He was sitting in his beach chair, the first day of vacation, and he’d dragged his beach chair down near the water. “Christ”, he thought, “it’s so good to not be working. But they’ll probably be calling me with something problematic”, and he felt a jab of anger at that already. He tried to let it pass and was glad the wife and kids were on vacation finally. They were already full-bore in beach mode with sun hats, toys, snacks, and splashing and laughter. Near the restrooms further up, he heard the circus of ice-cream truck music pulling into the small parking lot and children the beach over went into urgent negotiations with parents. He just wanted some rest. There was a skittering of little birds that pecked frenetically at the sand in front of him as the little wavelets licked at their feet and chased them back and forth across the beach. The larger waves breaking a little further out made a steady rumble that might help him drown out the other noises, at least. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about work, but his mind raced with the noise of it. It was as if he were on a large boat at sea and had just left the deafening vibrations of the engine room and was now elsewhere on the boat. The thrum of the engines was still reaching him. He was still on the boat.

On the next day, he was back in his beach chair and happily hadn’t received any emails or calls from work. He knew they all tried to spare vacationers from work contact, but it was so often necessary. A good friend of his had told him not to check his phone while on vacation and the thought of fielding a problem from worked suddenly made him angry again, and, in homage to his friend, and in a fully uncharacteristic pique of recklessness, he reached down and turned his phone off. He felt a silver shot of brave grace his spine and he lifted his floppy sunhat off his eyes to look at his family. He began to assess them in a new way; he tried to see if they looked like happy people. They did. Just now Mom was applying suntan lotion to the littlest one and it was clearly being done with love as a vigorous massage of the little chubby legs involved tickling and giggling. Well, it’s not all been for nothing, he thought, at least. The ice-cream truck came, he dished out money to the kids, and, after a while, he listened as the ice-cream truck drove away. Such a bubbly circus calliope song of ice-cream temptation. He remembered an old joke about people who grew up in poor neighborhoods, as he’d done–that in those neighborhoods the ice-cream truck played ‘Helter-Skelter’. The joke was still funny. And it reminded him that in those days there wasn’t always money for the ice-cream truck. The birds were back today, skittering over the wet sand, occasionally rising in deft little synchronized clouds of surprise as they wheeled to other locations on the beach. He wondered what kind of birds they were. Another beautiful day, and projected as such for the whole week. He’d moved his chair deeper into the water’s edge and now, instead of just washing over his toes, the waves thundered at his feet as they broke and he could feel the cool weight of the water, and its strength. “I hope work’s not trying to get me” he thought. And then he thought “good old cool clean Atlantic Ocean water. . . ”

On the third day, he’d left the phone on a side table in their hotel suite, quite by accident, and they were all back at the beach. There was a little town at the other end of the island, but they’d talked it over the night before and decided to just keep ‘beaching it’ as it was so goddamned convenient and beautiful, and the children remained thrilled. They’d been talking on the little balcony of their hotel room overlooking the beach. Maybe they’d hit the town at the end of the week to get a T-Shirt and some exotic souvenirs for the kids. Mom had even said, glass of white wine held to the moonlight, that she didn’t care if she ever even left that balcony let alone trekked into town, and they both laughed knowingly. He kissed her hard impulsively and the 6-year-old, hanging onto Mom’s diaphanous gown, made the appropriate noises of disgust and embarrassment. So, next day they were back on the beach, the ice-cream truck came and went. He was watching the sandpipers–he’d looked the name up the night before. He was really watching them, now that he was a Wikipedia sandpiper expert. He noticed that the little groups had very precise ‘personal-space’ distances and was watching them rise as people strolled along the shore and neared their little running flocks. The waves were quieter today. He lay back in his chair and let the sun really soak in. He’d been prudently careful of sunburn so far, as they all had, and so everyone was developing a harmless but appealing light tan. He really felt the sun now and was warmed and it moved him. He began to drift into deep thoughts about the ways that the sun was woven into our survival, our history, and he marveled at the astronomical astronomy of it all. He’d wanted to be a teacher and he played out little scenes of being a teacher in his head. Wonderful moments with High School kids, maybe, where a History teacher could open up so much fun knowledge of the history of us and our world. “Teaching history is teaching everything“, he’d said to himself now and again.

