Lines in the Sand

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I was chatting with my mother a few days ago and this memory came up. She didn't remember, but I did - possibly because of the disappointment. When I was about five years old, we traveled by train to San Diego. The train trip was another vivid memory of my childhood, but is not what I want to remember today. My memories of San Diego include it's wonderful zoo and the giant tortises there. Perhaps the tortise was the most memorable animal of the zoo because we would ofen see box turtles on the road side in Kansas. We would occasionally persuade mom to stop and pick them up and we would bring them home and try to feed them. They didn't adapt well to captivity; if all the children of Kansas did what we did, the box turtle population would have been descimated in that baby boom generation... We went to Disneyland and I found it scary. I've never become a rider of carnival rides possibly because of that early experience. None of this has anything to do with lines in the sand however.

We went to the beach. We walked out on the hot dry sand, none of us in beach clothes, filling our shoes with sand. We reached the point where the waves had darkened and hardened the sand. Dad leaned down and drew a line in the sand and said, we'll go when the waves cross this line. I suppose there were many reasons why Dad might not have wanted to spend very much time at the beach. Perhaps he didn't want his kids returning to his sisters house with clothes full of sand. Perhaps there was a plan for something else later that day and he didn't want to get us all cleaned up again. I suspect it was hot; some of us sunburned easily and Barbara was a baby. Perhaps the biggest reason was that he was a non-swimmer (as were we at the time) and wasn't comfortable with water play. Whatever his reasons, the very next wave crossed his line - and he really was ready to go. We persuaded him to wait for a few more waves, but not many. Drawing lines in the sand can be disappointing, waves wash them away sooner than you think.