Chicken Soup for the Beach Lover's Soul (20 page)

My mom and aunt would be busy in the small cabana, making us what seemed like a feast after such an active day. We'd sit around the table—the adults at theirs and the kids at ours—and we'd talk about the day and what we would do the next day.

We'd all hang around for a while after dinner, then we kids would change into our PJs for the ride over the bridge. It was okay to be going home; we knew we'd be back the next day—even if it was raining. The rain couldn't keep us away. We had such fun huddling inside the cabana wrapped in our towels and oversized sweatshirts and telling spooky stories, playing cards, reading, or, of course, eating. We were all so close then, and I couldn't imagine that days like these would someday come to an end.

When we were a bit older, my cousin and I would pull a pair of chairs down to the water's edge and sit and talk about anything and nothing. We'd share our fears, hopes, wonders, and dreams. We'd talk about the “old” beach-club days when we used to play team tag in the place we called the “zoo”—rows and rows of lockers for people who didn't have cabanas.

I experienced many “firsts” at the beach club: my first job (as the arts and crafts counselor at the beach club camp), my first crush (on our cabana boy), and even my first kiss. I'd made so, so many memories at the beach, but I always knew there were more to come, more summers ahead. Even when we kids were all grown up, we'd meet at the beach on the weekends. My niece and I would climb the lifeguard chair and watch the sunset together while I'd tell her of all the cool things I used to do at the beach. When I got married, my husband made himself busy repairing the cabana, which had seen much wear and tear in the course of thirty years.

Although the cabana was still in the family, at some point we stopped being there as a family. All too soon, it seemed, we went our separate ways, and my husband and I found ourselves living across the country. Finally, my mom and aunt decided to let the cabana go, to let another family have it, to create their own cherished memories of growing up on the beach.

I haven't been back to Silver Point since we moved out west, but I can always visit it in my mind. I vacation at the beach—any beach—as often as possible. I drop my things in my hotel room, and then practically run down to the water. I make a sand trail with my feet, swooshing the hot sand back and forth until I reach the cool, wetter sand. I still anticipate a good rainstorm and the card game that's sure to follow, along with the chocolate-covered graham crackers I'll buy in the hotel lobby.

When I close my eyes and concentrate, I can see, hear, feel, and taste the Silver Point Beach Club. I imagine looking out onto the ocean from the railing of the stilts. I see the seagulls zigzagging over the garbage cans. I see the heavy green doors of the cabana. I look where the sand ends and the water starts. I see the umbrellas and chairs. I hear the waves crashing and people laughing. I smell the salt in the air and feel it on my skin. I feel almost four again, dragging my feet through the sand to leave my trail, twisting my body back and forth, and thinking of how good it feels to be part of a family, how good it feels to be loved.

Karen Falk

A Seacliff Serenade

L
ove must be as much a light as it is a flame.

Henry David Thoreau

He was fifteen, or so he lied. I was fifteen (the truth). And the night I met thirteen-year-old Michael B. around a driftwood fire on Seacliff Beach was immense: it meant I was no longer romantically backward. Finally, like all my junior high school friends had already, it was my turn to fall in love for the first time, and Michael flipped me into the abyss with his eyes of Aegean Sea blue and manner as shy as mine.

That was thirty-five years ago.

Today, the details of my first romance, the magic of my first love, live in my mind and heart as a seaside serendipity of sun, sand, surf, and stars. Seacliff Beach is where my first boyfriend and I swam and splashed and laughed: my first kiss, my first beer, my first French kiss—all with Michael B.—all at Seacliff Beach.

Now, a lifetime later, I suspect the beach is bewitched. I mean, really, what can Seacliff be thinking? This California crescent of shore where dolphins frolic, seabirds play, and sun and stars smile down on a beautiful central coast— well, it seems the beach is bringing back to me the love I knew at fifteen. And it is not simply the flush of thrill, the rush of something new, unexpected, or immense. It is, as well, the boy himself, his Aegean Sea eyes unchanged in all this time.

Not that he washed up with the tide, although he might have for all my surprise. But just last week as I walked the beach, there he was: my first love, running along the sand. And to see him, these thirty-five years worth of exboy friends later, is to realize with an uncomfortable start, I hardly have evolved at all!

I confess, not since my teenage romance have I managed to swim and splash and laugh in the ocean surf with the same free and easy abandon that ran like the wind through the me of fifteen. And let's be honest: In my three and a half decades of travel to other beaches on a handful of continents, not a single one has offered so much as a harmless flirtation, much less an enjoyable fling, far less a serious love.

But the beach that is the site of my teenage triumph, where I fell in love during a sunburned summer of surfing and swimming and fun—I think it is up to something.

Michael is newly divorced (the truth). At age fifty-one, I am starting over. That's a lie. At age fifty-one-and-a-half and fresh from a long romance gone wrong, I, too, am beginning again. So, tripping upon my first love at this precise moment in time on the very sand where magic once upon a time whirled me in a dance of freshly awakened desire, a dance that tossed me up, up into the realm where all feels possible—well, it does seem slightly suspect. Early this evening I walked to the beach from the family house to which after years away I have returned, unsure of where the life I play out next will be—this city or that? In silence I converse with the very same sun, sand, and sea that long ago held so much promise for the clueless me of fifteen. “Come now, Seacliff, out with it,” I say. “Is bringing me Michael your sly, wily way of matchmaking— again?” The surf speaks not; the birds keep mum.

