“Feel the wave!” “Put your chest on the board!” “Watch for the foamy water!”
My two oldest children, Noah and Gabriela, call out from the shallows, their voices carrying that particular mix of excitement and skepticism reserved for watching a parent attempt something they’ve already mastered.
“I’ve got this,” I call back, though I haven’t ridden a wave in 30 years – not since I was their age in these same waters. My children exchange glances, clearly doubting my bravado.
Then it happens: the first wave builds behind me, and something ancient awakens. The cosmos delivers exactly what I need: a perfect wave cresting at precisely the right moment. I leap forward as the water reaches its crescendo, suddenly rising, catapulted toward shore by forces older than memory. I grip that board like salvation itself, gliding almost to the water’s edge, breathlessly victorious.
Noah and Gabriela erupt in cheers. “Dad! You did it! That was amazing!”
Their surprise mirrors my own. Sometimes muscle memory runs deeper than we think.
I’m back at Santa Rosa Beach with my children, where past and present blur like watercolors in rain. In 1989, long before I had children of my own, my maternal grandparents – Nina and Papa – purchased a condo here, eventually selling our sanctuary in 2003.
Papa departed in 2013; Nina followed last summer. Now the wheel of memory turns as it always does, carrying me between what was and what is.
There were mornings here when the world belonged entirely to Papa and me. While the sky hung black as velvet, we’d awaken and slip away to the Donut Hole, that temple for day-breaking souls. He’d sit with his coffee cup, steam rising like incense, while I selected glazed offerings for the sleeping family we’d left behind.
The back porch became our theater, the Gulf our entertainment. We’d settle into weathered chairs and watch the ocean perform its eternal dance, two generations separated by decades but united in wonder.
On rainy afternoons, classic films flickered on their television: the sweeping romance of “Dr. Zhivago,” the magnificent ruin of “Gone with the Wind,” Hitchcock’s elegant suspense in “To Catch a Thief” and “Rear Window,” the poignant cynicism of “Casablanca,” the biblical grandeur of “Ben-Hur,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” conveying its terrible truths.
With Nina, I walked the shoreline like a disciple learning scripture, each shell and wave a verse in the great poem of childhood. Papa transformed me into a hunter of crabs, an architect of sandcastles that the tide would claim as tribute.
Nick’s on the Beach is gone now, lost to time after a fire that had already rewritten its design. Still, I remember how we once feasted there like visiting royalty, under Papa’s Auburn basketball photograph – somehow spared, even then – a talisman against forgetting.
Then there were the go-kart races at The Track in Destin, scene of my great automotive catastrophe at age eight. Speed intoxicated me so completely that I forgot the fundamental principle of turning. Full throttle into that first lap, then the awful moment of decision – left or right? – which my panic-addled brain resolved by choosing neither.
Straight into the wall I crashed, transforming recreation into crisis, sending workers scurrying like disturbed ants. Children are resilient creatures, bouncing back from disasters that would fell adults, so I emerged unscathed but considerably more cautious in subsequent laps.
Now my own children race these same tracks, explore these same dunes, discovering what I discovered decades ago: that some places hold magic the way oysters hold pearls.
We have our small dramas, of course.
“The goggles are gone forever,” Gabriela announces with 11-year-old finality. “This whole vacation is ruined.”
We turn the condo upside down – my daughter insisting with fierce certainty they were somewhere inside, me helping hunt under cushions, in the refrigerator, behind furniture, both of us maintaining the fiction that everything important can be found again – only to discover them hours later abandoned by the boardwalk hoses where sandy feet are baptized clean.
Such small tragedies. Such sweet relief when the lost is found.
Next came our expedition to Seaside, that picture-perfect community, where we discovered at dinner that Gabriela had achieved what fashion designers might call an avant-garde triumph: her shirt worn simultaneously inside-out and backwards, a sartorial feat requiring considerable unconscious artistry.
This trip, I notice what escaped my child’s eye: the curious spectacle of grown men surrendering to the beach’s ancient spell. They build elaborate sand fortresses with the devotion of engineers, hurl footballs through salt air with boyish abandon, bury themselves beneath smooth white powder like willing participants in some pagan ritual. No wonder I wasn’t shy or ashamed to boogie board.
And perhaps this elemental call is what draws us back, generation after generation, to these same stretches of sand and salt.
We return, always, to the sea. Not because we must, but because it reminds us that time flows rather than marches, carrying forward what needs carrying, washing away what needs washing away.
Here, where the endless rhythm of waves marks time not in minutes but in memories, we discover truths too large for ordinary days: that love transcends loss, that beauty echoes across decades, that some connections run deeper than death itself.
Between water and sky, where land surrenders to the infinite, the horizon becomes a doorway, and in that shimmering threshold where earth meets eternity, grandfathers are forever young, children never stop becoming, and every current carries us home.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Capital Markets Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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