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Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
When I was nine years old, I used to visit my cousins on Deauville Beach in Rehoboth, Delaware. One cousin was named Pat (Peach), who was three years younger but precocious. Standing along the shore, I would watch him sprint into the water and dive through the waves and disappear for a few seconds. This little guy, a bleach blonde with a pinkish sunburned face, kept grinning. Sprint, dive, again, and again and again.
This I remember, this sight of him, on gorgeous sunny days. We were kids and had no worries about anything except deciding which wave to sprint towards and dive into next. Those were the best of times, those were. Childhood has those moments. This bliss went on every summer of our childhoods.
My Mom and his Dad, may they be comfortable in Heaven now together, were sister and brother who got along well. I would stay, and still do, at the Rehoboth Beach house their parents bought in the early 1950s, a few wiffle ball tosses from Deauville Beach.
Before making the purchase, our grandfather, Pop Pop, called our grandmother, Mom Mom, asking whether he should make the purchase. “Do you think the grandkids will like the house?” he asked.
Be assured of this, Pop Pop. The grandkids don’t like the house. We love the house and have our whole lives. Those grandkids are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies and still go there every summer, and their kids love the house and the town of Rehoboth and Deauville. Multiple generations under your family lineage feel something good when there that we can’t get anywhere else.
As coincidence and serendipity would play out, Pat’s Dad, Charlie Garrett, was down one weekend at that house in his twenties when he met a girl at the beach and asked her out. Her name was Mary Ann. Legend has it Charlie and Mary Ann went to the Bottle & Cork in Dewey Beach, two miles from Rehoboth.
Mary Ann’s father had bought a house on Park Avenue just two blocks away from our Rehoboth House on Henlopen Avenue. Mary Ann eventually became Pat’s mother and my aunt Mary Ann, a very nice person to me.
That marriage bonded the two families forever as beach bum clans, close cousins. Several of us spent summers there working at The Dinner Bell, The Summer House, Justins, Nice & Easy, and Hurry Sundown – all restaurant bars. Those summers were endlessly fun, as free as waves crashing without concern for what anyone said or did.
Our daily routine: Wake up around 11, stroll a few hundred steps, lay out our towels on Deauville, take in the rays for a few hours, get a bite to eat at the beach snack shack, go back for a few hours of work, then revel in glorious nights again and again. For 77 straight nights or so. Deliriously delightful – all of it.
Nothing compares with how fun those summers were in college. Except the earlier summers diving into waves with little fella Pat, then puny because he was the youngest cousin in our entire generation.
Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
When we were all growing up back in the DC area, I would see Pat and the cousins from time to time. Connected by blood genes, special friends we all were and always will be.
One Friday night, when I was a senior in high school, Pat’s parents went out of town, so they had him stay at our house. Probably because he could be mischievous when left alone. Just a guess, but a good one.
So I thought for a second about what younger cuz Pat might want to do as a high school freshman. “Maggies,” I thought to myself. “We’ll go to Maggie’s. Pat will dig that.”
A now-closed pizza and beer joint on Wisconsin Avenue, Maggies was and still is my all-time favorite DC hangout. Tangy spaghetti sauce on the pizza, pitchers full of not-very-tasty beer but $2 each. Maggie’s felt like the original “Cheers” bar. Pat and I took in pizza and beer. That night, I never could have fathomed how his life and mine would play out, all the highs and lows and different journeys, all so disparate. We can’t know the future.
Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
After college, Pat went to New York City. Decided to run a marathon. Threw down a 3:26, which shows he’s a stud athlete, but more importantly, mentally tough. All that pain running 26.2 miles wasn’t enough to break my cuz. Not much ever has.
In business, he waded through the utter chaos that is the Wall Street financial district. Amid the greed and selfishness, Pat did his thing, winning the way he does while not acting like a typical Wall Streeter. My cuz kicks it. Always has. Always will. Without ever having to tell you about it.
About a decade ago, having had enough of Manhattan like everyone else eventually does, he broke the news that he had a big idea: he was moving to Australia. I sent him a smart ass email trying to convince him not to because I wanted to hang out with him more.
Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
The questions started: How long will he stay in Australia? A year? Three years? Then this thought: Australia is really far away.
Pat would send pictures of himself surfing in the Australian oceans. There he was, five trillion miles away, going into the sea, standing on a surfboard as a wave broke, his happy place ever since we were kid cousins playing around on Deauville Beach, which, if you haven’t been there, is the greatest beach anywhere. Ask Peach. Ask his bro Chris or sister Lisa or Carol or my brother Mark, or Rudy. They’ll set you straight.
