I'm on vacation, which means that it's raining. The reverse isn't always true, sadly. I'm at Pismo Beach, a fine stretch of sand but the motel lacks a way of reaching it. Just my luck: our "beachfront" inn made no mention on its website that the rickety stairs plunging down a cliffside were an ADA-violating death trap and had been closed for a year.
Fortunately in America, there is no windswept, rugged, gasp-inducing stretch of coastline without its fair shair of blighted motels plopped down like fat, old ladies in bikinis that haven't looked good since Gidget traded in her surfboard for shuffleboard. We're staying in one of these aging doyennes of the dunes, and it's a bright, airy room with a sweeping panorama of the parking lot.
Yes, but, yes, but ... there's a fireplace and two big beds for two small children and their enslaved parents, and we're centrally located to some honky tonk coastal towns that have yet to be ruined by sterile, upscale development. Exploration is on the agenda.
The weather is a weak, filmy shade of gray that shows no signs of lifting. I packed a mix of t-shirts and long-sleeved things, which means I have already run out of warm clothes with six days to go. This is good. Usually I don't bring anything warm and spend my vacations huddling by air vents and car engines, hoping the second law of thermodynamics will see enough heat transferred to thaw the slush in my veins.
I once sunbathed topless in Greece in November, a feat that should've seen me immortalized in stone. But the Greeks aren't doing statues these days and in any case I couldn't convince them I was Aphrodite and not just another horny tourist. I was at a resort town called Matala, which I'll never forget, because when else in my life will I find a hotel room for $3 a night with actual running water, both cold and very cold.
I was 22 and just out of college and was on yet another stretch of my Grand Tour, having frittered away a rainy summer (of course) in London, only to have the clouds chase me all the way through Italy and eventually down to the Red Sea in Israel. Matala consists of a smattering of downscale kiosks and gyro stands in Crete. It held some promise of late autumn sunshine, at least during the day, and nights saw us English-speaking teens and twenty-somethings shivering in bars getting drunk on cheap ouzo (a nickel a shot) and finding thrilling ways to keep warm.
By day, we loaded up plastic shopping bags with bottled water, jars of nutella and fresh bread and hiked to a remote stretch of beach away from the immediate line of sight of the hostels and cafes. In other words, the nude beach, or almost nude, if you were relatively prudish like me.
Somewhere in obscure parts of Canada and the Bible Belt, there are once-handsome men, now probably balding and pot-bellied, who have a secret trove of vacation photos they never let their wives destroy. In them I am posing in all my well-endowed, monokini-clad glory. I wish I could have just one of those photos of me in my prime, all golden delicious and fat-free, a mere 120 lbs., basking on a beach oblivious to the long years of zaftig, self-pitying spinsterhood ahead of me before I'd meet Plosh.
If nothing else, I'd show my college-aged nieces I was actually cool once, if a bit reckless and crazy. I can also impart some hard-learned wisdom:
Sex is expensive.
It's expensive when you have to pay for doctor's office visits to rid yourself of certain microbial souvenirs of the trip whose vectors of transmission cannot be described on a family blog. It's expensive psychologically when you have to think up interesting lies to throw your parents off your scent so you can avoid the told-you-so lectures and head-shaking.
From a self-esteem point of view, though, my escapades were spectacularly cheap.
Sex is still expensive, of course. We're here partly to escape the medical bills from Mugwort's birth -- $3,000 out of pocket so far and counting. And partly we're here so we can dump our beloved little brats on their grandma and indulge in a few minutes of frantic groping in our $99-a-night room. The one with the asphalt view.
The nice thing about sex at my stage in life, besides the fact that I get any at all, is that it's with someone whose name I can usually remember. Plus just in case we stop getting along, we both know where the other keeps their old boxes of photos.
I'm not sure if there's enough Jewish holidays this month. Lemme see ... the New Year, Day of Atonement, this weeklong Eat-in-a-Hut holiday, and next week is Happy Bible Day and some others with names I can't translate. 
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