We wiled away the hot, sunny Saturday afternoon at Crane Beach (here) with hundreds if not thousands of other blissed-out beachgoers. After frolicking in the waveless, chilly but bearable water in the low-tide sand flats, we beached ourselves on our chairs, opened magazines, closed eyes, and innocuously spied on our neighbors as the encroaching tide compressed the crowd into a narrowing strip of flesh-congested sand. Yes, it’s summer.
Camped next to us was a frenetic family of five — three single-digit aged boys, a rail-thin mother who moved like a cagey hawk, and a pot-bellied father who periodically roused himself from his sun stupor to weakly discipline his boisterous brood. Within the first 20 minutes of their arrival, the boys went swimming three times, started to build a sand castle, got reprimanded for inadvertently squirting strangers with a water gun, finished a bag of Teddy Grahams, buried a towel in the sand, and had the aforementioned water gun taken away from them. The boys howled as their father slipped it under his beach chair, saying repeatedly “Your actions will have consequences.” Their mother tried to distract them with grapes before they remembered they were at the beach and scrambled into the water.
After about an hour, their father emerged completely from his torpor and was goaded by his exhausted wife to take the boys into the water to play catch with a basketball-sized inflatable ball. Not two minutes later, one of the boys returned to inform his mother — who was attempting to bask in the sun, desperately — that “Dad overthrew the ball, and he’s not going to get it! He’s just letting it go!”
Everyone within a 25-foot radius of the boom-voiced boy looked out to the ocean to see said-Father walking towards the shore as the ball floated towards the boundary buoys.
“I CAN’T believe he’s NOT going to GET MY BALL!” the boy said in a shrill voice dripping with contempt. His mother acted utterly disinterested in the loss of the ball, probably because they were literally wallowing in a pile of cheap plastic toys including several other balls of various sizes.
I was bothered by the environmental implications — we’re lucky enough to be enjoying pristine sea water on a beautiful beach, and this fatty but otherwise able-bodied guy can’t swim less than 20 feet to prevent a sack of petrochemicals from littering the ocean? Man, if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the goddamn problem.
Perhaps Mr. P was thinking the same thing, or perhaps he saw a challenge. “I’m going to get that ball,” he said quietly to me as he grabbed his goggles and strode to the water in his Speedo. As he shuffled slowly out into the cool water, he passed the father and his other two sons coming back to their towels.
“It’s your fault! You overthrew the ball!” one boy said, pointing a finger at his father. “Dad, you’re a jerk!”
The father reacted with a sharp “Don’t talk that way to me!” but then proceeded to defend himself, explaining that the ball was moving too fast to retrieve and it was too dangerous. (I cannot imagine what would have happened if me or my siblings called my father a jerk, but I suspect we wouldn’t be staying at the beach very much longer.)
“But THAT guy is going to get it!” another son said, pointing to Mr. P as he steadily swam towards the ball, which was almost passed the boundary buoys.
“He IS going to go get it!” the oldest boy said. I don’t think they knew that Mr. P was the guy sitting next to them on the shore, but suddenly, their father looked pretty weak. Mr. P is a pretty strong outdoor swimmer, and their father was ripping into a bag of potato chips.
Mr. P periodically stopped swimming to spot the ball, which had floated past the buoys. Not wanting to get whistled at by a lifeguard, he turned around and started swimming back to the shore. With no hope of getting the ball back, the boys started demanding that their father buy them another ball that afternoon.
I ran out into the water to meet Mr. P as he came in. “Good effort,” I told him. “Although you really made that other guy look weak in front of his kids.”
We were in no rush to return to the beach, to the familial squabbling and the hot glare of the sun. Mr. P chased me around the water with his cold wet arms, until I became accustomed enough to the cool water that I let myself be caught. Then he gave me his goggles and suggested that I swim around for a bit while he headed back to the beach.
“Tell them I’m going to get the ball,” I called. “And then tell them ‘finder’s keepers, losers weepers, brats.'”
