Down By the Shore

Down by the Shore - Jenifer Casale

When I first played this song for my brother, I didn’t bother to play the whole thing. I figured I would give a taste: Verse, Chorus, Verse, ‘What did you think?’.

But when I did that, my brother said, “No way, where is the drop? Your songs are always bittersweet, and that is WAY too happy.”

He wasn’t wrong. In the part I refrained from playing, the guitar cuts out and I sing, “Even when we can’t go walking…” This song, as with so many that I write, is very bittersweet. It will become more apparent to my audience as time goes on that bittersweet is my favorite emotion across all media. Most of my songs have that “cloudy hopefulness”, a longing nostalgia that speaks to something very deep inside of me. I find beauty there.

Down By the Shore is a song that I wrote both for and about someone. My husband’s aunt Debbie was very special to me. In a very short period of time, she proved to be a very fun, kind, joyous woman that welcomed me into the family with much-appreciated eagerness. At the time that we met, she and I both had only recently taken up acoustic guitar and started writing and playing our own folksy stuff. When my husband and I stayed with her for a family reunion, I told her,

“People often tell me I sound like Mama Cass. But I think they only say that because they can’t tell her apart from Grace Slick. You actually do sound like Mama Cass!”

That shared connection was enough to make her a “bosom friend”.

For my mother-in-law’s wedding, she rented a beach house in Florida for her siblings, kids, and their SOs to come and celebrate the day. Still, we call that rental property, “The Big Yellow House”. It was a glorious time. We walked along the beach, collected seashells, and swam in a pool safely away from the jellyfish. There was tons of time to talk and enjoy one another’s company. It was precisely the relaxing time you want out of a vacation. And, BONUS, we had all been brought there to celebrate a beautiful wedding.

Stories about the trip usually include a part that goes something like, “Remember how you were fasting the whole first day?” Yes. Yes, I do. Because my husband and I observe Yom Kippur, we were not eating or drinking for the first day of the trip. But a cool option for the Holy Day which we don’t often experience, being from Colorado, was the availability of the ocean for a mikvah at the end of the day.

In the simplest of terms, a mikvah is related to a baptism. Although, in contrast, it is an act which is performed more regularly as a practice of ceremonial washing. Still, many of the same principals of cleanliness, spiritual washing, renewal, etc. apply to both practices. In a traditional Jewish mikvah, the washer will immerse under the water three times. Part of the adaptation of the practice in the Christian tradition acknowledges resurrection imagery; when one is laid down under the water it is as in death, and (this is similarly acknowledged in certain Jewish rites) is raised again as a ‘new creation’.

We explained this to Debbie, who loved the imagery. Yom Kippur was reaching an end, but she asked if she could still join us in a “mikvah”. So the three of us walked out into the water, said our prayers, and immersed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Only a few years later, Debbie got sick. In the hospital, she told her sister that The Big Yellow House was her “happy place”. She asked if she could have some of her seashells brought to her.

When my mother-in-law told me what Debbie had said, I knew exactly what she meant.

If Tinkerbell were to lend me some pixie dust, my memories of The Big Yellow House would help me fly.

So I sat down to write.

Each of the pictures that are now part of the '“music video” I made were very easy to compile, being that they were looping in my head the entire time I wrote the song.

“Let’s go walking by the shoreline, with our sandals in our hands…”

Yep - I’ve got a picture and a solid memory. Check!

“And let’s take our time ‘cause we don’t have many plans…”

That was just a fact of the trip. We had one plan: Attend the Wedding.

“We can sit on the porch of that Big Yellow House; Or go walking by the shoreline; With our seashells in our hands; And let’s take our time ‘cause we don’t have many plans.”

“I’ll lay me down three times ‘neath the waters of the Gulf…”

This is a reference to the mikvah we did in the ocean waters.

“And I’ll drink wine with my loved ones ‘til the morning comes…”

Okay, so this line actually cracks me up. And in the BEST way because I think Debbie would find this funny too. Whenever we went to visit, it was Debbie’s and her husband, Carl’s thing to make us margaritas. And we would stay up long into the night drinking very tasty margaritas that would spark the best kind of deep-conversation time. This trip to Florida was no different. It felt important to me within this tribute to Debbie to include a line that draws up these memories for me. And the part that makes me laugh is that I had to change it to “wine” because, well, that just sounds better.

“And tomorrow there is a wedding down by the shore.”

“Let’s go walking down by the shoreline; Draw our initials in the sand; And we’ll bear beloved witness; As this woman takes this man…”

Down to the picture included in the slideshow, I do love that image of their initials!

“We can sit on the porch of that Big Yellow House; Or go dancing just inside it; With our loved ones hand in hand; And we’ll take our time ‘cause we don’t have many plans…”

As I mentioned before, there is a point at which the music cuts out and the song grows more somber. The lyrics say, “Even when we can’t go walking by the shoreline in the sand; With or without our seashells in our hands; We can sit on the porch of the Big Yellow House; Where we gazed out on the shoreline; No real worries or demands; Knowing unless the LORD might send us, we don’t have many plans.”

Debbie passed away in early July 2020. She never heard this song. Not to drop things a notch lower, but I don’t think she had her seashells with her like she wanted. To tell you the truth, that detail does get to me, and all the more reason why I put it in the song. I needed to tell myself, “You know what, ‘With or without’.”

Because it’s not even really about what did and didn’t happen on that trip. It’s as simple as changing the detail about the margaritas to wine. Like any good song should, I have largely romanticized these events. This trip didn’t have to be perfect and neither did Debbie or the circumstances of her life. That’s not the point.

The point is that we can slow down and find joy. We can wash and renew. We can spend time with loved ones. We can go where we’re sent and otherwise relax.

I do hope that I get to go back to that Big Yellow House some day. What a fun thing it would be to do a recording of this song there! But, with or without it, still we can sit on the porch of that Big Yellow House.