Another bottle has been found! I received an email from a Ms. Maggie B asking for my address and letting me know that she had found a bottle. I wrote back spazzily wanting to know where and when. She wrote back letting me know that I’d just have to wait and see.
Cheeky.

Well, imagine my delight, gentle readers, when I got this in the mail:

And inside!:

And inside that…:

She didn’t actually cram a tomato and a salt shaker in there, but in a beautifully written letter, Maggie told me that she and her boyfriend found the bottle at Ft Tilden. This particular bottle certainly didn’t set any distance records as I had tossed it at Ft Tilden the same day she found it. But I feel it found its rightful owner. Maggie had had sort of a crappy day earlier (keys forgot at home, burned feet, hot dog dropped in sand) so I think finding the bottle cheered her up.

It’s so nice to get an actual letter. You can see someone’s penmanship. We don’t even know most of our friends’ handwriting these days. And holding the physical object makes you feel more connected.

Maggie moved here from Florida and found the initial adjustment hard. She said she made a pact with herself to get to the beach once a week this summer. I used to live in Florida too and found both the adjustment moving there AND moving away hard. Florida is nuts, and I could go on and on about how much I love it and hate it, but I’ll just say that it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Mainly because we had Hurricane Irene sweep through the area. I’m just waiting for the swarm of locusts at this point. I moved to Miami for college about 12 hours before Hurricane Andrew struck and I know full well how bad it can be.

Everything was basically fine here. A tree fell on my parents’ house in Jersey, but they’re fine, as is the house. No power as of yet, but fine (My dad: “Yeah, well, your mother and I just go to bed at 8.” Me: “Why doesn’t mom just charge up the laptop at work so at least you guys could watch a movie or something?” My dad: “Ah, we don’t need to get involved in that.”)

When I first moved to New York I made a similar pact with myself as Maggie did. I wanted to make sure to go to the beach, and to swim in any available pools or bodies of water that weren’t too polluted. That’s how I initially found Ft Tilden. In the last ten years or so, what was once a blank spot on the map has now certainly been discovered. But I prefer it that way. It’s fun to look at people on the beach. Unlike the subway, pretty much everyone is in a good mood. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s beautiful. There’s birds. And interesting rubbish. And shells. It’s for everyone. And you may even find a message in a bottle from the guy playing Kadima 50 yards from you.