Sandman redux sample

1

Preamble – Sand – Eternity – present day, October

Sand runs through my veins. It sifts through my consciousness like it does through my toes when I stroll the beach. Each grain is a memory or an image or a dream of this life. A dream because I suddenly arrived here at this particular time in my life, middle-age, and discovered that most memories are far less real, less palpable, than I would ever have believed as a young man. It’s almost as if I were never here. Where in hell was I? Those lucky few who wade lustily into old age and carry with them a treasure trove of fully re-callable, re-livable, memories are the exception to the rule. And they’re probably fooling themselves. Memories are amalgams, conglomerates, mélanges of bits of our realities. They change and morph in whatever ways the built-in, time-worn filters we possess make possible. Most of us dip our toes in the waters of time, feel its frigid grasp, gasp, and yank backwards. And there are times when this feels like another life, but I’m pretty sure this one’s mine.

As I sit here in the sand, on a Sunday in October, with the wind whipping the remains of my hair and watch grain after grain slowly fall through my fist into a rising cone-shaped mound, I recall many events in my life—some hazy, some crystal clear, most distortions of multiple memories—and look upon my current situation with the commingled emotions of hope and despair. Hell, it seems that hope and despair are the two mighty rivers that pool and form the well springs of my life. Hope because that’s what I do. I see emptiness and try to fill it up. I see a chance for adventure and experience. I hold the pitcher up high and prepare to pour, to fill that proverbial half-full glass whenever and wherever I may find it. This annoys the crap out of many people I know and call friends. I sometimes get the feeling that if I find one more silver lining, if I look on the bright side one more time, and vocalize my findings or feelings, then these people I call friends are going to behead me. One swift, arcing stroke with a devastatingly sharp sword. Plop. It’s over. B’bye. Despair because I’ve had enough. Everyone reaches a point in their life where they feel they have tossed and turned and suffered enough. This is not to say that the suffering is ever over, or that mine compares to yours, or that life and nature and the universe are ever done dealing it out. It’s more of a return to that glass. Okay, universe, it’s full now. Uncle. I’ve had quite enough. Whatever it is that you’re doing, knock that shit off.

I have lived through a cancer scare, spent two years caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, watched my children grow up and become saturated with and shaped by (and at times sickened by) modern American society and with their parents’ views of how to live a proper life, and now—when I have begun to feel like I’ve experienced enough calamity and tragedy (the glass is nearly full)—I find myself in the middle of an untimely divorce.

Is there really such a thing as a timely divorce? I wonder. I suppose there may be, but exactly when or how that works completely escapes me. And when you’re in the middle of something like a divorce, it is difficult (to say the least) to keep any semblance of perspective. Like my kids with their TV shows, movies, and music, I am saturated with all that is divorce.

Whenever I need to put things in perspective, or to gently pry out thoughts and feelings from within and dissipate their power, I return to the beach or, more specifically, the sand. I take off my shoes, walk around in it, spread my arms wide and arch my back, close my eyes, and drink in the sun and the clouds and the salt air and the breeze blowing in my face. I worship the nature of the beach. I swallow the sea air and relish the senses aroused by all that surrounds and penetrates me. Most of all, I open my soul and my heart to the poetry of the beach. I reach for and grasp and clutch and enfold the succulent words and images that spring to mind when I step foot on the stage of the shoreline.

My life seems to have revolved around and consistently returned to this place. Be it Mayflower or Nauset, Kill Devil Hills or Key Largo, Kauai or St. Johns, or just a spit of sandbar that’s arisen from an exceptionally low tide and therefore not on any maps, it doesn’t matter; what matters is the shoreline, the horizon on the water, the ripples in the sand, and the way the clouds are perched precariously on the blue sky. Over the years, sand has persistently found its way into my clothes, my car, my relationships, my thoughts, my furniture, and every embarrassing crack and hidden crevice of my body. And it’s the same with sea breezes. Let’s not forget those lovely, bracing sea breezes. And I’m not referring to vodka and grapefruit juice here, either. Real sea breezes course through my life like semis on nameless highways. And the waves. The sound of the waves has been a wonderful calming influence, a constant soundtrack to a string of events, another sensation that has had a profound effect on my life and my mind.

