"I hope I find a message in a bottle.....message in a bottle.....message in a bottle"
- Sting
To any beach going child, was there ever a more fervent heartfelt wish? How many of us have tried sending a message in a bottle, with the hope that if enough of us sent one, there would be one for us to find?
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Well, I found one. I tell you that I couldn't possibly make these things up, and I don't. Here is the photograph of it, to prove it. And, yes, we have the message. But I'll get to that part.
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No trip to the Sunshine State would be complete without a stop at "my beach", the beach I grew up on. For my entire life, since the time I was born, I spent the summers on Jones Beach and the winters on the shores of Jupiter Island. In those days, no one went to Jupiter Island; no one but me. I spent long long days and many many of them exploring the same stretches of sand endlessly. Back and forth. Over and over. So on this trip, I darted out of the car with a quick, "I'll be back!" and headed straight over the dunes for the white capped water. I found myself annoyed that they added a handicap ramp to the seemingly perpetually growing tiny boardwalk. On my beach, in my time, one slid on one's butt down the hill to get past the dunes to the smooth sand beyond.
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Once past the boardwalk, I was delighted to see that nothing had changed as nothing much ever does when it comes to the Alantic Ocean. I immediately went into "shell hunting mode" and saw that, as usual, there weren't any shells on my beach. And, I looked for Portugese Man O'Wars and saw that, as usual, you'd have to be careful and not get stung. And I looked. And I looked. And then I saw it.
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I thought, "No way. It couldn't be. It would be too good. Someone would have picked it up. It's not like the old days; there are people on my beach. Jeez, there's even a handicap ramp." Of course, I pick it up. And miracal of miracals: it is! Ohmygod, there is a god. The thing was a "message in a bottle"! Covered with live barnacles, all sealed up, with its message curled snuggily inside of it. Ohmygod.
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I quickly took it back to my husband. We gathered quite a crowd; there really are people on my beach these days. We shot a couple of pictures of the thing. Then we cracked it open. No, I did not save the bottle. We were not going to take smelly barnacles on our road trip around the east coast.
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The message is legible. It's hand written in adult script on two sides of a sheet of lined white paper. It's in a foreign language. No, I don't know which one. It wasn't French. We didn't think it was Spanish. We thought maybe it was Italian. It's hard to read because the ink did run a little bit. My best guess is that it might be a prayer for world peace because it has little Christian looking crosses marked on it. But that's blatant speculation. I have no idea at all what it says.
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Yes, I promise that I will try to remember and have my Italian sister-in-law look at it this weekend and see if she can translate it. For everyone who has heard about this 'bottle thing', I promise we'll find out what the message says and I'll be sure to tell you. There have already been alot of jokes because we've waited so long to get the thing deciphered. We tell people, "Well, guess what? If someone's stuck on an island, you sure don't want us to get the message. Our response to the sender of the bottle is: Hope you have alot of coconuts, you're going to be there awhile!"
