At the Beach

At the Beach

Recently my wife and I went to the beach.  It was our second trip this summer and, hopefully we’ll get back a couple of more times before the cold weather returns.  We both love the beach.  She gets her love honestly, having grown up less than a two-hour drive from the South Carolina coast.  I wasn’t that fortunate; having grown up in a town in North Carolina twice that distance from the sea.  Yet I share her love of sand and surf as If I was born there.  In fact my first visit to the sea was when I was six weeks old

My family was fortunate to have a cottage at Carolina Beach; the operative word here being cottage.  My children would have been aghast if I had tried to make them stay in such a place when we took our family vacations to the beach.  Yet, to us, in the 1950’s, it was comfortable enough and we loved out trips there in the summer.  It was especially meaningful to me because it was the one place my Father became my Dad.

My father and I were never close.  I neither feel any guilt nor have any animosity for this relationship.  It is just a cold, hard, fact.  My Father was a child of the depression and I was a child of television.  He grew up worrying about his next meal.  I grew up worrying I wouldn’t have the right color alligator shirt.  His work was his life, first and foremost.  My life was Elvis and cars.  Yet there was always one time when he quit being a businessman and provider and one place where started being a Dad.  That was the time we spent to together at the beach.

My fondest memories of him are those precious days over too few years we spent at Carolina Beach.  It was there we spent hours fishing in the surf, swimming in the sea.  It was there he taught me how to float on my back over the swells and to body surf in to the shore.  It was there I learned to bait a hook, to fish from shore and from a pier.  I remember when I was eight standing side by side with him on the Center Fishing Pier when the Spots were running, each of us pulling up two at a time on our lines.  When I had a backlash on my reel he would swap with me, untangle my line and hand it back.  We caught fish that day until the coolers were overflowing.  It is to this day still the best day fishing I can ever remember.  He taught me how to dig in the wet sand for sand fleas and then use them for bait.  He taught me how to fly kites.  He showed me love though like most men in his generation he could hardly ever verbalize it.

My Dad is gone now as is that little cottage at Carolina Beach.  It gave way, as most of the single-family dwellings on the beachfront, to condos ages ago.  It has become, like so much of what I write about, just another old man’s memory.  I don’t fish anymore.  It seems hardly anyone fishes from the surf anymore.  I guess there are just too many people on the beaches these days.  I still body surf and float on my back over the swells though I never mastered like my Dad who seemed to be able to stay like that all day.

If you ever go with us to the sea and I wander off my own to sit and stare at the water.  Please don’t take it personal.  You did nothing to upset me.  I’m just watching my Dad as he rides slowly over the rolling waves……

As Time Goes By