Last Friday I found myself standing on an empty windswept beach on a day that should have been warmer (and later was; as they say, if you don’t like the weather in Sydney, wait a few hours). I watched the grey waves batter the shore and wondered if I was in the right spot. So I called the school, and they told me I was. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a parade of kids with surf and boogie boards crested the dunes and spilled onto the sand. Among them was The Kid, holding one end of a yellow surfboard while his friend held the other.

For the next hour I watched as he and the other kids were instructed and guided, on the shore and in the water. I talked to the lead surf teacher and gave him the TK Bio, Brief Version, and watched as he proceeded to take TK under his wing, surfing with him four times.

A few days later I was at another beach, sunny one this time, just down the road. I only had a few minutes to spare because Little Brother wanted me back at the LEGO birthday party ASAP so I could…watch him build things? Or eat cake? Both of which I did when I returned, but until I did I trudged through the sand among the countless other Saturday beachgoers. Another day, another beach, another view.

Monday, my view was from a stage. Armpits soaked, looking out at an audience of mostly familiar faces, talking about a subject I’d thought I was an expert on until life showed me I wasn’t. I told a story, our story, Brief Version, and watched over the minutes and subsequent days as people regarded me with a new recognition, seeing their own story in what I’d said. Which is really the whole point of telling stories, isn’t it?

A couple of days later, The Husband and I were walking through the city–not the one where we met and were engaged, but our current one. The one that celebrates Christmas in the summer sun, the one where the department store windows were shiny and glittery and blasting “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” while we wore sunglasses and sweated our way down Market Street, toward a lunch to which I’d been invited after landing on a writing award shortlist. Once we made it inside the venue, skewing the average age and gender by our mere presence, we sat among six other people and drank wine and sort of ate lunch (we don’t like fish or lamb) and watched as older ladies tried to work a zoom connection and pushed walkers around the room and one got lightheaded and proceeded to spend the lunch lying on a couch with her feet propped up but made sure they filled her red wine glass and one speaker said she thought she might not make it onstage but Mylanta had done the trick and TH and I just kept looking at each other trying not to laugh. I did not win the award but the husband of the oldest writer at our table told me it was clear I wasn’t old enough yet and then dessert came and I couldn’t help wondering and knowing how I’d ended up in yet another place I never could have imagined. A place with just a shitload of wigs.

We get the life–and the kids, and the views, and the rooms–that we’re given, not the ones we ordered from the catalog. How inconvenient. How startling. How beautiful, that on a Tuesday night, I’m standing beside a friend at a venue filled with five hundred people singing the same song–which is sort of the point, isn’t it?