As a young child, I loved accompanying my stout father, “Mr. Big” to the city sea wall for his regular swim after a long, exhilarating walk along the Fort Groyne, a weathered, narrow concrete erosion barrier bolstered by great granite boulders, jutting out into the ocean like a giant index finger at the far end of breezy Kingston.
While he waded out past the squelchy flats, to exercise in the deeper waters made dull and murky by Amazonian mud, I would stand barefoot on the warm, brown sand beach to shout and squint at him, a mere dot, bouncing up and down in the restless waves. Racing in the surf along the rich shoreline, hair streaming in the steady, salty wind, I would search for shells, stones, sticks, specimens of driftwood and sea glass gems washed smooth by the frothy Atlantic.
Among the flotsam, bright green seaweed and carpet of creepers would gleam the beautifully deceptive Portuguese man-of-war, a fascinating, fragile, frilled bright blue balloon, transparent in the sun with its delicately tucked upper purplish polyp for which it is named, given the ready resemblance to the famed Latin battleship at full sail. The thin tendrils covered with venomous pearl-like cells would extend in a tangled trail of moist curls or be clumped in a thick, dark, mysterious blob.
