I meant to write about our last summer vacation as soon as we got home but, well, things never go as planned. At least that’s what a lot of annoying people tell me. You know, instead of telling me how to make them go as planned, which would actually be helpful.
The story of that vacation really begins three years ago. That’s when my dad died. It’s also when our family adopted a homeless penguin named Matilda.
Actually, no, we didn’t. It’s just that after mentioning that this was about my dad dying I figured most people would think “oh crap this is going to be that kind of blog post” and stop reading. So I added the bit about Matilda to let you know that, well, yes it would be that kind of blog post but it would also have penguins sprinkled in for comic relief so maybe keep reading.
My dad died just as COVID broke out and everything started getting locked down, including his nursing home. So when he finally succumbed to dementia my brothers and I were quarantined in our homes and it was a nurse holding his hand as he passed, instead of family.
A nurse named Matilda.
No, sorry. No one ever told us what her name was. But it would have been nice, right? If her name had tied this all together later on? Because that paragraph about how he died is really fucking sad. And it probably hurts because everyone knows someone that this happened to. People usually don’t want to sit with that hurt. People need for this really sad thing to have meaning, to be part of some bigger picture that all makes sense in the end, like a movie. Preferably one involving penguins.
I wrote my father’s obituary. I mean, of course I did, he and my mom had spent $65,000 for my English degree so that was the least I could do. And, as I talked to my family to get all the details of his life right and find the parts to accentuate, they all repeated the same thing: our summer vacations at the beach in Watch Hill, Rhode Island were always the best time of my dad’s year. For those two weeks, he was finally able to relax. We all could. Well, except my mom–even on vacation my mom had to mom.
We always knew exactly what our summer vacation was going to be. Every year my parents rented an apartment in Watch Hill for two weeks. Watch Hill is this little seaside town right on the ocean with a long row of shops and a carousel and tons of well-kept houses we could never hope to afford. But for those two weeks we got to stroll around the streets and go back and forth to the beaches whenever we wanted, just like all the people that could afford those houses. And after dinners we’d ride around the carousel until the music stopped and then we’d get one last the last ice cream from the St. Clair Annex before it closed for the night. We hunted hermit crabs on the bay side of the peninsula and let them crawl across our hands. We got sunburns on the beaches and bought overpriced toys in the overpriced toy shops. There was a sense of place that showed up as a kind of glorious freedom and I remember not really worrying much about anything. We could just be and that’s not something we did a lot outside of that vacation.
I had brought my daughters to Watch Hill too when they were young. We always stayed in Mystic, CT though, and made day trips into Watch Hill. They rode the carousel and they bought toys they didn’t need, just like I had. But it was never the same. There’s a huge difference between heading out to Napatree Point with nothing but a sandwich in hand versus walking to the beach carrying the entire contents of a small SUV plus two small kids. We spent more time finding a public bathroom or an acceptable mid-morning snack than actual frolicking in the surf. So the kids always wanted less time at the beach and more time at the Mystic Aquarium. With the penguins. Especially the one named Matilda.
Okay, so the penguins part here is true. Kind of. Thanks to the Mystic Aquarium our youngest daughter developed a deep, lifelong, and—if I’m being honest—obsessive-bordering-on-maniacal love of penguins. But they all had homes there and none of them were named Matilda. Well, that we know of.
Now, my father requested to be cremated. He wanted his ashes to be buried next to his mother. And three months after he died, we did just that. But we decided we’d also spread some of his ashes on the Napatree Point beach in Watch Hill, next to the waves and the tall grass. We just needed COVID to end and things to return to a level where we could once again leave the state without quarantining for weeks on end and could actually rent a place to stay.
So, once the omicron wave of COVID went through and things returned to relative normal, it was time to finally spread the rest of my dad’s ashes. That’s not exactly a fun-filled summer vacation kind of thing but that’s logistically when we’d have to do it. In my mind, I envisioned us all solemnly opening up the little memorial urns on the beach and watching his ashes waft dramatically in the wind and remain forever on the beach or among the waves. And there we would stand as a family, stare out into the ocean, and say our most final goodbye to my dad.
Clearly, I have watched far too many movies where Things Go According to Plan.
But, overly-sentimental imaginings aside, I had at least recognized that I needed to make the rest of the vacation be about something else. And that’s when we adopted the penguin.
I’m sorry…really. At this point I just can’t help myself. No, we didn’t adopt a penguin. It gets funnier from here on out, though, so now I can let you know that there will definitely not be any more made-up bits involving penguins. Probably.
I decided that if we were going to the beach then we were going to have an actual Beach Vacation. So for the first time ever I rented a place right in Watch Hill for us, bank account be damned. I figured that would give us a home base that my family could use when we did the ash-spreading. Then the rest of the week would just be the girls and I relaxing on the beach and whatever else the kids wanted to do.
My mother and my brothers met us at our rented condo on the first night of our vacation. Late in the afternoon on a beautifully sunny day, we walked down to the Napatree Point beach to do the deed. That was about when we remembered that the entire beach is also a wildlife conservation area where dumping all of your what-have-you was pretty generally frowned upon. So we decided to walk a ways up the beach as surreptitiously as we could to find a more deserted stretch. We wanted my dad to be at peace, sure, but we also wanted to leave Watch Hill without a criminal record. Once we found an empty spot, we pulled out our urns and solemnly tipped them over to spread the ashes. Except that absolutely nothing came out. My dad, in typical my dad fashion, apparently wanted to stay exactly where he was.
