I've been writing about some things that have made me sad enough to cry lately, and it has made me think about the question of why. Oh sure, I can think of things you might understand being sad about, such as my grandma Hattie passing away. It's not as if, say, a beach I used to go to when I was a kid,particular television shows I watched as a kid, or anything else thatmay have happened in my past was particularly sad. If anything, those were happy things, and yet at times I will think about them and I will be sad.
I started thinking about the most recent post where I wrote about how I broke my arm at Bonny Doon Beach. I started hunting the net trying to find pictures of that beach because I had a hard time remembering what exactly it looked like. There aren't a ton of publicly posted pictures of that beach for obvious reasons: it is, or at least was, a nude beach. Oh I'm sure people have pictures of that beach in their private collections. But posting pictures of nude people just being nude, well, there's something wrong with that, at least in the good ole US of A.
Anyway, the pictures I was able to find were very different. Specifically, I was trying to see where the cove is supposed to be. There used to be a clearer separation between the cove and the rest of the beach. I remember walking through what was a kind of a large "hole" in a cliff to get over to the cove. Kind of like at Natural Bridges State Park in California, where I stole this picture from:
The more recent pictures I can find of Bonny Doon of the "entrance" to the cove area show the top part of the "natural bridge" completely gone. That along with the fact the beach is becoming a state park and could possibly lose it's clothing-optional status makes me sadder than it perhaps should. And I realized what it was that made me sad about this--this is something I had no reason to believe would change, and here it is changing.That makes me sad--enough to cry.
Going back through some of the other seemingly ridiculous things that have made me cry over the years (e.g. TV Shows, songs, music), it seems that it's the fact that those things are different or totally non-existent now is what bothers me. For example, I can't even begin to explain to my son how cool Sesame Street used to be. Now at least I can show him, thanks to YouTube, though of course he doesn't quite get most of it. I rented one of the Electric Company DVDs from NetFlix and showed him. He liked a few of the bits, particularly the Spiderman stuff, but didn't care for the rest of it.
I'm a gadget freak, and in the world of gadgets, things change quickly. My job, despite having the same employer for eight years, has changed in numerous ways. My kids change every day. It's not as if I can't deal with change. I guess there are some things that are meaningful to me and, for whatever reason, I don't think should change, but do. And in the right circumstances, well, the water works begins.
I guess that's another one of those things that makes me, um, whatever I am.