Love and Happiness

Hunting for Shark Teeth with The Wife

Emily sits quietly on the other end of our green couch. She is silent but the noise of her thinking is audible. You can practically smell the smoke, the grinding gears as she strokes the fur on our cat’s belly.

Like most of us, she has much on her mind. Em is thoughtful and fastidious, a planner. As someone who has spent her entire adult life living with chronic illness, she is expert at dealing with doctor’s offices and insurance companies. She’s worn an ileostomy bag for thirty years. It is something you are never not aware of, even when you’re asleep.

We began coming to Florida’s west coast about a dozen years ago to visit my in-law’s where they spend the winter just south of Sarasota. They are in their eighties, and the slower pace of the area suits them. Em used to visit her grandparents on the other side of the state as a kid; as soon as we exit the airport, bathed in the humid air, a familiar, welcome calm settles over her. The palm trees greet her like old friends. When she was a girl loved playing shuffleboard and swimming—first in, last out.

Now, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Emily hunts. For shark teeth. The teeth are fossils spanning the Pliocene to Miocene epoch. Shark’s lose twenty thousand teeth in their lifetime. They are seemingly indistinguishable from other small dark stones lodged in the sand, a fascinating deposit from creatures that we associate with the present, restless and menacing.

I drive Em to a local beach and pick her up a few hours later. Sometimes I hang, reading a book as she sifts through the rocks and shells, picking through the shards and broken bits of glass, to find her booty. She’s used scoopers and shovels and nets but prefers her hands. She grips a Ziploc in one and each time she spots a tooth she says, “Thank you, thank you!” and drops it in the bag.

On the beach, the horizon is placid and lonely. A school of Pelicans fly low along the water fighting against the wind. Beachcombers stroll along, heads tilted down, studying the ground. Every half-hour or so I bring my wife water. She is generally a well-hydrated human, but hunting for teeth, she loses all sense of time, hunger and thirst.

She sings to herself, which she only does when most safe and happy.

I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens 1923 poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West”:

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

What Emily doesn’t do at the beach is think.

Back when we lived in New York, Em worried about the stress of her job in a hospital emergency department; the congestion of city life pressed on her. During the pandemic we moved to rural Vermont. There is no sea, but there are lakes and rivers, beautiful hills and valleys. We’ve made dear friends. Leaving the city was not, however, a miracle cure. Emily’s various maladies did not magically repair. In fact, some of her ailments, only worsened.

When she is at the beach, all of that falls away as she focuses on catching a glint in the sand, or a point, some arrowhead of the seas.

There is only Now.

At her folks’ place, Em pours her loot into a bowl filled with water and begins to separate the teeth from other fossils—pufferfish mouth plates, stingray barbs, and horse teeth. When we return north, she pours her treasure into a large glass bowl that sits on our dining room table. It is filled with thousands of teeth.

After breakfast, an old crossword or Sudoku puzzle from our local paper completed, Emily absent-mindedly sinks her hand in the bowl of teeth, sorting through them, letting them fall through her fingers like sand. She selects individual ones, lines them on the table in front of her, a reference book nearby so she can identify which shark each tooth is from. The smell of the ocean close again, the spume tickling her ankles on the shore.

Before long, daily life crowds back in, the endless list of calls to make, emails to respond to, bills to pay, each impossible to resist, as if she herself is a shark who swims while it sleeps because it must in order to survive. My wife’s silence belies her preoccupation, as her fingertips run over the smooth teeth until she feels the pricks at edge of each.

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[Paintings and drawing by yours truly.]