One of the benefits of self publishing is that you are your own boss. So, this last week my wife, Mala, and I decided to run away from home and take a nostalgic trip "down the ocean". That's what people say around here when they are going to the shore.

First, for those of you who are not familiar with Maryland, I need to give you a geography lesson. Maryland is that strangely shaped state which gave up part of its territory to form DC. Someone carved Delaware out of it and took a dull knife and tried to cut another section off but couldn't quite pull it off. That left us with the Chesapeake Bay. The ocean side of Maryland is called the Eastern Shore. We used to live on the Western Shore which we thought was Maryland. You only find out there is a Western Shore when you move to the Eastern Shore. You get to the Eastern Shore by crossing the magical Bay Bridge which takes you from the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country to the land of watermen, yachts and sunbathing at the beach.
Anyway we set off across the Eastern Shore to revisit the areas where we spent summer vacations with our kids. Since we now live on the Eastern Shore we went straight across country. Sorry folks. The roads were great but all we could think was that agribusiness must own most of that area and pays miserable wages. An awful lot of abandoned and run down houses. We looked forward to getting to the shore.

We had to make a pit stop and spotted a Burger King. But we couldn't find the road into it so we parked by a dumpster in the Comcast Cable lot and worked our way to it through the brush. Inside only the men's room was working and it was occupied by a woman. The urinal had been torn out which I guess made it unisex. We bought some fries and a drink and fled.

Next stop was Rehobeth Beach which we remembered as a toney community by the sea. Well, it used to be. Now it features the most incredible array of shopping outlet malls ringed by condos. I guess people go down the ocean now and shop. There were a few nice areas but we fled on south. Dewey Beach was really familiar. So was Bethany Beach. And Fenwick Island was still there.
But it was Ocean City where we used to hang out with the kids for a week or two. We had a favorite little funky cottage which at the time had cable TV. We didn't have cable at home. Our reception was so bad that some nights we watdh TV in black and white. At the beach we had the luxury of one whole channel of HBO. So we watched the same few movies endlessly when we weren't visiting water slides and building sand castles at low tide. And at night there were glow lights to be hurled into the air.

This was just a day trip so we planned to have a little lunch at a nice place overlooking the ocean. Nothing was open. Most of the Subways were even closed. The place was a ghost town. The weather was still warm so I thought there would be some activity. Nothing.

There was something of a time warp atmosphere. We recognized many of the hotels and there seemed to have been a little more building on bayside. But everything was very much the same. We finally bagged the idea of the charming little place by the sea for lunch and settled on a pizza and sub place in a mall. It had the advantage of being open. It was the kind of a place where all the men had tattooes and the women had no eyelashes. I got a meatball sub which was amazingly greasy. I thought my paper plate had a green design on it until I noticed the green was the table. The grease had dissolved the plate and I had eaten part of it. Not a fantasy fulfilled.

Back on the road we gave up on our history. We stopped briefly to go out on the beach. Tis the season for beach replenishment. Beep, beep, beep. Clank, clank, boom. They were pumping sand and bulldozing. We walked around for awhile and returned to the car.

Sometimes memories are best left fond and alone. It didn't change the memories of those days and it was amazing to see a beach town changed so little. You really can't go home again. That's out of our system.

So I'm back dealing with Amazon, Baker and Taylor and the rest of our future. I guess checking back on our past was a part of walking away from our former life. In the space of a year we have closed our travel business, given up our villa in St. Lucia, sold our lovely two hundred year old stone home on a picturesque creek and moved to a new world we love. All of it without a quiver. I'm increasingly thinking we are strange. So many changes in just one year and there has been no upheaval.

With our lives unencumbered we can simply focus on our writing and related activities. Who says you can't seize the opportunity to reinvent yourself and start a new life in your sixties. And with the publishing in our own hands, we are firmly in control of our destiny.

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