A family's mask-free day at the beach

We’re building a sand castle, our daughter and I. She’s all of 6 years old, no higher than my waist. We squat near the shoreline, the waves of the Atlantic Ocean inching near us. It’s a Saturday morning in mid-July, the air already heating up, just the two of us on our own.

This is how it goes at our beach club, before the virus brought dread and danger and kept closed the beaches at Coney Island and the Rockaways and all 14 miles of beaches throughout New York City in the summer of 2020.

Caroline douses the sand with water from her plastic bucket and scoops claylike grains with her shovel. Her tiny hands sculpt a mound, patting it tight as I mold a surrounding wall. Seagulls wheel overhead, squawking, the breeze scented with salt. Caroline is absorbed in her own creativity, a newly minted architect following a blueprint only in her imagination.

Silver Point Beach Club, in Atlantic Beach, Long Island, open since the late 1930s, is nothing fancy. Wooden cabanas propped on stilts stretched out in U-shaped rows acre after acre. The serve-yourself cafeteria specializes in French Fries. Members are mostly cops, firefighters, electricians, plumbers and the occasional white-collar interloper like myself. The place is flanked by more expensive beach clubs with Cadillacs out front. Yet movies have filmed on these grounds and magazines have done photo shoots and the generations keep coming back.

We four arrive in mid-morning, an hour or two ahead of most other members. Elvira takes out a book to read at our cabana. Michael listens to music on his headphones. Caroline and I totter down to the surf and commence our construction project. Nobody wears a face mask or worries about contaminating someone else just breathing or feels forced to face a global scourge and contemplate your own mortality.

The hours here are ours to make of what we will. Maybe we’ll plunge into the Olympic-size pool and splash each other willy-nilly. Or we’ll park ourselves waterside in lounge chairs and listen to the Beach Boys. We’ll watch the waves somersault and surrender ourselves, our skin and our souls, to the hypnotic spell of sea and sky.

Such is our day at the beach. Your family breaks loose from daily chores, now free from all rules and routine. Maybe you’ll fling a Frisbee around or watch piping plovers skitter along or just stare into the distance, dozing and daydreaming, trying to glimpse Europe. We make up each moment as we go along.

Hours later, Caroline and I complete our sand castle. It has towers, turrets and a drawbridge, all encircled by a moat. Kids passing by stop to admire our handiwork, some probably fantasizing about flattening it the second we leave.

Later, as the day cools, everyone migrates over to the barbeques. Elvira commandeers our grill, the only woman out there among all the men. They’ll kid her about it and she’ll kid right back, always giving better than she gets. Soon smoke swirls overhead, fragrant with mesquite and seasoned beef, pork and chicken.

Later still, full from our feast, we pull out of the parking lot for home, the gravel crunching under our wheels. By now our daughter and I know the surf has already pitched forward and washed away our sand castle. We also know we’ll just build a new one next time.

That’s life. We’re all building our sand castles every day.

As no one need be reminded, summer is special — our reward for braving winter and our runway for the fall. It always takes too long to get here and then it’s over too soon. And nothing spells summer more than a day at the beach. We go around with bare shoulders along the boardwalks and ride the waves and spot the fireflies flashing in the twilight.

We stopped going to our beach club after nine years. Our children, now teenagers, had pretty much outgrown it. Perhaps my wife and I had, too.

But by next summer, we’ll have kissed the pandemic goodbye. The beaches will reopen and paradise will be regained. I’ll have a new partner in the construction business. I’ll be building sand castles alongside Caroline’s toddler daughter Lucia.

Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist in Forest Hills, is author of the memoir "Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age."