Mud Money Days

“I was a terrible child,” Jackson says to me. We’re on a beach–Singing Beach–which is a short walk from a train station called, romantically, Manchester by the Sea. “Very bossy. I used to boss everyone around. My sister was my little minion, until she figured it out and escaped.”

He goes on: “At the beach, I used to make coins out of mud and make the other kids pay with them for things, and I would charge interest since I invented the currency.”

I had been dragging my knuckles over the sand lazily, listening, but at this I stop and sit up. “I did that too,” I say. “Except I used to make pies from the ocean mud.” Sitting there among the soft sound of the lowering tides weaker waves, I can still feel the silty, silky, somewhat wretched consistency of that mud. You had to dig to find it right where the waves crashed. You had to defy the undertow for it, but it was worth it because it made the best pies. “I used to batter them in the softer white sands farther back on the beach, and bake them in the sun. I used to distribute them, proudly, to my family when they were done. And I distinctly remember being a bit baffled that no one wanted to eat them.”

This is one of those memories that hits you like a bright, sudden color. One of those all-encompassing, transporting memories that sinks you into a synchronized feelings of nostalgia, bemusement, and–in my case–humiliation. I think many children do these things–invent currencies and languages and make soup out of water and salt and pepper at Friendly’s with their annoyed parents–but I am fairly sure that I was not a child for many of these shenanigans. I’m actually certain that I was close to 11 by the time I cut out this particular maniacal performance, and without must strain I can think of many other odd rituals that I persisted in well into my teen years, and my twenties.

Honestly, it took a substantial amount of energy not to bake Jackson a mud pie right then and there, and then berate him with quite, simmering guilt when he–dependably–would refuse to ingest it.

For the rest of the day, I think about how I am literally just the worst person.

Later, we are eating ice cream and watching the boats bob in the low-tide harbor. The sun is sinking in the sky, and the mounds of exposed mud in the shallower regions are glowing a grainy orange. The conversation has returned to our childhood bossiness which, if you’ve ever met Jackson, makes no sense; meanwhile, if you’ve ever met me, it makes complete sense.

“Mud money,” Jackson says. “Mud money days.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about that. Mud Money Days. I think about how strong the urge to reenact that particular reverie was, and slowly I discover why: at the age of twenty-three, with a college degree under my belt, the makings of a career holding me stable, and the aspiring dream of writing novels, I am absolutely, irrevocably, still in the business of vending mud pies.

That’s what writing is, isn’t it? Or what it might be? I usually hate long, drawn out metaphors about writing and The Craft, as though the art of putting the right words next to each other is an esoteric pursuit with an inscrutable, mystified philosophy that only a few people might be privy to, but this one seems to fit me aptly.

I think a lot of writers are pompous (myself included), but I think that if you stripped away the pomp and ornamental egos, you’d actually just find a bunch of children toiling under a hot sun, slapping sand and mud together hurriedly, obsessively, greedily, before hawking their makeshift goods at audiences that are, for lack of a better word, befuddled as to what is being handed to them.

“It’s currency!” says Jackson. “It’s nourishing!” says me. We’re both right. We are both children, typing on our laptops in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning, pressing mud into different shapes, crafting dimensions from the dimension-less, hoping that someone will accept our muddy creations as the sort of fantastical currency and nourishment we think they are.

photo cred: thejunglefever.wordpress.com