Sun Aug 3, 1997
One of the reasons I want to keep a journal is because I’ve already forgotten what we did the night before last.
I remember now.
Before Saturday came Friday. And Friday evening I remember as being dreamlike. Actually, Friday was a perfect day all the way around.
We went back down to Frisco, which, I think, the consensus is we like Frisco a lot. The southern exposure on Hatteras Island really makes a difference. The water quality was perfect. The water was clear and clean and the waves were not extremely big, but very well-formed. The shape was good and it was just right where everybody could go in and enjoy the water and even the big kids could surf and the little kids could play in the waves and grandma could go for a dip, and who could ask for more from a beach? We got there about noon, and the tide was just coming in a little bit and when we all arrived it was pretty dramatic because it was a big gang. We had almost fifteen Lowes, and a few of John’s other friends and some of their parents, and the whole group approached 20. Quite a big crowd. But we had a real blast. We tried to stay in the water and make it last as long as we could, that beach was so fine and we all had that sense of the impending end of our holiday, being the last full day and a perfect, beautiful sunny day it was and after having had a couple of cloudy days, we really, really savored this one.
And I remember high tailing it back to BJ’s place in Buxton which, from the layout and the look of it was very reminiscent of several places we had taken on the Texas gulf coast, it even kind of looked like one place that we kept returning to, in a way, except it didn’t have a direct view of the water from the living area, there was this kind of a half baked rig outside that was tacked on to the front of a regular conventional Cape Cod house from another generation with whatever the hell it was. Perhaps they didn’t have the same priorities as we did, they preferred to be sheltered from the storm. Maybe they were seamen, who would just as soon turn their backs on the old girl from time to time and hunker down for a good night’s sleep on dry land. But then someone came along and decided to tack this deck onto it, because it was more important, perhaps, to take advantage of an exceptional view, and with a narrow little spiral staircase, it takes you up to this little crow’s nest where you can see the water.
But when we got back there there was a veritable feeding frenzy. Pam was a little bit ahead of everyone, as usual, and she stoked the fires by dishing out the hamburgers. I guess partially at least, thinking the way we do, with this the last day let’s eat up this food before we have to throw it out. And so she cooked up, oh, I don’t know, a couple of pounds of hamburger meat, and by the time we got there we were starving, because we had been at the beach all day, as long as we could stand it, and didn’t have any picnic lunches or anything like that. In a way, my favorite way to enjoy the beach, just with as few accouterments as possible. But anyway, the net effect is that we were hungry and thirsty and came in and all fifteen of us were ferociously devouring those burgers which Pam was shoveling out as fast as she could, everyone was making something with one hand and eating something else with the other, reaching for the beers and totally enjoying ourselves, really.
Once we’d sated our hunger, we wandered outside. Some of us headed down to the beach.
Now the sun was just going down at this point and Anita and Mom and I went and sat up in the crow’s nest and enjoyed the perfect golden, suffusing glow of the sun going down behind us in the west. Highlighting the yellow sand of the dune in front of us and the sea oats waving in the slight breeze with the backdrop of the beautiful blue Atlantic and the blue sky and the beach sounds, huh. Put that one in a bottle.
So as the sun went down a little bit further, we descended from the crow’s nest, Mom, Anita and I, and Mom stayed behind as Anita and I went over the dunes and down to the beach where the kids were playing and it was another, another picture, I guess, we were just full of strong feelings because it was our last day, but again the light was just right and the salt air and the white sand beaches, our whole family there together like that, it just made me feel like a kid again.
And it brought home all those memories of when we were kids, and you know how our parents loved the beach so much, coming from their little apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, just to have a home and to have that home, and to have a family, they could pat themselves on the back a little bit and it was the 60’s after the war and the depression and they’d finally made it, finally made it to their little slice of heaven. And that feeling that they had somehow communicated itself to us, their kids, because there was, at the beach, there’s always been a place to come home to for us. The beach has been our home. Its where we come to get healed, as a family and as individuals. It’s harder to communicate that feeling to someone else who didn’t live it. I know my brothers and some of my cousins will pick it up, but others, it sometimes seems, just don’t get it.
So Anita and I climbed over the hill, down to the beach where the kids were playing, some kids from the neighboring houses were playing football, and BJ and I picked up a lackluster game of catch with them, which got a lot more interesting once someone suggested playing keep away. The grown ups against the kids. That spiced things up a lot. And as we lofted spirals back and forth to one another, me and BJ, Anita and Pam, with the kids racing up and down the beach and a couple of bonfires lighting up fore and aft, the sun gone now, just a memory, like the childhood we’re chasing down that highway, rising up inside us like the waves beating the beach down, pounding, roaring, sea spray blown back by the wind, phosphorescent in the sleepy evening drawn down reluctantly like a kid who doesn’t want to go to bed even though he knows he’s exhausted.
And after swimming all day and feasting frantically and a full week of intense Lowe-ness, with my father’s drunk spirit giving us our benediction, we still had energy to run up and down the beach tossing the football and holding our own against a couple of eleven year olds.
But digging down deep, at the bottom, we found what we were looking for, there on the beach. There was no difference between grown ups and kids, husbands, and wives, we were all — family and strangers — like people all in love with the same beautiful person, who had been gone for a long time, now she was here and we all finally have her whole attention, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Yes, this was it. This was what we were all looking for.