Just a Kid in Love with the World

It was getting darker as we wound through the colorful labyrinth of Old Town Nice, desperately searching for the coastline.

We stumbled off the tram after an exhausting three-hour train ride from Avignon TGV. I flipped our map upside down, trying to orient myself in this new nook of Southern France. We were tired, but the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean Sea had been teasing us all day as it slipped in and out of view in the train windows, and so we found ourselves doing our very best to head south, maneuvering drunken bar-hoppers and maniacal scooters zipping around tight corners.

Just when we were about to call it quits, we ducked down a narrow alleyway between two buildings and there it was: the ocean stretching endlessly toward the inky blue line of the horizon.

Our sore feet momentarily forgot to remind us of the day’s journey as we ran down to the beach. Like little kids with too much excitement in their bellies, glee spilled out all our edges as we felt the magic of being young and in love with the endless beauty of the world. Grey pebbles covered the shore, all polished completely smooth by the tireless hand of the tide. I noticed that when the crashing waves retreated toward the sea, they pulled some of the pebbles on the beach with them, knocking them into one another in the foam.

Suddenly I wasn’t sitting on the coast of the French Riviera, but instead in a kitchen chair back home, watching my mom pour cold milk into a bowl of cereal.

“Listen, Madi. Put your ear next to the bowl.”

Snap. Crackle. Pop.

“Listen, Sabrina. The stones sound like Rice Krispies.”

I watched a slow smile spread across her face that mirrored mine.

I remember reading a quote by Eugene Ionesco that said, “The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.”

We did a lot that weekend: ate giant plates of steaming pasta from Bar de la Bourse, meandered through the fruit market on Cours Saleya, tried flower flavored ice cream at Fennochio’s. But the moment I always return to looking back on our trip is that first night on the beach when a giant pile of rocks reminded me what it felt like to be a kid again.

Ionesco is right; the day I fail to be amazed by the world is the day I lose the uphill battle against adulthood. However that doesn’t mean that finding a little familiarity thousands of miles from home in the crackling waves isn’t a magical moment all its own.