The problem was that, during the interceding two years, his ashes had become—and here I’m using technical mortuary terms—a brick. So there we were, nonchalantly milling around a beach/conservation area with no beach apparel whatsoever, whacking the back of our small urns like they were bottles of ketchup and the beach was the biggest, sandiest hamburger you’ve ever seen. When we finally got my dad’s ashes out, instead of being dramatically carried by the wind into the ocean he just kind of plopped onto the beach in one hard, poop-like cylinder. And it just laid there on top of the sand like a turd from a very constipated mummy. My kids and I didn’t have any beach toys or really anything to break him up and spread him around. So we just stood there on the beach, staring at each other awkwardly, knowing there was really only one solution to the problem but none of us wanting to do it.
It’s an odd thing, smooshing your own father with your sandal, trying to mix him into his new surroundings a little more permanently.
That’s when one of my brothers abruptly said, “OK, we’re done.” And then everyone else was like “Yeah I’m getting kind of hungry. Where are we eating?” And that was it. That’s how that went. There were no dramatic monologues as the sun set on Napatree Point. No tearful goodbyes. Just the ketchup bottle whacking and the smooshing, followed by a lot of talk about dining options.
So, no–nothing ever goes as planned.
After my mother and my brothers left, my daughters and I just started on the relaxing part of our our vacation. We all found a couch that suited us. We started reading whatever books we’d brought. We’d made no definite plans for the rest of our vacation save walking around the town and maybe going into Westerly to eat and shop. When the sun started getting low out our window my daughter said she wanted to go back to the beach to watch the sunset. Turns out we all did. The girls and I waded into the water and just stood there listening to the waves roll in and out again, until the sun finally slipped under the horizon. One by one everyone else on the beach left until we were the last ones watching the moon reflected in a thousand glittering shards on the water. In the distance, the Watch Hill lighthouse swung its light out across the Atlantic to warn all the ships about the rocks and the coastline. And somewhere far out in the dark you could almost hear all the ships replying that they were all now fully equipped with GPS, thank-you-very-much, and absolutely didn’t need any warning. It was so gloriously peaceful and calming that we went back and did that every night we were there.
When we were getting ready for bed that first night my oldest daughter asked to wake up at sunrise and walk the mile-and-a-half to Napatree Point and back. Being the doting and protective father I am, I told her I’d join her to make sure she didn’t have any issues and not at all because I thought it was a super cool idea and wanted in on it too. Of course, I’m older and lazier than her so we actually did it about a half hour AFTER sunrise, which I rationalized was fine since the sun actually rose behind the hill on the other side of town anyway. We had such a good time we wound up doing it every morning. We started noticing the same people out there with us either walking their dogs or setting up their camera to take pictures of the ocean in the early morning light. There were tons of dogs, which of course makes any tradition better. Every morning she and I would have a conversation about colleges or whatever we wanted…or we wouldn’t say anything and just walked under that gloriously low sun, stopping only to pick up shells or interesting rocks to bring back to her friends. And I started to feel those old feelings of freedom, of a contemplative kind of exploration that I wouldn’t have known how to name when I was a boy. And then we went back to the condo, waited for my younger daughter to wake up, and then ate the handmade donuts we’d bought from a small bakery in Westerly, which is really the only way to end those kind of walks.
Over the next four days, yes we shopped the shops. Yes, we visited the lighthouse…because what vacation is complete without your teenage daughters telling you with emphatic detail how unimpressed they were by this old bit of engineering their dad finds so damn cool. (I mean…who doesn’t love a Third Order Fresnel lens? Kids these days!) We watched the new batch of kids ride the carousel and try to get the brass ring at the end. We found Taylor Swift’s mansion and sympathized with her security guards as wave after wave of people screamed into her intercom TAYLOR WE LOVE YOU, WHY WON’T YOU COME OUT TO TALK WITH US??? Her security guards just looked on with faces that said Maybe because it’s only 3:30 in the afternoon and you’re already drunk and yelling into an intercom we disconnected after the 3rd day of this crap?
I watched as my daughters settled into Watch Hill and started feeling comfortable just walking around the shops on their own, wading into the water on the bayside looking for hermit crabs, and all the other things that I used to do there when I was a kid. Watch Hill had become their place too instead of just a destination. And seeing that happen made me feel something more than simple nostalgia. Pride. That I had passed something onto my daughters that had been given to me all those years ago. Something…not a thing, exactly, but something they could hold onto just the same. Like you hold onto a penguin.
For the record, I was going to wrap this up without one last penguin bit but my daughter (the penguin-obsessed one) read this and was like “you need one more reference to Matilda at the end.” Mind you, she told me that after reminding me that the penguins at Mystic Aquarium had colored bands on their little flippers to identify them instead of names. The bands were some weird combination of their age, their sex, and when they had arrived at the aquarium. Therefore, my daughter insists, none of them were named Matilda but instead something like Ten Year Old Female Arrived August 10th 2012. I guess what I am saying is, if your name is Matilda and you hate it…it could be worse.
We’d gone to Watch Hill to leave a bit of my father there. I expected it to be a dramatic, emotional affair. Instead my daughters and I had the kind of time that reminded me why my dad had brought us there when I was a kid.
So, no, things don’t always go as planned. Sometimes they go even better.
