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Show Go Love/222 The woman looks at me, deep into me with brown eyes. All day long I've been meeting people that look at me this way, like they know who I am, the person I've forgotten being. She smiles a little and I see her slip three extra oysters into our clear bag. "I sure hope not, sweetie." She hands me the shellfish, the sea grass they're wrapped in shining bright green I carry out the scent of bread and water, the vision of my with the sun on her cheek, eating the buttered muffin, the sea spread out over behind her while we drive. There's rain in the morning, then the sun is out, a chill wind. I wear river shorts, wake my daughter, and the two of us carry the surfrod and a cooler out to low tide, walk a half-mile down through pools of sea anemone and starfish, these fantastic reds and blues. We're barefoot, looking out over the surf southwest, the sun rising behind our backs, warm already, though this wind is a knife, and I take another fleece from the backpack and put it on Lara. Three Chinese men in full waders and storm parkas, wooly caps pulled tight over their heads, surffish the second breaker, a hundred yards or more out in the cold shallow water. They're good casters, all three, but the one on the south, he's in a zone. We sit cross-legged on the beach and watch, my own rod leaned against the cooler and my daughter in my lap, breathing, eyes full open, nighttime on her breath. And this Chinese man whose in a zone, I watch him bait and cast a double rig just like I use for Blues, trot three strides into a wave and let fly, the lead and hook and bait zinging fifty, sixty yards out to the splash. He tightens up, waits. Thirty seconds pass. Then the eleven footer bends hard in the middle, does a buggy-whip as the man backs up the surf, cranking, keeping the rod tip high. Two big flat fish, silvery at this distance, dance on the line-double- trouble. Two at a time, they put the bend on the man's rod and I see them flap when he |