On Park Point

How long has it been since I've been to the Beach?

The Beach, when I was a kid, was Park Point. Hot sand that burned the bottoms of our feet--we'd ow! ow! ow! all the way down to the water. Frayed beach towels laid out on the hard-as-rock ground. Frigid water. Sunburn. The coconut smell of tanning lotion. Grit inside my pink ruffled suit, inside my sandwich, inside the rim of my plastic glass of lemonade.

We'd build half-hearted sandcastles, we'd attempt to bury each other in the sand, we'd walk along the edge of the beach, where strange peapod plants grew, and bushes scratched our legs, and invisible insects chewed at our ankles.


Guv read in the sun, the brighter and hotter the better. In this picture he is, at least, wearing sunglasses, but most years I remember him reading bare-eyed. Just thinking of how the sun made those white pages even whiter makes me dizzy; I picture the letters dancing in front of him, as they do for me when I read in full sunlight, but he had no trouble; he could read for hours.

Sometimes, early on a summer morning, he'd declare the Beach for breakfast. Who's for the Beach? And then my poor mother would be left to gather everything up--the old stove-top coffeepot, the charcoal burner and charcoal, dishes, forks, all ten of us (some had to be pried from their beds) and whatever she could rustle up for food. Pancakes. Biscuits. Whatever those things are that are lined up in a row along the edge--chicken breasts? Surely not.


The beach house was at the far end, down by the lifeguard station--an old wooden structure with changing rooms with slippery floors and showers. The main part of the building held a concession stand, its echoey room dotted with ice cream tables and those tippy chairs with wire backs bent into the shape of a heart. I was entranced by those chairs and one afternoon persuaded my brothers to slip over to the beach house so we could sit in them.

We were politely stationed at one of the tables, pretending we were in a sidewalk cafe in France, when the owner came from the back room and growled, "What do you kids want? You wanna buy something?" But we had no money, of course, we never had any money, and we slunk away.

I sneaked back later, just to see those lovely chairs again, and the owner came out of the back room and hollered at me. "What are you kids doing? You kids trying to steal something?" And I fled in terror.

One afternoon, when I was in my early teens, I was lying on a blanket in my little bathing suit, reading Sinclair Lewis's "Kingsblood Royal" when a man approached me and asked what I was reading. "Is it any good?" he said, and I shyly started to tell him about the plot, and how Lewis wrote the book when he lived in Duluth, when my mother, sitting in a beach chair a few feet away, spoke up sharply. "Laurie Jo! Come here! I need to talk to you."

"In a minute," I said, and turned back to the man, but my mother said again, even more sharply, "NOW. I need to talk to you NOW."

And the man gave me a look that I took to be sympathetic, and I gave him one that said, "Parents!" and got up and stalked off to my mother, who gave me an earful about talking to strange men while lying on a blanket in a bikini.

I was 15, and I had no sense of the power of a 15-year-old girl; I saw myself as nothing more than chubby knees, thick ankles, fuzzy hair and glasses.

All the way home, back along Lake Avenue and across the Aerial Bridge and up the hill to Fourth Street, I stared out the window of the Corvair and thought, "I wonder what he wanted? I wonder what he might have said?" I did not, then, stop to think, "I wonder what he might have done?"