The Gift from the Sea

 Gift from the Sea 

I was at the beach with my wife Linda and daughter Lillian and granddaughter Lulu.

We rented a condo near the water, and for a week every moment of our lives was touched by the sea.  We walked along its shore in the morning and the evening, we listened to the soft rush of the waves washing up on the beach over and over again, we watched seagulls flying softly above our heads, we smiled at the excitement of the small children running along the water and into it, and we entered the water ourselves to swim and to stand and to feel the ocean’s deep breath.

Standing there in the water at one point, I remembered a book I had read a long long time ago.  It was called A Gift from the Sea.  It was by an American author, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of the famous pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh who flew the first plane across the Atlantic Ocean.  Her book talked about a vacation she and her husband took on the Florida coast decades ago and the gift that the sea gave her.

I hadn’t thought of her book in 40 years, not since I first read it, but there I was in the water suddenly thinking of it again, thinking of it and the gift that the sea gives us.

And what is that gift?  For me it was a sudden sense that all of my memories of water and shore and sand were still with me, still fresh in my eyes and my ears and in my heart.  

Standing there on the beach, I remembered standing as a three-year old on the deck of the troop ship that brought us from the DP camps in Germany to America in 1951.  I remembered watching the black and roiling ocean waves, and I remembered asking my mother what our life would be like in America.  I remembered being five years old and afraid of walking into the water at North Avenue Beach until my father took my hand in his and told me that he would stay with me in the water no matter what.  I remember years later sitting in the sand with my wife and our 5-year old daughter on a different beach and building a sand castle with her, and hearing her excitement at how beautiful it all was.  

All of these memories and so many others came to me as I stood on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean last week and thought of the gift that the sea gives us.

— This was my recent column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest newspaper in America.  https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/guzlowski/dar-od-morza/

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