Judging people on the beaches of South Carolina

I am going to eventually blog about going home to South Carolina, where my family and I valiantly marched from the mountains to the sea and where I: consumed radical vegetarian fare in Asheville with the priest who married me and my husband 25 years ago; took my kids to see the Girl Scout camp where I got homesick 45 years ago; introduced my family to relatives in Boiling Springs I haven't seen in 40 years; watched my uncle who is 85

tell a whole new crop of cousins about his grandfather who is my great grandfather and my children's great-great grandfather; surprised my old newspaper buddies from The State Newspaper in Columbia; enjoyed brunch with my soulmate, lifelong amazing first babysitter of my children, while watching her now with her own babies,

 and watched my children hold her babies,

and felt the circle of life in the estuaries along the coast.

But first I'm going to write about a ping moment I had on the beach.

This post is brought to you by me, prompted by my moment, but forced into words this morning, this first morning back in Ohio, by the writing of my friend Colleen in her hilariously brilliant and tender The Family Pants.

I, like you, Colleen, work hard at not judging people.

I had a mean-as-a-snake grandmother who was orphaned in the back hills of SC who talked about everybody like she was perfect and they were not. There was something wrong and bad about everybody she knew.

I have been determined not to be like that.

Meanwhile, there are categories of people I do not like -- namely, rednecks and very wealthy people.

So there I was in the land of the Confederacy this past week. We stayed at a high-rise in Garden City

at the edge of Myrtle Beach and if you've never stayed at Myrtle Beach or close to it, you will never know how many people there are to judge.

One morning, I forced myself out of bed go to down to the beach at 6 a.m. to take sunrise pictures with my big honking Nikon equipment. I am patient. I am kind. I am sitting in the wet sand and lying in the surf. My PJ pants are soaked. I'm shooting and adjusting settings and working the OM of the sea as I  wait for the sun.

Just as the timeless ball of life comes dripping up from the horizon, this elderly, Walmart couple walks right into my field of vision. T

The woman has her hands in her pockets casually and is trailing her toes in the water while her husband is behind her snapping pictures with a pocket camera.

You can see the woman skirting the edge of this photo below, while I try desperately to compose the sun with the sea without getting a single one of her hot pinkie toes in the frame.

I keep attempting pictures, while feeling dumbfounded that these people have waltzed into my picture on the only day I will wake for the sunrise.

I think to myself I should just go up to this intruder and ask her politely to move.

Instead, I march 50 yards to the left of her, so I can clear my path to the sun.

I am empathetic enough, even though I'm also pissed - and judging of their obvious lack of education -- not to get right in THEIR line of vision.

Meanwhile, they can't help but see me.

I shoot a few more, then turn my camera back toward them to get shots of the pier.

And then I see that they are suspended in action. They are staring at me without moving. I turn my camera back to the sun.

Next thing I know the man is standing beside me.

I have no idea how this is going to go.

But the man is smiling.

"That one of them cameras you can see right away in?" he asks.

"Well, yes," then, "Do you want to see?"

We stand there quietly for a few seconds looking together at my photos.

"My wife and I were watching you and we thought, 'Boy, she's got some kinda lens there. I bet she's getting some nice pictures. These are real nice."

I thanked him, and then, offhandedly thought to be conversational, to tell him that I had an even bigger lens in my camera bag on my shoulder, but that I was afraid I'd miss the sun if I took the  time to change lenses.

"Well, it's supposed to be a clear day tomorrow, too," the man reassured me, smiling. "You can always try again with your other lens."

What a good thought from this man I pronounced as having no educated thoughts in his head.

I saw his wife, standing off in the distance.

She waved and smiled and it occurred to me, right then and there, that some people are, yes, less school-educated than others.

Some people are filthy rich.

But everybody is part of the human condition. Everybody has a soul and a life that precedes my chance encounter with them. Everybody has thoughts and feelings, a mother and a father and a story.

I walked along the beach the rest of that morning after my encounter, looking differently at the other human souls who -- just like me, though perhaps for different reasons --  had intentionally risen before dawn.

 I took pictures of a woman collecting shells with a little girl with an orange bucket.

I took pictures of two doughnut-eating men fishing in the sea.

And then I thought, what would it be for me to not just take their pictures, but listen to their stories?

And so I went up to the shell-collecting woman. She had very few teeth in her mouth, even though she was maybe about 40.
The woman told me the little girl was 11, they were from Baltimore and this was their first trip to South Carolina.  The little girl was so excited, she roused her aunt at 5:30 to get up and get out into the day.

"We're going to make a collage," she said

I went up to the fishermen on the beach, who told me he was fishing for perch and whiting. He showed me the shrimp he uses for bait and told me the worst thing about fishing with shrimp is that it gets pulled off the hook in the surf.

I asked if he and other man were brothers.

"He's my son. Forty years old," he said.

"Wow, you don't look old enough to have a son that old," I told him.

He didn't. He was a handsome man with the prettiest blue eyes over his tank top and big belly.

He got to chatting then, asked me if I heard about the crazy guy in the car flying through the parking deck last night. I asked him if he heard about the golf cart wreck down at the state park. We told our stories and then we both said to the other "Have a nice day."

I went on up to my room after that, holding hopes that this would last,  that I would be a better person, a richer person, a more learned person for more than just those moments on the beach.

I went out to the balcony overlooking the ocean. The man was down there, looking up at me. I waved. He waved back.