(Original Post - June 2011)
There’s always been something about sand that's intrigued me.
In my fiction writing, it’s always present, often playing a role more important than many of the characters. I’ve done short stories and a children’s book that are set entirely on a sandy beach. A novel I completed over a year ago begins and ends on the beach. Sand has got to be the most symbolic stuff in the world, so I use it liberally, in fiction and in sandboxes.
Kids love sand. Actually, I think just about everyone loves sand, but kids show how much they love it. Cool or warm, wet or dry, coarse or fine, it’s near impossible (at least for me) to not take off the sandals and walk through the stuff, or grab a few handfuls from a nearby sandbox and let it slip through the fingers.
We’ve got a sandbox on our patio. Actually, it’s more of a sand table. The kids sit in their chairs on either side of it and can play for hours. There might be a brief interlude when they want some bubbles blown, or want to shoot baskets on their little net, but in terms of captivation, the sand is hard to beat.
Myself, Norah and James were on the patio yesterday, enjoying a bit of afternoon sun. The kids were completely engrossed in the sand. Norah was playing with figurines of Dora and Dora’s diverse friends. James was basically foiling all of Norah/Dora’s plans, uncovering any character who tried futilely to hide from his wrath within the fine grains.
James is rough. That’s perhaps the simplest way to put it. He can be sensitive like his sister at times, but he’s loves to tip things over, throw things, drop things, and move at full speed, often through anything that stands in his way.
So when James was digging for Dora, he was throwing the sand everywhere. It was all over the deck, the chairs, his clothes, his hair. He was using a little plastic shotglass to scoop the sand out of the sand table, dumping it anywhere but back with the rest. I reminded him a few times to keep the sand in the box (reminded meaning I showed him how to dump the sand back in the sand table while shaking my head and comically saying No No No while pointing at the sand on the deck.) For his part James seemed to listen and shook his head in unison with mine (though in retrospect, he could have been shaking his head in disbelief as he watched me kneel by the sand and scoop it with a tiny cup as if it was the most valuable substance in the world).
This went on for some time. The sand pile on the deck grew, while in the sandbox, it slowly decreased. As James took two fistfuls of sand and slowly let them run through his fingers to the deck boards, I turned a bit more stern, and abruptly told him, No. You gotta stop that buddy!
James looked at me, but it was Norah who answered. She didn’t even look up from the sand when she answered me, likely for fear that Swiper, that sneaky fox, would uncover Dora’s pinecone and steal it away.
“Dad, he’s just a baby. And it’s only sand.“
As if this answer was not enough to stop me in my tracks, I looked at James, whose tiny hands were still spilling a slow, thin line of sand. At that point, I didn’t see lost sand anymore. I saw lost time. It was just like the sand of an hourglass, counting down the moments, days, months that remained of James being a toddling baby. He was essentially doing the same thing I love to do – letting sand run from partly opened fingers. However, to him, where the sand ends up is irrelevant.
And now, it’s irrelevant to me too.
Time is ticking. Time is fleeting. Coincidentally, the title of the short story I alluded to earlier is Time and Tide. And the old adage is true…
It waits for no man.
Just a thought - How many childhood behaviors do we complain about and try to help children outgrow, only to turn around a year or two later and say I’d give anything to watch him do that one more time.
“Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. And once you've lost it you can never get it back.” - Harvey MacCay
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