On the fourth day, everyone got to the beach late. Same setup, roughly the same place. He played with the kids and taught them the science of drip-castle making and they scoured the beach for things to put up as flags and decorations for the castle complexes. It was fun and cool enough for other vacationers to take pictures of. At one point, there were living sea creatures in the moat systems. He went to the ice-cream truck with the whole family; it was a big expedition to get there, make choices and get back with the brilliant Sun accelerating everyone’s drip vigilance. He noticed that the sandpipers were a community and wondered if they could think. Could they think, and know things? How are they so synchronized? What are they feeling? What are their social setups? He wondered about other animals as well, and then about ocean creatures that might be just yards offshore, or beyond that island, or in the depths of the Marianas Trench. What is the setup among them all? He fell asleep to the tribal drumbeat of the waves for really the first time and his wife let him sleep. She watched over him. The youngest was napping in the shade of a small cheerful umbrella and the other two were coloring, and exhausted from ‘shoulder-fights’ in the surf and maybe near a nap themselves. But the Dad really slept. Pure, flat, clean, dense sleep. When he woke up much later, he felt like he’d stumbled out of a small warp in time. The setting sun, his wife and children all near and safe, the white line of gentle waves: all this came into focus slowly. His wife was watching him climb out of this stupor and was genially amused. She thought for a moment that he looked like when he was younger, before the kids.

On the last day, one of the children had wet the bed, a pair of sandals had apparently been left at the beach somewhere, the middle child was indeed going to be moderately sunburned and the tunafish had been accidentally left out all night so today’s sandwich plan was kaput. “So what?” they all said. We’ll get takeout from the hotel for lunch and the children squealed because they knew the room service menu and were going to exploit it mightily. Mom and Dad had said, “anything you want.” After the fattest lunch, they all still trekked to the ice-cream truck mid-afternoon, and all got something. Then they waited. Once they identified the kids who’d merely lurked, they waved them forward and bought them all ice-cream too. One of their children had noticed some lurkers the day before, kids from the town probably, and asked Mom and Dad what to do. So, this was the answer, and they all embraced this chance to be nice to other people. Their own children glowed. There were no sandpipers on this, the last full day. But the man knew that he’d see them forever. Those little lives, that society, that connection to everything. When the little birds had darted their long narrow beaks in the sand, their little stick feet awash in thin, clean sheets of ocean water, a harmony of land, sea, and sky converged. He was having these crazy thoughts, but he delighted in it. He watched the horizon for quite a while, chatting intermittently with his wife. He asked her what it must have been like to be among the first to strike for the horizon in early sailing history. She knew his penchant for this sort of thing and it was one of the things that attracted her to him. They talked for a long time about some of the early explorers, her takes on things as interesting as his. He eventually settled in for another nap, laid out flat on a towel this time, in the umbrella shade, with his fingers in the sand. He could really smell the sea on the breeze, and he took many long deep breaths with his eyes closed as he stretched out on his towel languorously. Then he began to drift off, and at that moment he remembered something he’d recently read. It was about an oil company’s headquarters on the north coast of Alaska inside the Arctic Circle: “A few years ago, there were three birch trees in an atrium in the building’s lobby. In September, their leaves turned yellow and curled over. Then they just hung there, because the air in the enclosure was too still. No wind. Fall came when a man from building maintenance went in and shook the trees.”

He could really picture this -not the leaves falling- but he could see, really see, the leaves yellow and curled over, hanging in the still air. He felt like he was seeing this for the first time. While he was watching this image, he fell deeper into sleep and all of the scenes of his life began to recede from his mind, being pulled away into the shadows like stage scenery being pulled backward by quiet stagehands in black clothing. The deep warmth of the sun permeated him to his bones. He slept heavy as a plank.