Years went by. Decades went by.
Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
Australia became his home. We thought maybe he would retire there, grow old there, while we thought about him and wished he would come home again to be with us. Because we like him. Because we love him. Because he’s cool. Because he loves the beach and the ocean and waking up at 5:30 every day when he returns each summer from Australia to take his board out on Deauville and paddle, just him and the sun rising and a silhouette of him encapsulating the many mysterious of life, of the beach, of Deauville, of cousins, of families, of connections, of the directions people take with their lives, of the limited number of chances they have to explore what they can in the time they have here. Because that stuff inspires all of us, gives us hope.
Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
Last Thanksgiving, Pat and I sat on barstools at an oyster house in Rehoboth. He returns each year for this holiday week, also. He loves his family. We talked about serious topics, what we thought, what we felt, what we wanted to do next, how we got through, what moves we made, why we kept moving, what it all seemed to mean, without identifying what it really means because there’s no way to really know.
Pat said something to me then that I remember, something about in the past year or two in Australia, he had one basic mantra: keep moving as in when in doubt, when you’re not sure, when things get complicated, when decisions need to be made, keep moving.
Like he kept moving through those waves as a six-year-old. Like he kept moving during marathons. (My brother once said Pat was probably the best triathlete in Southeast Asia. Sounds plausible. None of us would be surprised. Like he moved on Wall Street. Like he moved throughout Australia.
Will you ever come back?
Back with us?
To America?
To the beach?
And stay?
Will you, Peach?
A couple of years ago, my daughter was getting married in the U.S. Of course, he was invited but couldn’t travel across the world. My daughter called to tell me there was one gift she really wanted, something very high-end, a coffee machine for the ages. Pat got that as a gift for her.
Didn’t have to. It wasn’t necessary. Did it anyway.
Because he’s a good man; no, a great man, a generous man, a likable man, admirable and an example to all of us to follow your heart where it leads you. I sometimes think that he never would have gone to Australia if there weren’t beautiful beaches there because his heart and toes and feet and mind are all firmly embedded in beach sand, forever.
I sent him a text this past week, as I usually do around this time of year, saying I was looking forward to seeing him at Rehoboth Beach this coming Fourth of July weekend. A time of exciting anticipation this time of year is. It’s as if we’re still little boys just wanting to dive in waves together.
But we’re not little boys. We’re older, much older. He’s bald. I’m a grandfather. Retirement nears for both of us. This is an unthinkable thought in a lot of ways. You start working at 22, put your head down, then look up and it’s almost time to stop, to close the laptop, to pack up your bag, hand in your security badge, and walk out the door, not quite sure what your life amounted to.
I think of the thousands of hours my cousin and I have gotten out of bed, put on our clothes, and contended with work situations that, while sometimes fulfilling and energizing, have been just plain hard much of the time. We got through all that. Here we are, both still moving forward.
“I’m bringing my dog home and his name is Charlie Garrett,” he texted me back.
Charlie Garrett is and was his Dad’s name. I loved him. He died too young. But before he did, he would be on Deauville Beach with us, chatting up the day, telling us what he felt about the delights of Deauville Beach, the taste of a chilly Budweiser from an iced-down cooler. From my earliest memories, Uncle Charlie showed me that life was most definitely supposed to be enjoyed.
On that beach, and all around that town, he showed us all from sun up to bedtime, from his tennis matches in the morning to soaking in the sand and water, to the evenings on the porch regaling us with stories about his crazy dog Heather who one day, he explained, stole an entire sandwich from a fisherman on Deauville and gobbled it down. Pat loved his Dad, too. He looks like him, too. In him, we all get to continue seeing Uncle Charlie.
But back to the text. I detected a clue about something I did not realize. Bringing home his dog, Charlie Garrett, wasn’t something he had done when he came to the beach for Fourth of July festivities.
Now he was. Charlie Garrett was coming back to Rehoboth Beach and would be on Deauville Beach. His dog, his Dad, and Peach – all of them.
Could it be that Pat, my guy Peaches, was bringing back his dog because he wanted his dog to be with him when he actually flew back home for the final time, the big move, the re-emergence into our country, the United States of America, and would be staying around longer than a few weeks each year?
Yes, he was coming home. On the move again.
Planning to stay.
To be with us longer.
Welcome home, Peach. Welcome home, Cuz.
Please stay.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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