Sign in Hepworth, Ont., ten minutes drive from my parents’ year-round home at Sauble Beach, often voted as the province’s best beach, seven miles of brown sugar-pack sand, its texture ideal in summer for sculpture, our favorites on Friday, July 22, is Ella’s Mermaid with sea turtle neighbor and a smooth-skinned nude sand goddess torso done by a blond-haired, blue-eyed male sculptor in his early thirties, even feathered the ribs under her perky breasts, head slightly turned away, looking toward the entrance, a flirt, thinking a brown sexpot, say Brad SandPit, will arrive anytime now, and yes, it reminds of Winterbourne, a blonde beauty herself, but oh so real, and oh so long ago, who has chosen me, a boy three years her elder, the privilege of putting tanning lotion on her back and thighs, my homeboys watching as I slather the lotion on my hands then press them down on Winterbourne’s shapely back, moving up and around when suddenly she shrieks and darts out of my grasp like a fish, shouting, “L! What are you doing? That really hurts! . . . Let me see your hands.” Well, yes, they were full of sand, and her back where I’d massaged her is beet red from the coarse rub she’d suffered from the boy she’d no longer have anything to do with; our friend the sculptor, though, is much older than I was then, and by the looks of him, keen to reel in some lovin’ of his own, perhaps one of the Winterbourne-like girls who are standing around, chatting him up, struck by the sly wonder of the sand goddess, maybe, one asks, Will you do a sculpture of me? Yes, he says, I will. But please, first, come to my place, I’ll need to make a cast. That is what I did to make this one. It won’t take but a minute . . . “Save Our Jails,” the hand-written sign says. “Save Our Jails.”
