On a recent vacation to Puerto Rico with my boyfriend’s family, I realized this would mark the first trip to the beach since my father’s death. I was actually in California when I got “the call” last February. My first visit to that state let me experience Joshua Tree and bizarrely, a rare blizzard that …
On a recent vacation to Puerto Rico with my boyfriend’s family, I realized this would mark the first trip to the beach since my father’s death. I was actually in California when I got “the call” last February. My first visit to that state let me experience Joshua Tree and bizarrely, a rare blizzard that covered the entire desert.
I had known I would get it at some point, but I never imagined the news would come when I was miles from home.
Out on a balcony in San Juan, overlooking the water, I couldn’t think of anything my father loved more than this. Not “going to the beach” but being “on” it, the way that clouds are really sort of “on” the sky, hovering not touching, coming and going as they please. If my father did deign to interact with the beach, it was to cool himself in the way air conditioning (his second love) couldn’t. He’d mosey down from wherever we were staying and walk straight into the water without hesitation, trudging in the waves like a determined toddler. Then, after submerging himself completely, he’d walk back out to resume his role as tropical gargoyle. If there was a beach, there must also be a balcony and so the two have become synonymous in my mind. More musts then follow: there must be music, good music, curated especially for the moment. Frank Sinatra, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen. There must also be drinks, cold and colorless, pools of water forming underneath as soon as you set them down. And so, every summer I heard the soundtrack to my father — music playing, ice clinking in the glass, and waves crashing on the shore below us. Eventually, one of these would kill him, and lord knows I wish I were talking about James Taylor.
Despite this constantly repeating track, I never knew why this particular form of leisure was so beloved by my father, but it made him so content I started to scoff at those who thought the beach was supposed to be experienced on land. Homes that hung signs that read “LIFE’S BETTER WITH SAND BETWEEN YOUR TOES” had no idea how wrong they were.
“How embarrassing to not know what luxury is,” I would think to my pre-teen self while reclining in a deck chair, disc-man as hot as a cast-iron pan burning in my lap. “You couldn’t pay me to be down there.”
This mindset of course aided in my efforts to dull the pain of my dad not being “at” the beach with us. I’d look up and scan the houses, squinting to find him with his arms over the railing. The feeling of not being chosen dug at me like hands in the sand. But all of this would dissipate the moment I’d come back to see him just behind the sliding glass doors, head back, eyes closed, smiling while tapping his toes to a guitar solo. It’s this image of him, alone and happy, that will be conjured whenever I meet the smell of saltwater and sunbathed wood.
Turning to my boyfriend Joe, I try to tell him something before my voice breaks, a message I read on my dad’s Facebook, which now acts as a digital graveyard I come to visit every now and then. Someone had written to him that he hopes “wherever he is now,” he’s on a terrace overlooking the water. I tell Joe how much I hope that too. In our many lavish trips to St. Thomas and Ocean City and the Grand Cayman over the years, one could never argue that my dad gave us something average. Even in mourning, I’m not fated to walk among the “regulars” who associate their loved ones with seashells and sunsets and the romantic rolling of the waves. I stare off into the distance imagining him choosing a place for us to spend our next summers if he were still here. “We’ll get the one with the balcony,” my dad would say.
Of course, we’ll get the balcony.
