Notes from Away: Seeing the beach from six stories up

When we last left off in the little running tale of my trip to California with my son, things had gone all kinds of wrong on the trip out, but we had made it in one piece; salvaged the scuttled first day with one good meal; and gone to bed fed.

That entry was easy to write. The events had a natural flow. They fit neatly into a little story. I needed do nothing more than tell it.

I’ve been struggling with how to write about the trip from there. Were I to just draft a “so then we went to…” play by play, I’m not sure which of us would be more disappointed. Probably me. No, definitely me.

You’d walk away un-wowed by a piece. I’d walk away feeling like I had failed to document something important to me. And worse, that failure would have a long tail because when I write about my son, while I’m writing for the present you, I’m also writing for the future me.

When my son is in the story, there is a part of me that is writing notes and tucking them into glass bottles so I can someday take them down from a shelf, pull the corks, slip out the paper, and read them again.

In those bottles is love. That is what it is. Love.

The stories in them are just recollections of times when I felt it deeply… when I saw it held up to a light… appreciated the depth of it… felt blessed by it…

Love is hard to put down in words though.

It is the ultimate ‘show, don’t tell.’ Blurting out “I love my son” or “I love being his father” conjures absolutely nothing. Neither does a damn thing to bring you into how feel or even explain it, really. And neither would age well in a glass bottle and then bring some future me right back to today so vividly, it was as if I was reliving it.

And being fully honest with you, that is what I have wanted most from writing about this trip. I wanted that glass bottle. The one that would someday take me right back to a time I wish I could replay in more than memory so that I could feel it again.

That’s a lot to ask of words.

If I could, I’d fashion an entry good enough to gather up a moment on the last day of the trip along with a little beachside and cork it in glass.

It was late afternoon. I was standing on one of the landings of a weathered wooden staircase which winds six stories down from the top of a high bluff to a beach below. The waves were rolling up on the beach in long, lazy sets. There were people scattered across the beach and others in the water swimming.

One of them was my son.

He had gone down to the beach a while earlier. He had been hoping to find the kids he had played some soccer with the day before. I had lagged behind before eventually making the walk to the stairs to take a few last pictures and see if he had gotten into a game. He hadn’t and was instead just practicing on his own.

After a few minutes, he kicked his ball over towards his knapsack and stripped off his shirt like he was going to go in for a swim. There was a lifeguard on duty. My son knows about rip currents and is careful and cautious in the ocean. The beach in that spot slopes gently. It doesn’t get deep until a long way out. It’s a good, safe place for a teenager to wade in and cool off.

Still, for a good while, I just stood there on the landing watching him in the water.

Part of me was just drinking in the magic of my almost 16-year-old son in the California surf on a perfect day while I watched from afar.

Another part of me was rooted to the spot because no matter how old he may be now, I am still his father, and he is still my boy. I’m the person who held his hand when he crossed the street and who cut his grapes lengthwise into skinny little quarters. I’m the person whose chest he fell asleep on when he was sick and who fell asleep with their arm around his bassinet the night he came home from the NICU.

Out there in the water was my son at almost sixteen. Up there on the landing was me relishing that very moment while also feeling acutely where it sits on the long horizontal line of his life and my time as his father.

When my son was three or four, we used to play this game where he would run around the living room and then come crashing towards me while I sat on the sofa. I’d catch him between my legs and say, “Trash compactor!” and then squeeze him with my legs while he giggled. Then I’d laugh like a cartoon villain and say, “BWAHAHA… Now it’s time for the Squashatron 3000!”

He’d reply, “You don’t have a Squashatron, daddy.”

And then I’d let out a resigned sigh and let him wriggle free… and he’d go running off giggling again while I called out after him “Oh, I will though! I’m working on inventing one!”

The Squashatron 3000 was a kid compactor. Or, it would be, once I finished inventing it in my lab. It wouldn’t make a kid that much smaller. It would just smush them down a little bit. Just enough to slow down how fast they were growing up.

That was the idea of the Squashatron 3000… and, oh, I was working on it.

Of course, my son knew I really wasn’t.

I was just telegraphing to him how much I loved him just as he was at that very moment while also joking about keeping him from growing up any further…

And he was replying with “You don’t have a Squashatron, dad.” as if to telegraph back ‘You can’t stop me from growing up, dad…’ and then I’d sigh an exaggerated sigh as if accepting defeat and would let him go.

On my end, it was a tongue-in-cheek shorthand for the whole experience of being his father. The way it has always felt. Loving him as he is. Loving the present moment in his life. Wishing I could slow all of this down just a little. Accepting that I can’t. Knowing that I will love whatever comes next.

That last day on the beach… my son in the water, me up on the stairs winding down to the sand… I was feeling all of that acutely.

On the one hand, there was the deep joy I have felt as his father over the span of his entire life. On the other, there was the profound love I had for him at that specific moment.

The former is a long horizontal strand which now covers almost sixteen years.

The latter was specific to a moment. That one. The one on that beach. My son, fifteen years old, head full of curls, arms and legs tan from summer soccer, jumping the waves while I watched from the stairs. That moment.

In laboring over how to write about this trip for both you today and for a future me, I think I was worried that in the storytelling of the events and details, lost would be the thing that mattered most to me about the whole trip. It was the way I felt standing up on that landing overlooking the beach.

It was how I felt the entire time I was away with my son.

The trip was an opportunity to stop time for a moment… freeze it up… breathe deep… and just live in the fullness of how much I love that kid and how much I love being his father. It was a chance to rid the world of all of its clutter for a few days and just feel a love that is so deep and whole and profound, it leaves me humbled by the gift of it.

Of all of the things I could have said about this trip, that is what mattered most to me. That is what I most needed to write down.

I could have just written about where we went and what we did. I could have just told you I love my son. I could have simply stated it.

Maybe by writing about that one moment on the stairs six stories above the beach… the one where I was standing barefoot on the sandy wooden planks leaning up against the wide railing as a breeze came up off the water cooling a perfect summer day toward sunset…

Maybe by writing about watching my son out in the surf jumping waves… the way his wet curly hair hanging in his face made him look older… the way I stood there seeing him at 4- and 6- and 10-years-old anyway and felt the pull to go be his lifeguard but then deliberately decided to stay put…

Maybe writing about that one specific moment in time in a lifetime of loving that kid… maybe you reading along today would feel it somehow.

And being perfectly honest with you, even more than that, maybe by writing all of that, someday when some future me rereads it, maybe I’ll get to feel it all over again. Viscerally. Deeply. As if revisited and not just remembered.

That was the goal.

I may have one last post in me about this trip. This was the one that mattered most to me though. I think that is why I have been stuck...

This whole Substack of mine is like a public diary: things private to me written specifically to be made public. Sometimes, I have to just write for the diary.

This was one of them.