The Girls of St. Barts

Accentuating the Complete and Total Loser's loser quality is the fact that the rest of his family has done well in life. His two brothers have hair, wives, happy children and multiple houses in exclusive vacation areas. 
The Loser's parents did well, too, mostly thanks to his mother, who took an interest in investing and showed great aptitude for it, even if that aptitude came in the form of knowing who to listen to. By the late 1970s, the Loser's parents had money, and by the 1980s they felt confident enough to spend it. No, that's not true. The Loser's mother felt confident enough to spend it. The Loser's father, a Great Depression era kid, lived in constant fear of ending up in the poor house no matter how much he had.
Nonetheless, he allowed his wife to bend him to her will, even when that will said "We're going to St. Barts." 
They stayed over a month every year once they were elderly, stopping only a few years before their back-to-back deaths in fall of 2011. (They stopped because getting around on cobblestone streets and climbing stairs with no railings became too difficult for them.)
They often encouraged the Loser to take some vacation time and visit them there. He never did. 
The Loser has spent some hours of the first day of this new year going through boxes of snapshots which have been sitting in his parent's second floor storage room for over a decade (the Loser now lives in their house and will until ...?). 
Most of the pictures are awful. Friends smiling at the lens, meals, people sunbathing and reading. Uninteresting landscapes. 
 The photo below is from winter of 1985. The Loser has no idea who the people in it are or who took the photo, though he guesses it was his father, who was more of a shutterbug than his mother.
Nice pic. 

A topless girl on a warm beach.

The Loser's Parents Return from Florida

They are back from Florida, where they stayed on the coast and watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. The Complete and Total Loser went to a Midwestern college for four years yet in that time has never set foot in the Sunshine State like so many of his peers.
His parents used to go to St. Barts, but they're too old now to cope with the lack of banisters and cobblestone streets there. The Loser imagined all month they were better off in Florida, where he's pretty sure ambulances patrol streets like ice cream trucks and geriatric hospitals are minutes away.
"We didn't see one black face the whole month," the Loser's mother said. This is just reporting; she is no bigot. (If anyone's that it's the Loser, who lives in the city where a large percentage of blacks pose at least a degree of threat and where he has indeed been robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight by two of them.) They said also there were no Jews where they were.
The Loser's father found it extremely relaxing to watch the shore birds. Pelicans, gulls and smaller birds -- sandpipers? -- shared the same sea and shore. "How," he asks, "do they survive?"
This sounds like a dumb question, but it's not.
Twenty-first century Americans are so far from nature that when we observe animals close up, it is astonishing that they can live. No clothes, no shelter, no technology of any kind. No health insurance! Naked creatures with little beaks and webbed feet, surrounded by predators, chased by cars, filth and toxins they can't possibly adapt to quickly enough, their habitat torn down and replaced by inedible structures with confusing reflective surfaces.
Yet some of them survive. And even thrive.