Wherever life has taken me thus far, down the tattered and winding roads of government employment and through the sometimes seamy, sometimes vibrant and exhilarating halls of various private corporations, from an anonymous cube in a vast field of anonymous cubes to my own desk and its accompanying window at home, I feel the call of the waves and sand and salty breezes tugging me and beckoning me to let this unique and natural life force sink into and permeate my heart, my mind, and my soul. I feel it calling me to let go and relax, gather my wandering thoughts and perspectives, and let the pieces just tumble into place. There is a part of me that wants to sink back into the sand and let it suffuse my mind and soul, seep into every crack of my existence.

The beach tells me that if I could pull back for just one second, step into another body or away from my own to see where I’ve been and who I’ve become, I would feel some peace. I might even cut myself a break. Sit back and let my ass make a nice deep dent in the soft sand, take a good hard look at myself, and realize that things are never as bad as they seem from inside that hermetically sealed, personally constructed onion I call my “self.”

Sometimes I attempt to gain a measure of perspective without actually going to the beach. I mean, let’s face it; I can’t always be at the beach. I need a substitute of some kind. In order to take a mental step back and see myself as truly and realistically as I can, I recount the beaches and the events, the memories and the people. I recount them with smiles and tears, head shakes and mental handshakes, and contrast them all against my current life. I try to make sense of everything that is bombarding me: the dull ache in my chest, the overwhelming fact that the only woman I’ve ever really loved is slowly leaving me, and the delicious chaos of a life spent with sand in the crack of my ass.

2

Early Memory – 1964

There was a time when it was all so easy. I mean that. There was a time when the most difficult decision I made all day was which pair of sneakers I would wear—the green Chucks or the white Keds with the blue stripes and the hole on the side of the left shoe? I suppose it didn’t matter much; when you get right down to it, the socks were all wrong. More on the socks later…

I recall the constant, cool fresh breeze shooting in from the ocean just a half-mile away from the home in which I grew up, or I should say, where my life began; because I never really grew up there. I just passed the early years of my life there. I didn’t really grow up until I had kids, and even then sometimes I wonder. I am, after all, a man. And let’s face it, we men (well, most of us) never really grow up. I recall the fallen leaves that would swirl and dance lazily around on an autumn breeze, a bright distant sun simmering in a slate gray sky, and bikes to ride… football and street hockey and basketball to play… woods to explore… laughing and the sharing of secrets. A thousand things. You name it. But lots of giggling. If there was one defining quality about me as a child, it is that I loved to giggle.

And I remember that there was never time to go to the bathroom. Crazy, I know, but as a kid the last thing I wanted to do was take time out from whatever important thing I was doing—running or jumping or climbing or swinging—and go to the bathroom. I would wait until the last possible second, adjusting and contorting my body so that I could continue playing, and then when it became absolutely unbearable I would race across the field, across the street, and into our house, terrified that I would miss something awfully important or exciting. I never did, of course, but I always felt like I would. Little things were so bloody important. Funny, I never really worried about pissing my pants. No, I worried instead about missing a comment or important factoid spewed by one of my friends.

Then there were the issues around which of my Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars I liked best, or which route to a buddy’s house I preferred—through the marshy area (which had small sand dunes and low-lying muddy areas, both magnificent), or weaving in and about and among the empty cottages in the dead of winter, or rolling across the field of thigh-high grass in Indian summer and watching a squadron of grasshoppers whizz away when I interrupted their meeting. Man, I still remember what a thrill it was the first time I caught one with an impulsive swipe of my hand, only to let it go and find my palm coated with what looked like molasses. And which baseball cards to attach to the spokes of my front wheel. Was I going for sound? Or how good the player on the card was? Most likely, I would be going for Red Sox players. Do I use a favorite, like Yaz? Or a lesser known player like Bill Monbouquette? There were so many important things to think about. And so much time.

