Guns and love disastrous (five illuminations)

(I)
I'm sitting on Chair 1, guarding a moderately busy beach during an uneventful three o'clock safety brake when the boy approaches me. He's four years old.
Are you a lifeguard? he asks.
I am, I answer.
Do you have to be able to swim?
I have to be able to swim a whole mile!
Do you like being a lifeguard?
I do. Does he want to be a lifeguard when he's older?
He answers without the faintest hint of a smile. No. FBI agent. He reveals a squirt gun which has been tucked into the back of his swim trunks. Holding it in the air he turns and runs.

(II)
The water is cool and clear early in the day, but with the strong June sunshine and a frenzy of activity it becomes warm and cloudy by midafternoon. As the sun sinks, it becomes a calm place, even a private place if only up to a foot below the surface. But those deeper areas are enough, and occasionally we lifeguards must remind lusty young couples that the beach is a family-friendly facility—that is to say it is a place meant for the raising of existing children, not the making of new ones. What percentage of copulating couples do we catch? Who knows. We occasionally learn of some incidents only from patrons more observant or simply closer to the action than we are. Sometimes such reports come from children, but, thankfully, their own innocence protects them when we fail. We were displeased, if not exactly alarmed, this evening when a child told us of a couple in the water "kissing and fighting."

(III)
The boys were in the shallow end, pointing their fingers at each other in the manner that has allowed children to engage in bloodless gunbattles for generations. Perhaps these fellows of ten and twelve weren't armed with the plastic facsimiles that have supplanted the fingers and the imagination for this most recent generations, but the older of the two had certainly acquired a modern, gory idea of gunbattles. While "Bang! You're dead!" sufficed for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, who were no doubt raised on nearly bloodless war movies like "Kelly's Heroes," which dispatches dozens (hundreds?) of Nazis without a single bullet wound. This boy spoke in a manner more fitting of young Marvin's demise in Pulp Fiction. His younger duelist was quieter, so I heard only one side of the imaginary showdown:
"I shot you!"
"I killed you!"
At this point the boy's mother cried, "John!"
"I shot your head off!"
"John!"
"I blew your face off!"
"John! Don't talk like that!"

(IV)
I'm riding along Weaver Lake Road, on my way to Claire's house (she's back from the jungle), and I'm gaining fast on young couple walking side-by-side down the center of the path. I shout my customary bicycle on your left, and the girl (who I see is no more than sixteen) casts look over her shoulder. She starts to move to the right, and realizing that her male companion has not heard she begins to pull him towards her. Feeling her tug, he turns to her for a kiss, but she pulls him past her, and he takes a stumbling step onto the grass, evidently perplexed until I fly past.

(V)
A hundred yards farther down the road I come to a stop at a red light. I cast a glance around the intersection and see a large black SUV with windows proclaiming in fingerpaint JUST MARRIED. Inside the groom is at the wheel talking animatedly. The bride is gazing out the passenger side window with a look of resignedness. The light turns green, the bride blows me a kiss, and we ride on.