Donovan Kelly

Life at the beach doesn’t always go swimmingly. Maybe the young waitress was an omen. She was 16, going on 12, her baby face not yet scarred by anything. Which is why I started laughing when her first words to me were, “So, how’s life?”

“Do you ask me that because I’m so old?” I said. “No, I ask everyone that,” she replied.

“Well, my life is fantastic. How’s yours?” I responded, in my best adult-to-adult voice. “Tiring,” she said. “Life is tiring.”

Again I had to laugh. In a few hours she would be frolicking on the beach without thoughts of arthritis, children or mortgage payments, but somehow she found life “tiring.”

“You are too young to have a tired life,” I said. “Wait until you are 103-years-old like me.” “Are you really 103?” she said, her eyes momentarily taking on the wide-eyed look of youth they deserved. “Gee, and I thought you were, like 68,” she said, moving down the counter to cheer up another customer.

Looking “like 68” didn’t exactly thrill me. I’m not quite there yet and wallow in delusions of looking a young 50 something. But more depression awaited me.

When the Dutch settled this corner of Delaware 375 years ago, they called it “Zwaanendael,” which roughly translates “doth thee want a good deal on swamp land?” The locals wisely changed the name to “Lewes,” which nobody can pronounce either. For years, Lewes avoided the rapid development of neighboring towns like Rehoboth (“let us be hoboes again”) and Dewey Beach (“do we swim or do we drink?”). Local writer Jennifer Ackerman claims Lewes was protected from the evils of rapid growth because it was blessed with an abundance of mosquitoes and fish fertilizer plants. Alas, the smell of fish fertilizer has faded and Lewes has been growing. Still, it retains a bit of the flavor of a small fishing town that we enjoy.

The downtown hotel is still called “Zwaanendael Inn,” which the owners insist means “home of the swans.” To prove it, dark chocolate swans from the local chocolate factory magically land on guest pillows every night. When I checked in, I was listed as two people. Under intense questioning, I admitted I was only one slightly large person. The clerk busily corrected my listing. Knowing that I would pay the same for the room whether I was one large person or two regular-sized people, I asked what the difference was. With her erasure flying, the clerk said, “Well, it affects housekeeping chores. Like whether we leave one chocolate swan or two.”

Just like that, one dark chocolate swan was taken out of my life. Makes you want to shout “The Zwaanendael you will!” But I didn’t shout. I quietly accepted my remaining chocolate swan because life at the beach was so not tiring.