My dad at the beach was always an incongruous sight. He was more of a solid land guy, tennis, walking, not too much of a sand and sunworshipper. I can't remember him in the ocean at all. My memory of him visiting at the Jersey shore was out on the beach in a chair, socks and sneakers, tennis shorts and short-sleeved shirt, and, of course, a Knicks baseball cap. A true shoobie, even if he was from New York. But he was happy to be with his children and grandchildren at the beach, for obvious reasons, and so he parked himself in a chair and took it all in long enough for us to snap a picture, anyway. I think the beach is a place where so many of us have our seared-into-our-psyches memories of our parents, maybe because those long days in the sun allow all the shared love to really bake in, hazelike. I believe it was Tom McGrath at Philadelphia Magazine who wrote that the shore was the only place he ever saw his father ride a bicycle. And don't we all know just what he means by that. My memories of my mom at the beach are pretty vivid too: in her arms in the ocean, always packing cantelopes for our day trips (Jones Beach, parking lot 6, if we were early enough). I can remember her bathing suits and her then-out-of-style rubber flipflops (what were they called then? Something else.) And in her later years, it was the Jones Beach boardwalk where my father would take her, armed with first a folding chair stored in the trunk for rests, later a wheelchair. Was a respite that worked until the end. The other day, running on the Boardwalk, there was an older man in front of me who, from the back, looked and walked just like my dad, dressed in the same old guy jeans and sneakers. For a moment, it seemed...But you know, after a minute or two of that, I ran a little faster just to get in front of him, to move back into the present. It's a beautiful and trippy place, that ocean out there, with the smell and spray and light and breeze, the endless horizon to who knows what, and memories that originate in its vicinity in some ways seem to never quite evaporate.