As I was driving down the hill today to get into Placerville to buy crap I thought I needed, I had the usual full body shudder feeling as I drove around the bend that leads down to the river.  This is the big recreational spot that is just past the second one lane bridge, past the house that looks like an antique store but isn't and all the way up on the curve with the guard rails where cars are almost always parked.

It's a special little place because of the memory that is burned into my head like the curse of a thousand demons:  That of my husband's ex-business partner casually mentioning that there is a nude beach down there over the side of that cliff.  The comment was innocent enough, but as it turned out, had life altering effects.

Now I am no prude and was properly boisterous in the carefree and bold 1970's, so Katrina is no stranger to the nude beach experience.  Many years, another husband and about 100 pounds ago, my ex and I took our three sons of grade school age to a few nude beaches.  The experience is quite nice, feeling the sun on your special bits and quickly (yes, quickly) losing the discomfort of being around a whole bunch of naked people you don't know.  As I frolicked and played on the beach with my boys, a couple of young men came up and said to me, "You take your kids to a nude beach?"

Not sure of their opinion of the idea, I hesitantly said, "Um, yes...?"

Their eyes glazed over and in unison, sort of like Doublemint twins, they said, "You are the best mom ever."  Then they went on their way.

As I mentioned, that was a whole lot of a whole lot of things ago and there's no way in anyone's wildest and most frightened imagination that I'd be caught on a nude beach right now for fear that I'd find myself harpooned and sold to Eskimos to light up their oil lamps for the entire Winter.  Nuh uh, baby.

So when Eric's ex-business partner suggested that a nude beach lurked within a good size stone's throw of my trip down to Placerville, I was left to ponder the extent of mental damage done to me. 

Why could Tom Selleck not have come to my door?  I suspect his Magnum PI-mobile broke down on Mt Pleasant Road and *I*, being a stay at home mom, was the only human home on the tippy top of Grizzly Mountain.  Having shagged his fine self up the hill to my house, he knocks on the door, asks to use my phone and while he waits for Higgins to show up with a mechanic, he happens to mention that there's a nude beach on the way to Placerville.  He compliments me on my lovely, Raphael-esque, zaftig curves and suggests that I join him for some nekkid rompin on said beach.  He produces a fully stocked picnic basket (packed by the Gold Vine Grill) from the trunk of the now fully operational Magnum PI-mobile (aww, it was just vapor locked!) and away we go, my hair blowing in the wind and his hand on my knee, sailing surely toward the nude beach.

But no.  I now forever have the memory of my husband's ex-business partner, all 300+ pounds of him, climbing naked down the cliff side, his fingernails digging into the red dirt and his little feet scuttering to find a toe-hold in the rocks.  Whether there's a nude beach down there or not, I can't flush that picture out of my head every time I drive past.

Why can't Tom Selleck show up with some mental floss so I can lose that particular image from my mind before I have to pluck out my inner eye with an olive fork?

I hope he brings the picnic basket...