Sandcastles

It was my birthday with Dj and he wanted to make our first birthday together special. I wanted to go to Cozmel but he decided Galveston would be just as much fun and not as hot.
It was the first time anyone had ever wanted to take on a trip for my birthday and I sure wasn’t going to argue about where we were going. For the first hour driving down from Dallas, I tried to ignore his slow driving but after the second hour we stopped at a Dairy Queen for ice cream and we had a come to Jesus meeting. He drove so slow that he was a hazard to every moving vehicle on our side of the stripe. We had been honked at and finger waved. I knew that if we were to make Galveston my night fall and in one piece, I had better drive. Our ice cream cones didn’t seem to melt that fast in the Texas heat with our cold shoulders. As I sat down behind the driver’s seat I wondered, “What hope did the rest of the weekend have for us?”

We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast in one of the older Victorian homes complete with period furniture. Our bed had a marvelous headboard that reached to the high ceiling perhaps it was a sign of our high hopes for getting along. Our hosts were a wonderful combination of proprietors and substitute family members providing us with home made breakfasts and snacks complete with wine and chocolates in our room everyday and all the pleasantries we could swallow. The Gulf winds blew a pleasant, albeit scorching breeze across the front porch as we walked up to put our bags into our room before we went off to explore the island. It was hot enough to sweat our clothes wet and hot enough to dry them before we ever noticed.

We had several options to entertain us throughout this June weekend with hundred degree weather. The week before we left, I discovered on the internet the Annual 1999 Sandcastle Competition which included teams from all over the country. As it turned out, the sculptures were on the beach before daybreak to build their castles around the theme “The Millennium”.

All they were allowed to use was the gulf salt water and the beach sand. And of course the Texas sun would have them baked solid by noon. If we were going to the beach, at least we would have something to look at other than mostly naked people baked red jumping in and out of the small dirty gulf waves. Of course there were other attractions like Moody Gardens, who had their Rainforest and Aquarium Pyramids, the IMAX Theater and Colonel’s Paddlewheel Boat. The pyramids were 10-story glass complexes that housed birds, tropical fish and mammals who shared the lush man made environment that is supposed to imitate their natural habitat but they usually had a stink of years of bird and animal droppings.

Of course it was climate controlled which meant we would be out of the heat and the stuffy air cooled with that sterile smell attempting to mask the awful stench. There were also several of the Victorian homes we could visit and if we were lucky we might see one of the ghosts of some poor souls purported to haunt the rooms.
After unpacking our bags and laying on the huge bed under a giant ceiling fan with really cold air for an hour or so, we decided we were sufficiently cooled down enough to go to the Sandcastle Competition, Unfortunately for us; we weren’t the only ones who wanted to see the mounds of sun baked sand and half drunken artisans. It was a half cloudy day with an over cast grey sky, the kind that burns you more than tans and makes you wish the clouds hid more than the sunshine. Because of the cool air of the car, we had an illusion that it wasn’t all that hot outside. When I opened my car door the first blast of hot wind almost made me want to stay in the cool car.

It took us over an hour to inch our way to the parking area all the while we bantered about whose idea was this anyway? And did we really want to see the sandcastles that much? We could still turn around and go to Moody Gardens. But no we weren’t going to forge our way to the parking area just to say “Ok, I saw them. Now let’s go!” No, the car was now parked and we were going to get out and actually walk in the convection oven environment and we were going to see those sandcastles, every last one of them.

I had been divorced for over thirteen years. My children had moved out to their own places a little over a year ago. It wasn’t that I hadn’t dated, I had. It was a conscious decision to wait until I was on my own before I wanted anything resembling a permanent relationship. It had been two years since I wrote a list of what that relationship would look like. There was one item I didn’t include…age. A couple of weeks before my birthday, I was thinking of telling Dj that I thought things were getting too hot too fast and we needed to spend more time apart. That is until I pulled out my list and compared him to it. Of the twenty-one items on that list…he filled all but one. He wasn’t a sharp dresser. But he thought he would fix that right away and we went shopping for his new look the weekend before our trip. It was then that I taught him that black belts went with black shoes and brown belts went with brown shoes. It was a start.