As children, it seemed that time was our captive. A good day could stretch out indefinitely; a bad day would dare not show its face. Or so it seemed. I mean there could be a bad moment in a day (quickly forgotten and relegated to non-memory), or a bad event, but seriously there were no “bad days.” A clear sky would beckon us to adventures forged in our pop culture imaginations, or at the very least dreamed up somewhere beyond our dead-end street. When I return to the neighborhood of my childhood today, I can still hear the whisperings of those glowing, endless days in the crispy salt breezes that always have, and always will, pour across the area. Whisperings of a stiffening breeze at dusk through the scrub pines, of tires on patches of sand in the worn gray streets, of skin slapping water in the glinting sun of the beach, of the smell of coconut oil on the simmering bodies of the smiling teenage tourist girls.

Autumn on Cape Cod was my favorite time of year. My childhood was the sixties, and the beaches cleared after Labor Day, when the tourists moved back to their real towns and homes and lives and left behind the temporary homes they had made or shared or defiled or whatever it was they did when they visited my beaches, my realm, my home. As the years went by, the sad reality sunk in that the tourists had begun to arrive earlier and earlier, and stayed later and later before finally clearing out and leaving those of us who lived there to clean up the mess… and begin to get ready to batten down the hatches for the bleak, yet wonderfully vacant, off-season. As I grew, the summer population expanded until it seemed the peninsula would crack off and float out to sea.

But when I was a kid the beaches were pretty much cleared the week right after Labor Day and I could ride my bike there and feel the cool wind in my face. I would weave back and forth across the entire expanse of the blacktop as I pleased and encounter gloriously few cars. I could drink in the salty air, watch the whirling gabbing careening squawking gulls, and listen to the steady lapping of the small, sound-side waves. After Labor Day I could go there alone, be alone, and it all belonged solely to me.

And, generally speaking, autumn was perfect, not to put too fine a point on it. Not too hot, like the middle of August, and not yet frigid, like it was every year from December to March. In the fall, anyone who loved solitude, or the crisp, fresh, pungent ocean smell, or trolling for lost treasures in the cold sand could move about undisturbed, exploring as they pleased, cutting their own swath through their own achingly beautiful beach world. I never really understood the notion that the tourists didn’t want to be a part of this. I always just assumed that the families had to leave because the kids had to get back to school. And that’s true. But what about everyone else? What about the couples without kids, or with kids who had grown up and moved out to start their own families? I figured that they just left when everybody else left. It dawned on me years later that maybe they weren’t in on the secret. And once they caught on, once they understood the beauty of the beaches in desolation, all bets were off.

For me, the ride to the beach was at least as delicious as the beach itself; the ride was a slice of heaven in its own unique way. Upon first glance, one might think it mundane; it was anything but that to a kid who waited for the end of summer to drink in the freedom of solitude and slurp down the joys of childhood like others would ice-cold lemonade on a hot summer day. That short trek to the beach after Labor Day was special for me. I found it to be a quiet world broken only by the wind whistling in my ears and the crunch of sand and leaves and—yes, pine needles—beneath my tires. The gray, narrow streets were somehow comfortable. They were lined with scrub pines and, for the most part, bereft of lines. They were tailor-made for a kid on a bike. And most of the time on these windy, quiet rides to the sand and surf I had the road all to myself. When nary a car was seen for any stretch of time, I would generously fill the other side of the street with imaginary craft of all kinds—spaceships, horse-pulled carts, zombie-driven GTOs, what have you.

My stingray bicycle was equipped with all the latest cutting-edge technology available in the mid- and late-60s: banana seat, fork extensions that gave the rider that “chopper” look and feel, and, of course, the quintessential baseball cards clothes-pinned to the front and rear wheel frames and poking stiffly (at least until they wore out) into the spinning spokes. Clack clack clack clack clack. It was awe inspiring. It was loud. It was obnoxious. It was glorious. Some kids opted for ribbons streaming from the handlebars. Not me.

