By Tom Poland: A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Sunday lunch at the Sea View Inn. Forty-five years it had been since my daughters and I were together at Pawleys. While eating I thought about our long-ago days at an old beach house. I could rent the house for a week for something like $700. Arrogantly shabby it was, but to us it was Biltmore on the beach.
When I recall that house, I see the house Thomas Hudson lived in on Bimini in Islands in the Stream. The house was not like Hudson’s but its significance was. Artist Hudson’s loneliness was broken by the vacation visit of his three young sons. I was breaking a crippling kind of loneliness, living apart from my girls. Now the three of us were vacationing. Together.
Our sunscreen filled the air with coconut fragrances. Sun, swim, play, and swim some more. Jaws had come out in 1975, and sharks were on my mind as we waded into the waves. No sharks, but a predator of another type. We were sunning when my younger daughter, Becky, began to scream. She sat there as a horsefly drilled into her shoulder. A swat from a beach towel dispatched it.
Horseflies aside, the edge of the continent’s a place that relaxes and energizes you. Back then we leaped waves and body surfed. I gave my all to that week. It had to be a time like no other. Once a year, being what some folks term a Disneyland Dad, I did all I could to give the girls a memorable time. It began with the telling. To tell my girls we would spend a week at the beach was a Hollywood moment. It sounded grandiose and epic, funny though, I best remember the little things.
I had a kite sailing high when I handed it to Beth. She promptly let go of it and the last we saw of it, it was headed for Bermuda. We looked for seashells and sand dollars, but I have no memories of sharks’ teeth. Nor did we do the Myrtle Beach thing. My girls, eight and six years old, didn’t know of this great cultural center. I recall putt putt and ice cream shops come evenings. One night we went to a seafood place where Beth doused her food in peppery cocktail sauce without tasting it first. She could not eat her dinner.
Some afternoons I worked while the girls played games. I wrote my first magazine feature on a screen porch freshened by sea breezes in that old house. “Mysteries of the Firefly’s Light” would lead me into another world entire, and years later my girls would follow me.
Family back then consisted of me and my girls, my parents, two sisters, and a brother-in-law — eight people. The years brought marriages, in-laws, babies, and deaths; even so, family members number 20 or more and they’re as scattered as a covey of South Georgia quail, a saying Dad liked. Beach trips are complicated. Schedules are hard to mesh. Things sure have changed as the beach goes too. People are far more than casual. They are shabby and not arrogantly so . . . people look like refugees.
These things I thought of as we dined at the Sea View Inn, a place that brings back the days before cell phones and credit cards took over life. Remove your cap when dining in this restaurant where the emphasis is on a classy experience, much like a classic, old-fashioned week at the beach.
The girls and I still talk about those beach trips. We’ve changed, of course. Today we’re curious about porpoises, osprey, and places like Hobcaw Barony and Sandy Island. As Dad would say it takes a while to get over Fool’s Hill — that is, to put childish ways behind you. Today I’m content to stare at waves, reflect, and remember, and I remember plenty.
At the trip’s conclusion . . . when the girls went back to their mom, Disneyland Dad returned to his Destitute Dad ways. Empty and more than a bit down, he had, however, invested in memories, and those memories paid dividends. They still do.
Classic food in a classic setting. Photo by Beth Shugg.
