| ...bygone days. The beach used to sparkle like
silver, so long ago that his memories, like the TV and movies of the times
are in black and white. He remembers children running everywhere, and he
was one of them. Oceans and seas of laughing faces, every summer his family
would come out here, and most of them are gone now. But he can still remember
the smell of salt on the air, his brothers and sisters singing songs. He
can still remember coming up over that ridge before it was even light out,
and seeing it, a few scattered trees, at the base of the hill and then sand
and water for as far as the eye could see. A few lonely gulls would be circling
overhead and his breath would catch and he always wondered if his brothers
and sisters felt same way, he did, like the feeling he had when a brisk
fall wind caught the leaves and made his skin tingle, but this feeling was
warmer and brighter. Moments after arriving the children would run out of the parked car, their father would shout at them to help carry things, but their mother would smile and put her hand on his shoulders and say “just let ‘em go,” and he would relent and mama would say, “don’t go too far now, stay in sight!” and in a rush of brightly colored shorts, and bathing suits they would all hit the water, and it was cold early in the morning and refreshing as a tall glass of lemonade after a long hot day in the sun. They played Marco Polo and jousted on each other’s shoulders. Later they would pause long enough to eat, and suffer through the enforced twenty minute wait and then rush back into the tide and swim and laugh and splash each other. They often built castles in the sand, and those castles came to represent to him, his time at those beaches through the yeas. The tide washed every one of them away, just the way it had washed away first his mother, then his father and one by one ever one of his brothers and sisters. The sand castles, like his families’ smiling faces had been washed away, but like those smiles, the laughter, the tears, he remembered every one of them, the tiny ill-formed castles he used to make, with a little blue plastic bucket and an old bent spoon. The ones that his older brothers would laugh at. And the tall strong towers he built in later years, driven by the memories of their mockery, and the great granddaddy of them all the castle they’d all built together while their parents watched over their Family Circle and Sports Illustrated magazines. It must have spanned close to ten feet across. It had little toothpick flags that his father had saved from sandwiches throughout the year, and it had a moat, complete with a driftwood drawbridge. How many tiny worlds like that had they created together? So much was lost, whenever one of them was gone. They’d worked on that castle most of the day, barely remembering to swim. Their father took a picture of them all standing over it smiling. The picture never came out, but it didn’t matter, nothing could be clearer than his memory of the moment, and he preferred seeing them that way, their faces lined up surrounding him, their skinny arms wrapped around each other in a loving embrace, a picture would have engulfed that memory, and they would have been distant, like they were now, flat and dimensionless on paper, untouchable, their voices forever silenced, their faces frozen in time. But in his memory they still laughed and shouted, they were warm and fragrant with lotions and pomade. Fragrant like the dreams he often had of them and that beach. The ghosts of their voices rise in the tide and the wind, That’s what he hears in the roar of the ocean, that’s what he sees in the sparkling of distant waves, their smiling faces. That’s whey he comes here, because he misses his family and they are here, always here, in the sunlight waiting for him. Sometimes, when he’s alone, he remembers... The tire swing at the creek used to launch him close to ten feet in the air... A long road, winding in the headlights that illuminate a pre-dawn landscape, leads him to this place... |