A friend once told me that a small, well-timed tantrum could lead to a quick trip to the local Western Auto, where you could obtain any color you desired of these bright plastic strips. They came with handle bar grips, so installation was a snap and soon they could be streaming from your fists as you roared down the deserted streets. In my eyes they were a girl’s adornment, like charm bracelets or fringe on your bellbottom cuffs. I wanted no part of them. I had Yaz and Teddy Baseball and Say Hey and Hammerin’ Hank clacking in my spokes, man. They provided all the color and pizzazz I needed.

On a cold or crisp day a trip to the beach would bring tears to my eyes. These were welcome tears, unlike most others that followed either a whack on the fanny for an intentional transgression or accompanied some new and confusing emotional pain—like growing up. These tears—what I call beach tears—signified the entire adventure: the ride, the quiet, the sand, the noise, the freedom, all of it. They were a tactile memory enhancer. To this day, if you get me on a bike and one droplet, one salty beach tear is shed, then I can recall every ride, every sense, every sky, and every treasure found. And being a sentimental old fool, like most of us in middle age, that one beach tear can evoke some real tears. 

Sometimes on these trips to the deserted beach, my hands would become brittle from clutching the handlebars against the frigid air, but that didn’t bother me. I ignored it until I arrived at the shore and then savored the warmth that spread evenly down my knuckles as I pressed my hands into my sweaty armpits, all the while planning my assault and ensuing adventure on the sand.

A word about sounds. The sounds along the way and at the beach were a collective garble, a cornucopia of aural delight. On the way it was the soft crunching sound of sand under my tires as I rolled through tiny drifts at the end of driveways I passed. The pine trees gently brushing up against one another in the steady, usually stiff, breeze. The hushed squeegee sound of my bike tires as I skirted the edge of a puddle or the rhythmic thumping when I mounted a short wooden sidewalk bridge over a stream or inlet. The clunk of a wooden fence gate swinging freely in the breeze. The confounding roar of a car engine from the other end of a tree-lined, tunneled road. The ululating calls of the gulls. The whoosh of my back tire swinging around in a long, exaggerated, sliding, death-defying, halting skid. The quiet, persistent whap-slap of mellow waves against the flat shore. The empty swings at the beach swaying on their chains, their rusty links squeaking and squawking and moaning beneath the volley of swooping gulls.

Time seemed to slow down while I explored the cold sand. It was as though the whole scene was waiting for me and my imagination to dream up what we could, anything at all. Dark green lumps of stringy seaweed dominated the landscape, scattered up and down the shoreline as though some sea giant had risen from the depths and shook his mighty mane, spraying clumps of his gelatinous hair across the strand. Empty horseshoe crab shells lay strewn about like discarded bomb shell casings. Clam shell shards of every shape and size littered the sand everywhere you looked, like chunks of shrapnel on a battlefield.

And that’s how I imagined the seashore at times like this, as a miniature battlefield. As a child I watched John Wayne war movies with my dad, and they stuck with me. The heaps of seaweed were soldiers’ dead bodies strewn about, the gulls were dog-fighting war planes diving and screaming up and down the expanse of the battlefield, and the foamy froth at the very edge of the waves became amphibious landing vehicles crawling upward to discharge troops. I would stay for hours, my bike left leaning and forgotten against the pilings that separated the beach from the parking lot.

A car would meander by every thirty or forty minutes. A senior citizen would lean out to wave if I happened to glance in their direction. (A side note about the senior citizens. Other than the bitch crone that lived next door, I found them to be painfully friendly. They would always wave, always smile, always say hello. I think it was less from loneliness than from the era in which they were raised. They were brought up to acknowledge everyone, friend or stranger, and they seemed to garner added delight if the person they said hello to was a child—especially one at play. Their persistence taught me to wave back. I enjoyed it. It was like a little game we played. They were passing on a minor, but important, little nicety of civilized life, and I was complying by learning it and hopefully passing it on. Now, living in suburbia, I find this little nicety has been all but forgotten or discarded. People no longer consistently wave or acknowledge one another. Instead, they relish their anonymity and persist in cutting themselves off from their community. Ignoring other people is one of the sad truths of modern suburban society.) Waving back and seeing the joy it would bring to their faces is a memory I will always cherish. But like everything else, it was woven into the story running through my imagination at the moment. They weren’t friendly senior citizens passing by; they were loved ones waving to the soldiers as they passed through town on their way to the railroad cars that would carry them to war.