As I got out of the car, my flip flops fill with hot burning sand and I did a little jiggle holding on to the car door until I somehow put my feet firmly back on the flip flops on top of the sand with high hopes that this was going to be fun. Dj walked around the front of the car smiling from under his big rim straw hat, cool matrix look a like sunglasses, his white tee shirt with some Galveston logo, his aqua swim trunks and his big bulky sandals with Velcro snaps. Yes, that was his new look. I was wearing a cute little straw hat, sunglasses, a skimpy one piece bathing suit and a wrap tied around my waist. Yep! We looked like tourist! I didn’t care it was my birthday and as far as I was concerned they had the Sandcastle contest just for me.

So true to tourist form, hand in hand with him in tow, we started the long walk down the beach viewing each and every one of those sun baked sandcastle entries. The sandcastle teams lay around exhausted, sometimes feasting on barbecue that had been roasting all day while they worked. The smells of food, beer and sweat mingled with the salt mist coming in over the water and blended with the sounds of sea gulls, car radios, laughing and yelling and the occasional “Oh my God! How did they do that?” Those of us who had come to be voyeurs were following each other in one long single line procession. If it wasn’t for the heat, the sculptures were awesome, incredible pieces of art. I realized that all the little pitiful attempts at the building with sand and water were shallow and rightly washed away. These sand sculptures reminded me of the Tibetan sand mandalas that they take such care to construct only to destroy and through in some water source in order to spread the prayers and blessings to all. Within a week all these sculptures would return to the place they had come, the beach. Relationships are like this play with this…

Dj kept grasping at my hand to hold it tightly while I kept getting that grasp down to barely touching each other. For someone who hated the heat he wanted to hold on as hotly as possible. I was happy to have as much air passing between us as possible. It was just too hot, so it was “a one finger, how little can I hold on to you and still be in contact with you” touch. Dj and I had some very different tendencies. He is slow and I am fast. He thinks things through and I, well I know what I want and decide quickly. The faster I want to go the slower he tends to be. My “towing” him didn’t help make him faster, in fact it tended to make him slower until he stopped in front of a full size sand dragon laying down asleep snoring out what felt like a breath of fire. The dragon’s tail wrapped around a miniature replica of a beautiful fairy tale castle. It reminded me of the gold shiny Christmas ornament of a knight in full armor on his armored horse I had bought last Christmas. I never really wanted such a guarded man and Dj seemed very open, the exact opposite of someone who had been wounded and whose heart was protected. I gave up my fairy tale dreams of anyone coming to my rescue years ago when I decided that if I was going to make it in this world, I had to do it myself.

It’s been an hour since we parked the car. His face is red, his arms below his white tee shirt are red and the tops of his feet around the Velcro straps are red. I am a little pink around the shoulders but I know it’s time to head out of the heat or back to the car for sunscreen or we were going to be slow roasted and unable to move tomorrow from the burns. I wonder is this really that much cooler than Mexico as I turn to head toward the car. Suddenly, I am pulled backwards when our arms are outstretched to their limit and Dj’s hand firmly clasps mine. I stop, anchor myself to pull him towards me…he doesn’t move. In fact, I am jerked back to where he is standing in front of the dragon’s mouth where he catches me to keep from falling down.

I look up under that big rim straw hat and see a smile or was it a smirk? I watched myself in his sunglasses as I goosed him and missed his ribs ending up with a handful of his white tee shirt. He grabs my hand and pulls me up to him and kisses me….a big salty, sweaty, sandy wet kiss. It was one of those kisses that make your toes curl and you forget all sensibilities and it really doesn’t matter anymore where we are or where we were headed. That is until the heat builds as the body parts are touching and just like when you put your finger on a hot stove. We quickly jerk away from each other, to try to cool the skin. A cold shower would feel really awesome about now as we both feel the dragon’s breath and decide in unison to move away from the fire. Perhaps the weekend wasn’t turning out as badly as it began.