Part Five of Joan and Amy's Adventures in San Diego: Going to the beach (in a caftan) is the pits

Aside from the sand, the sweltering sun, and the seaweed...I love the beach. I even purchased a swimsuit caftan, anticipating that I would be spending time seaside along San Diego's sunny shores. But, because of my height and width, the plus-size cover-up barely covered my plus-size posterior. (pronounced boo-taye in the Mosiman house. "Not by me," Brad corrected. "Or me," Savannah added.).

"I think it's cute," Sydney reassured me, "I love the orange fringe at the bottom." "I look like I'm wearing a set of drapes," I complained. Joan shrugged, "If Scarlett O'Hara could do it...why not you?" Thus bolstered, I squared-up my shoulders and, with chin held high, slogged through ankle-high sand to claim our spot on the crowded beach.

"Isn't it just called a cover-up?" Sydney asked as we wrestled beach chairs, boogie boards, backpacks, and coolers across a seemingly endless desert, "I've never heard of a caftan." "You also never heard of a hassock but we had one in our livingroom for your entire childhood," I gasped, heat blisters forming along the bottoms of my tender feet. "Is it pronounced caf-tan?" Joan wondered, walking like a cat with tape on her feet, "or caft-an?" "Is it ka like the Egyptian god or ca as in catapult?" Sydney added with interest. She was mastering the art of beach navigation by mimicking the familiar movements of a marching band drum majorette. I was really beginning to regret this purchase.

We finally set up our spot. Unable to at first trust the unwritten code of the beach, Joan initially stood guard over her $12 watch and my cell phone from the early 80s until the lure of the sea was too much. I stayed out in the water until the ocean knocked me down. Returning to my beach chair, I read and mindlessly consumed cherries, placing each stem and pit carefully in my sandal. "A lady NEVER lets her pits show," I told Sydney, bestowing yet another timeless nugget of priceless womanly advice upon my daughter.

I watched benignly as Joan and Sydney whooped it up in the Pacific. We were easily the loudest ones in the ocean. Suddenly, a stomach cramp of epic proportions came upon me like a rogue wave and I was tossed from my beach chair like so much flotsam. I went fetal on my sand sheet. "Mom! Are you okay?" Sydney yelled, having spotted my sudden disappearance from the sea. "Too...many...cherries..." I moaned.  Of all the ways I'd imagined going, a fruit overdose hadn't even made my top one hundred. Sydney and Joan immediately began packing up.

"Wait," Sydney said, "Mom's saying something."

Joan leaned over my prone figure, pressing her ear close like my head was a giant shell and, if she listened hard enough, she would be able to hear the ocean AT the ocean. Living the dream.

"What is it, Amy?" she asked, "What can we do?"

"Don't forget my caftan," I whispered.