I ruled the beach with an iron fist. My orders fought with the winds, punctuated by my feet pistoning into the sand. My marching and dodging and diving and carrying-on left twisting ruts and trails everywhere in the sand. And the gulls knew to keep their distance. I had a deadly arm and was always prepared with rocks and shells. My pockets bulged with ammo. My mission was a simple one: hold this beach for as long as possible… at all costs. Well, hold the beach until supper time. But definitely at all costs.

When the sun began to sink, it left long shadows that enhanced the shapes of the beach; this further charged my imagination, and my antics and tactics and (imaginary) pyrotechnics would reach their climax. The colors of the sun-soaked sky became the tinted ribbons of explosions, wispy trails of descending bombs, and smoky tails of high flying fighter jets. What a colorful, cacophonous, magical world.

Twilight signaled the slow, meandering ride home. I walked and rode a fine line then. While stretching the day as long as I possibly could, the lowering sun tended to darken the narrow, winding streets. Drivers clicked on their headlights, and little boys on their choppers were much harder to see. Furthermore, I’d better not be late for dinner.

Side Note – present day thoughts

One bright November day not so long ago—before the recent marital troubles—as I quietly sat, breathing deeply of the ocean air and staring off into the distance at the whitecaps, my memory drifted back to a fateful day when I was four and came to this beach with my mother and grandmother. It was a memory cocooned loosely in another memory, like a warm shawl around Grandma Hazel.

The day was gusty, a prelude to a promised (and much discussed and anticipated) Nor’easter, the edge of what had once been a hurricane that had battered Florida and North Carolina on its way north just days ago. The wind blew in heavy sighs, bending the sea grass in the marsh behind the beach, and howling its presence between the jutting, jagged rocks of the jetty, then out over the sand and into my young ears.

I grabbed my mother’s hand in my left, my grandmother’s in my right, and pulled them away from the dark blue ’67 Fairlane and onto the beach. I had to see the big waves. Had to hear them up close and feel their power. They were terrifying, beautiful, mesmerizing, and totally cool. Everything a four-year-old could ever ask of nature. I stalked toward the waves, turning into the stiff breeze and pulling my captives along with me. I remember not worrying about the sand, because my cowboy boots were too high for the sand to breach.

As I sat there dredging up this memory and picturing every detail in my mind, I paused and turned my head, closed my eyes; I recalled how utterly convinced I was that they loved this as much as I did. It was all so big, alive, and tactile to me—the way the salt air was forced into our lungs, the constant fight to gain ground as the sand gave way under every footfall and the wind pushed persistently back at us (not unlike Marcel Marceau on the Ed Sullivan Show, my mother once said), the roar of wind and surf rushing in our ears, taking complete control over all our senses. It was work for the ladies, especially Grandma Hazel, I later learned. But they were happy to oblige such an enthusiastic soul, at least for a little while. Every time I looked up to gauge their moods, I was greeted with a smile.

It was not long after Halloween, so I still had my costume. As a boy, I looked upon Chuck Connors, “The Rifleman,” as my personal hero. He taught us a sense of right and wrong, of family, and of loyalty. And he was so cool shooting that rifle. So here I was, decked out in my Halloween cowboy regalia: suede vest, cowboy boots, six-guns strapped to my hips, and cowboy hat proudly jammed on my head. Throw in the Sears’ Toughskins jeans and the Rat Patrol t-shirt and you’ve got the picture postcard of little boy cowboy (and 60s pop culture) regalia. I loved everything about that outfit. It was a cowboy dreamer’s heaven... with a little Desert Fox combat thrown in for good measure.

