The smells of the beach! Suntan lotion mixed with sand and the salty air. The mingled aromas of fried clam strips, French fries, tarter sauce, and ketchup coming from the boardwalk pavilion.
The sun warm and comforting but never too hot with the ocean breezes. The water warmed by the Jet Stream yet still cooling and invigorating.

And the sounds. Transistor radios playing the latest music or more often spewing a New York Yankees baseball game. The muted but omnipresent mix of people talking, laughing, splashing. The sea gulls calling providing a backdrop with the waves rippling ashore.
All of this engrained itself into my very being. It was an adventure, it was nature, it was nirvana. I had my grandmother to thank for insisting we go to this wonderful place.

When I was young boy my grandmother used to love going to the beach. Almost every Sunday of those shortened New England summers my mother, sister, grandmother, and I would get up early to go to the 7:00 a.m. Mass, come home and pack for the thirty minute ride to the Connecticut shore-line.

We had a special blanket that was only used for the beach and no matter how many times it was washed and hung out to dry you could still smell the mix of salt and sand in it. It was in our family before I was born and still the beach blanket by the time I left home. It was a faded navy blue with what appeared to be a Native American design on the border – a rather strange artifact for our Polish-American family.

My mother, sister, and I could all squeeze onto that blanket although it was rare for all three of us to be still at once. Meanwhile my grandmother sat in the green and white web strapped folding chair under our striped umbrella that encompassed every color of the rainbow.
I would play for hours in the gentle surf of Long Island Sound. Jumping the ripples that were big waves to me, catching small translucent jellyfish in a bucket, and running up to other children my age asking, “Do you want to play?” I was a master of amusing myself but sometimes I would yell for my mother to come watch me “swim” as I crawled along the sandy shallows in a parody of actual swimming.

My mother would indulge me for a bit and then often wade out a little farther to show me how to actually swim. Before long, she was out further than I could go, taking smooth, graceful strokes, propelling herself through the water in a way it would take me a few more years to attain. Looking back, I think that may have been her “happy place.” Her cares and worries of being a single mother in a time when single mothers were a rarity washed away by the waters of Long Island Sound. The salty water buoyed the victory in her battle with tuberculosis, which resulted in the removal of a lobe of her left lung and the premature deaths of her father and sister when she was a little girl. I think she was able to lose herself and focus on the soothing, joys of life for just a little while under the guise of showing me how to swim.

Those times my mother swam were the rare times I saw her do something for herself. Usually she busy was caring for my grandmother, working in the garden, scrubbing the floors and windows, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, hanging out the laundry and doing all of the other mundane chores that come with keeping a home and caring for her children and mother. I think her time in the water was the vacation she never had.

But, all vacations must come to end. The time to go home always came to soon for me and, I’m guessing, for my mother as well. I felt as if I could stay forever but home we must go. We would trudge back across the dunes covered in sea grass, load the car and off we would go. I doubt I ever lasted more than five minutes before I fell into a satiated, peaceful sleep in the back seat of our old ’58 Chevy while my mother was back at work, driving us all safely home.