In August I took my girls to the beach for almost a full week.  I promise myself to be present, to be here and to be now, not to dwell on either the recent past or near future.

I love being at the beach and all its sensations implicit and implied.  Day after sunny day. Water. Clean, soft sand. Waves. Seagulls and seashells and seaweed.  Walks down the beach and walks back up the beach.  The feel of the surging waves, of the cool salt wetness on your skin and in your mouth.  The smells of a dozen sunblocks, fried food and the clean tang of the ocean.

“Daddy, watch me!” “Daddy, where’s my boogie board?”  “Daddy, hold me” “Daddy, pick me up!”  “Daddy, I’m cold.”  Daddy, I’m tired!”  “Daddy, I’m hungry.”  The pair of them pull me in separate directions.

In the afternoon, we make sandwiches in our little motel room.  Who wants ham?  Who wants turkey?  Pickles?  Potato chips?  Grapes?  This is summer food. Later, sometimes, we walk to the ice cream stand down the street.  Sometimes, we stroll on the beach after the sun sets.  Later the girls watch TV in their cousin’s room, or more often she watches TV in ours. “We’re gonna FaceTime mama!” It’s almost nine o’clock girls, go to bed. Brown legs and arms slip under cheap white sheets and slippery acrylic blankets. The windows are open and the night is filled with hissing sea grasses, chirping crickets and the soft, steady crashing surf nearby.

Afterwards, I spend some time out on the patio and keep  my brother company while he smokes cigarettes and drink beer in a plastic lounge chair.  His wife is putting his son to bed, but the boy won’t release his grip on his mother.  “Do you know how long its been since I’ve gotten laid?”  I shake my head sadly. Poor man.  He measures time in days and weeks …

One morning my daughter slips out of bed and follows me to the beach before sunrise. “Are you going to the island?”  She jogs with me across the wet sand past the heaps of seaweed and barnacle crusted ropes left by the receding tide. We scramble up the rocky cliffs, past the patches of poison ivy and brambles.  At the top she takes in the slumbering landscape.  For a moment she’s not a 13-year-old girl with an impending hospital visit, she’s a princess and all mistress of all she surveys: the pristine beach, the dunes beyond, the lapping waves and crying gulls, and the real estate roosting on the nearby rocky cliffs.  “If I could choose any house to live in, it would be that one,” she says pointing at a tastefully large home with manicured lawn overlooking the beach.  But what if you got your wish?  Would you still feel that the beach is a special place?  Would it still be magic, or would it feel – over time – regular, normal, even mundane … and would you soon yearn for something else?

A buzz like a giant hornet grows louder and louder still.  A drone with a blinking red eye buzzes over our heads.  We stare at it as it carves a low looping path around her island once, and then twice and then retreats back to a distant point somewhere down the beach.

It’s six in the morning.  The sun begins to rise and we should be heading back soon.  I have breakfast to make and kites to fly and blankets to lay and sunblock to apply …

I’m present … no past, no future, just now.

“Daddy, if you moved here, would you buy me a stand-up paddle board?”  Maybe.

I love the beach, but I’m … tired.