Chapter 8
Mitchell pointed a thick finger toward the crashing waves. “Huge ones. Weird ones. One time he built a wall shaped like a giant sleeping dragon. Sometimes, when the beach was empty, the other guards and I would come down and help him dig the moats.”
I looked at Mitchell, utterly bewildered. “I… I never knew that,” I stammered. “Simon built office buildings. He engineered parking structures. He was obsessed with concrete, with foundations. He believed in things that were designed to endure.”
Captain Mitchell gave me a gentle, knowing look. Then he glanced at the ruined patch of sand. “He did. But every single afternoon, right around three o’clock, the high tide came in. And the ocean took every single one of his castles back.”
Noah ran a trembling finger over the laminated image of his laughing father. “Was he mad? When the ocean broke them?”
Captain Mitchell smiled a sad, beautiful smile. “No, buddy. He wasn’t.”
Noah looked troubled by this. “Why not? It takes so long to build.”
Mitchell leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Because your dad had a secret. A philosophy he told me one morning while we watched the waves flatten a three-foot tower.” Mitchell paused, looking directly at me, making sure I was listening just as closely. “Your dad said, ‘Mitch, if a man only learns how to build things that are meant to last forever, he’s going to miss out on half the beautiful things in this world.'”
The words hit me like a physical blow.
The sounds of the beach suddenly rushed back into my ears—the crashing waves, the distant laughter, the squawk of a seagull. I looked down at the flattened, ruined sand where Noah’s castle had been.
And then, a floodgate of memories tore open in my mind.
I remembered the massive, elaborate pumpkins Simon used to carve with Noah on the porch every Halloween, spending six hours on intricate designs, fully knowing they would rot and cave in within a week. I remembered the sprawling blanket forts in the living room that he would engineer with dining chairs and heavy books, only to happily dismantle them before bedtime. The delicate kites he bought that inevitably snapped in the wind. The vibrant, fragile spring flowers he insisted on planting in the front yard, fully aware that the harsh winter frost would kill them a few months later.
I had always assumed they were just fun, silly distractions. Hobbies of a busy man.
I never realized they were lessons.
May you like
He was trying to teach us how to love things fiercely, even when we knew we couldn’t keep them.
Oh, Simon, I thought, hot tears finally spilling over my eyelashes. Even from the grave, you are saving us.
