At the beach recently I recalled a kid I knew. He wasn’t cocky, just confident in the way that 20-something men are when they have life figured out.
He was in good shape, spending his free time and energy at the gym or outdoors playing ball. His second home was the beach. He spent almost as much time on the sand and in the ocean as he did at his apartment. Probably more.
Aside from his swim trunks the only other beachwear he wore was his Oakleys. Sunblock was for old women and toddlers. Umbrellas … ha, ha. Umbrellas.
Before the beaches were overrun with beer swilling louts and then teetotaling tongue clickers he enjoyed bringing a few beers in a cooler and drinking them throughout the eight-hour spans he’d spend hanging out. Lunch was a burger and fries or carne asada burrito and rolled tacos. And beer.
The only books he read at the beach were the covers of those read by the hotties he would chat up.
A bad day for him was … come to think of it I can’t recall hearing him complain much about anything except for maybe the occasional hangover.
That same day at the beach I caught in the reflection of a dirty car window a glimpse of a man that vaguely resembled that kid. Could have been his father. OK, maybe not his father. His older brother. His very older brother. His uncle?
OK, could have been his dad.
The man that looked familiar appeared as though the last time he saw a gym was on the way to work and home five days a week.
He wore a long sleeved T-shirt and shuffled along in a wide-brimmed straw hat, his legs bearing what looked to be streaks of sunblock. His shades were probably sensible knock-offs given that the likelihood of losing or sitting on sunglasses increases with their corresponding value. It’s something you learn as you get older.
Where the kid liked to plop himself in the middle of the action, the old guy situated himself on the periphery. One had gone to the beach to see and be seen, the other was there to escape.
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a bottle of — water. It’s what he would hydrate himself with during the two brief hours in the day when the sun was least likely to radiate harmful rays. He seemed to admire a nearby umbrella shading a couple his age.
His lunch was a bag of carrots and a bag of granola. The books and magazines he perused did not belong to pretty girls he wished to know. They were his and they were used mostly to shield his face as he napped on the sand.
He groaned as he rocked himself up off the sand, it was the sort of noise that mysteriously escapes from the mouths of those long past their 20s.
He made his way to the water, got as far as toe deep in the Pacific and made his way back to his towel, gathered his things and left.
I wonder what ever happened to that kid.
