy acc-"
"Serendipity," he will reply immediately, because in our family he is the keeper of that word. Just as I am the forgetter of that word.
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