Point of View: At the Beach

At the beach the other day there were beautiful sights — one of Amanda Calabrese, who was to have been named this week to the United States’ competitive lifesaving team, whirling through the waves in a long, sleek lifesaving craft of which she was obviously the master, and the other of the back of my wife’s head as it and her body rose and fell gently with the water in the late afternoon.

She loves the beach, for its suspension of time and for the feeling there of general good will. I wonder if a day at the beach ought not to be prescribed for all troubled souls.

People who’d begun to set up their things in front of us asked if it were all right — as if our view might be ruined! No, no, not to worry. There’s still enough of the sea to see and there’s world enough and time.

With Mary it’s a ritual — a tea ceremony of sorts. First you put up the umbrella, then lay everything out, the chairs, the chips, the thermos of limeade, and then, anchored in the sand, you take flight in a book, realighting now and then to see junior lifeguards, boards held at their sides, dashing through the surf. 

And girls won these races every time it seemed. Joe Dunn did it. He was the one who filed the lawsuit that let a thousand athletes bloom. One of them, his daughter, put his name forward, and it was done. He’s deservedly in our high school’s Hall of Fame. Life here is so much the better for it. My life as a sportswriter is so much the better for it — there’s so much joy in Mudville now that justice, mighty justice, has won out.

And the hot dog with sauerkraut, it was good.