Staring at water (upcoming book excerpt)

This is my earliest memory:

It’s as though I were there yesterday, or still there.  I am walking on the beach with my Aunt Betsy and mom.  They are holding my hands and we walk in the sand.  They are talking over my head.  We are barefoot.  I am watching the water to my right as we walk in the dry sand along the shore.  We go along like this for a while.  The wind is blowing steady and cool and the sun warms my skin and the sand.  The two sisters sit near a grassy hill.  I see a rusted metal rack of some kind, left there with its bottom buried in the sand.  I cannot imagine what it is for.  I am confronted with my ignorance of man-made things.  I sit with my incomprehension.  I look out at the sea.  It must have been Lake Erie, the Great Lake on the east side of Michigan.  We were living in Utica at the time, 12 miles north of Detroit, in Macomb County.  It may have been a smaller, local lake.  I don't know.

I stand and stare at the waves, the long, wide view of white-capped waves in regular rows.  Out there, the dancing sunlight on the moving water.  I want it to go on forever.  I want to watch forever and be here with this phenomenon forever.  My mom and aunt notice my fixation and make questioning noises.  I pay no attention.  They stand up, both holding my hands, and start to walk me there.  No!  No.  I dig my heels in and resist until they stop.  They don't understand what I am doing.  I can't explain it; that would take me away, too.  I don’t want to move.  I am not afraid of the water.  I want to stay.

And that moment is more deeply felt than much of the content of my daily life.  I hope we all have these moments.  I still do.  When I stop and stand still, anywhere.  They are openings.  They are like the books that I dove into reading as soon as I could.  This beach is from when I was three.  It is eternal and unchanging and I carry it with me.  I don’t think my brother was born yet.  My younger sister was somewhere else.