My Mom always watched me with eyes that sparkled with love. And she got that trait, or gift, depending on how you looked at it, from Grandma Hazel. Most days when she brought me to this beach, she would stand, cigarette precariously dangling from her lips (Tareyton—“I’d rather fight than switch!”), leaning against the hood of the old Fairlane, arms folded across her chest, watching her little boy mount the stairs to the beach, smiling and inhaling, smiling and inhaling, smoke billowing above her head. Her cheap polyester pants and light quilted coat screamed of her selflessness.  ‘Don’t worry about me; make sure the kids have the things they want.’

Grandma Hazel was a sweet old woman who exhibited a sense of care in everything she did. My memories of her are truncated, a little fuzzy, and mostly tactile; she lived only until I was six. Her face was deeply lined, but they were lines that somehow evoked a sense of love and gentleness, wrought of decades of smiling and caring and worrying. Her breath was always minty. Her hands were soft and worn, perfect for cupping little faces and pointing them up to hers for Grandma kisses.

Looking back, she is a blur to me now. That beach memory is my clearest, oldest of her; her death came not very long afterward. Not enough time… never enough time. I’m not even sure if I remember her real face or have transplanted the face I’d seen in photographs over the years. Strange. Thankfully, the soft hands were passed down to my Mom. And that memory, that collective synthesized memory of soft hands, is one that I will lovingly carry with me to the grave and share with my own kids. Those soft hands represented everything female in the world to me... and in some way still do. But I digress…

The waves were belligerent on that cowboy day, roaring into and slapping the cowboy shore, an unmistakable precursor to the heavy cowboy rains and high cowboy winds that were not far off. We slogged along, my two lady captives exchanging indulgent, knowing glances with each other and then to me and to the angry ocean. Suddenly, and without warning, a fierce gust buffeted us, stopping us in our collective tracks, and ripped the hat from my head. The string that loosely held it on my head by wrapping under my chubby chin held for a brief instant, then succumbed to the force of the wind. I could feel it dig in for a moment, and then slip off the end of my chin. The hat swirled momentarily and tantalizingly above us: ten, then twenty feet, then higher, before taking an abrupt turn and heading directly out to sea as though Neptune himself had wanted that hat. Cowboy hating bastard. It landed fifty feet off shore and remained there, bobbing on top of the white-capped waves, mocking my cowboy existence, denying my cowboy dreams, bringing me to cowboy tears.

I remember reaching, grasping the cold salty air. I remember pointing and crying, helpless energy seething inside me, powerless to do anything but watch that hat float further and further away, until it sank sadly into the waves. My hands hung limply by my sides, then rested lightly on the handles of my trusty six-guns. I was tempted to fetch them with lightning speed and dispatch the criminal ocean, but pushed down the urge with great effort (I knew that Chuck Connors would not have done so; therefore, neither would I). It was the right thing to do… or not do. That’s what “The Rifleman” had taught me. Never draw your guns in anger. Instead, I buried my head in Mom’s and then in Grandma Hazel’s soft shoulders and just sobbed.

But looking back on that day all these years later, I had to laugh. I had done nothing but complain about that hat: it never fit right, the string that was supposed to keep it securely on my head looked stupid and pinched into my fat little neck, and it didn’t look anything like The Rifleman’s hat. Geez. It matched my vest and pants and boots, for crying out loud. But it was mine, goddammit, and the sea had taken it away from me… and ruined my cowboy day.

The six-guns had been another story altogether. I remembered being completely satisfied with those molded pieces of metal and plastic. They fit my hands perfectly, they looked real, and perhaps most importantly, they were cap-ready: when and if I ever got my greedy, sweaty little hands on a roll of caps, those six-guns were ready to make some noise. It was a very satisfying crack-bang. It annoyed grown-ups and scared my sisters. Those guns were perfect. I kept them in a box somewhere in the attic for a long, long time afterward. Sometime between then and now they disappeared... gone to that place where such things go.