Returning to Seacliff now, what feels like a lifetime later, I find its enchantment remains—made all the more dazzling by my travels. No sands of San Sebastian or Cannes seem as clean, no bay of L.A. or Maine or Spain so unique. Mornings when the porpoises leap and evenings when the pelicans feed, I feel there is no better beach in the world for revealing how greatly I'm blessed—blessed not only to revel again in the outdoor joy that is Seacliff's gift to all who love a beautiful beach, but blessed also by this: the far-fetched idea—dare I name it hope?—that the place may have plans for me, plans for something beyond my dreams to which, given my iffy romantic history, I would typically think,
No way!

Mystery—tales of true love are thick with it. Dashed dreams, apparent loss, and then, at the bleakest eleventh hour, a happy—even miraculous—reconciliation. It is all so sappy, granted, but oh-so-thrillingly romantic! The story is a truth (or lie) I like. So I ask the all-seeing stars that with the faintest sparkle bid sweet dreams to the retiring sun, what is up with me and my first love? The winking firmament says less than Seacliff itself, though I admit the beach is taunting me with hints of what may be for Michael and me. On any day this is what I see: laughing couples hand in hand who stroll the beach at sunset; walkers and their romping dogs who frolic in the surf at dawn. Sunbathers, swimmers, fishers—the beach by light is peopled by the relaxed, the happy, the smiling. By night the otters and sea lions and, when the month is right, whales, add to the sea their wonder. Looks to me like a lovefest, all right. Hmm.

It would be a lie to say the togetherness that Michael and I share again is not an exact replay of our high school relationship. Never mind the thirty-five-year absence. When I splash and laugh and swim with—and kiss—the teenage boy who, at forty-nine, seems strangely unchanged, no time has passed. He's more worldly, perhaps, more traveled; that he has his driver's license now only adds to all the appeal he held for me at thirteen. The truth: Even decades lived apart, often at opposite ends of the earth (me: Paris; Michael: New Zealand) compact into minutes when the free, easy fun once shared with someone again turns up—undiluted, undiminished, undimmed—weird. Or is it a trick of the miraculous? My dear Seacliff, do tell! In my silent conversation, I ask the beach to tell its secret. But the still-warm sand stays silent and the prancing surf rolls in—without a word.

When Michael joins me we build a driftwood fire, he and I, and talk of nothing. We say simply everything in the fun it is to be at this beach after thirty-five years of—whatever, together. We look over the water to the lights of a faraway pier. Suddenly—and this is the truth—porpoises leap from the water, one and then another. Sandpipers scurry, pelicans swoop, and from off somewhere a mockingbird sings. The beach rolls in ecstasy around us, and at a strangely synchronized time, from points practically a planet apart (me: San Francisco; Michael: Indonesia), my first love and I each are drawn back to the same crescent of sea where a love that was new and young arrived once before. Could this be a love not done with us? It is only the beach that knows.

The sky streaks a palette of pinks as the sun sinks behind the horizon. The fog rushes in as if late for a date with destiny. It seems as eager to get back to this beach as weeks ago I was—Michael, too—each of us having felt some mysterious pull neither he, nor I, can explain. Snug by our driftwood fire, my first love and I revel in the moment—repeated. You rascal, Seacliff: the beach where magic happens.

Colette O'Connor

Reprinted by permission of Patrick Hardin.
©
2005 Patrick Hardin.

Sands of Time

M
emory . . . is the diary that we all carry about
with us.

Oscar Wilde

Four hundred years ago, my ancestor Robert Cushman climbed out of a small craft called the
Mayflower
and stepped onto the shore of Massachusetts for the first time. And for almost one hundred years, with only a few lapses, my extended clan has returned to gather for family reunions each summer on those shores of Cape Cod. In the early 1900s, my parents took a train to the remote reaches of the cape. By the time my cousins and I came along, we traveled by car along paved roads.

Every family album contains photos of multiple generations of Robert's descendants playing in the waves and building castles in the sand. Stories, too, have collected over the decades, and I've noticed some stories have gained a momentum of their own as they tumbled from generation to generation.

I remember playing with my Uncle Hervey's children on the beach, enjoying the sun and listening to the waves wash the shore. One day when lunchtime drew near, my uncle asked his youngest daughter, Polly, to run back to the cottage and make sandwiches for the family. Sure enough, twenty minutes later, twelve-year-old Polly emerged carrying a tray of sandwiches. As everyone reached out for them, Hervey asked what type of sandwiches she had made.

“Peanut butter with bologna on raisin bread,” she replied.

Abruptly, hands withdrew from the tray and Hervey asked, “What made you choose that combination?”

“Because if you make good sandwiches, everyone eats them too fast,” Polly answered.

Most of her brothers and sisters found excuses that day to hike back to the cottage to make their own lunches.

Preparing meals at the beach was always a challenge, given the meager facilities in the rented cottages. Nevertheless, all of us continued to thrive in the fresh air and freedom of the holiday atmosphere. Year after year, we collected driftwood (as Uncle Leslie would say, “Business is picking up on the beach!”). We sunbathed until people warned us about UV rays and skin cancer. We played games of canasta, Monopoly, and Scrabble. We visited favorite landmarks like Highland Light.

And we grew older and taller. After a year apart the big question among the sixteen cousins was, “Who was now the tallest?”

My brother Robert (yes, named for our long-ago ancestor) and his cousin young Hervey stood back to back in the living room of the cottage.

“No fair, you're standing on the carpet while I'm on the linoleum.”