It catches me, the smell: this ocean drift, tinged with salt. Pungent as seaweed. Sulfurous, perhaps. And for a moment I’m brought back in time: the smell of Galt Drive, Fort Lauderdale, 1983, and the cream-colored pants that my grandfather wore to his chest. Photos do not capture it: the warmth that I felt once in hugging him, flipping over coin-cards in Memory, scooping Oreos with my small thumbs, Oreos simultaneously crisp and humidified—this was back when lard was still employed, unbeknownst to him—and the way he erupted in laughs. I still remember the sound of those evenings: the waves crashing, the intermittent roar of the dark. And for a moment, here at age forty-one, I float backwards, my three children beside me, two leaning in the surf, one scampering off in the sand, my wife having her own version of a coronary chasing them—I will later learn that a riptide warning’s been cast. And even here, amidst the darker, slightly purplish tint of the water, along the Bama Coast, with the air that putrid quality, the sand almost clinically white, I think not about my own lot in life—how little I own, and ever will, which is as much a product of the age as any life choices I’ve made. And I dwell not on the fact that this is actually the first vacation I’ve taken with my family—our oldest is going on eight. Nor do I really ponder the future: the fact a plague lingers, with no end in sight; my wife may lack income or coverage come July; and my own job, while stable, has grayed every hair on my chin. No, I recall my own grandfather’s grin, and the plagues he must have faced: the intra-family feuds; the loans spent and lost; the relatives vanished in Bucharest; the word kike he must have heard a thousand times before finally gaining admission to that esteemed country club in Elgin, Illinois that perennially and bitterly rejected him (and all of his ilk), and wound up here—or there—in south Florida as a result, having shunned the very community that finally and begrudgingly accepted him in favor of a warm winter home; and how his only consolation—the only real one, in fact—is the same one as mine: the smell of warm waves, how they lap and crest, as tiny heels click in the sand.
J. A. Bernstein is the author of Rachel’s Tomb, which won the A.W.P. Award Series Novel Prize and Hackney Award; Desert Castles, which won the Wilhelmus Prize at Southern Indiana Review; and Northern Cowboy, which won the Wilt Prize at Lightning Key Review. A Chicago-native, he teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is the fiction editor of Tikkun.
Photo by Steshka Willems from Pexels