I was sitting in my beach chair watching my son, Clyde, build a drip castle. He learned the technique from me, of course, and I realized as I watched that it all made some sort of sense.
I'm not a planner, I'm a pantser (no, I don’t pull people’s pants down). I can plan if pressed to it but it's usually unusually stressful1. The older I get, the more I realize that planning is not stressful but I'm still working through that. Slowly.
With that in mind, it makes sense that I was drawn to drip castles. When building a drip castle, you select your spot of sand, grab what you have (sand and water), and get to work dripping. Maybe you find other things along the way (in this case, a feather of some sort and your own friggen body) and add them to the mix. There is no plan. There are no predefined shapes. You don’t have to worry about the sand-to-water mix in your castle mold bucket. You simply start dripping, watch where it all lands, and build upon it. Sometimes, you drip too much in one place, and it all sloughs to the side, but gee dangit, that just means you are afforded the option of building upon the crumbled mass or starting a new tower next to it. The thrill is in the journey, the discovery.
Or you can smash it all to pieces and start again.
Or you can build it too close to the water line and let the structure evolve as the waves eat away at it. (This appears to be Clyde’s favorite approach.)
Such is the beauty of a drip castle. It doesn’t matter what happens to it; it always looks somewhere in the neighborhood of right.
As I sat on Lover’s Key beach, watching Clyde build his castle while I sipped a Yeunglings, it occurred to me that the reason my son loves drip castles—the reason that I taught him how to make drip castles—is the same reason that I enjoy writing in the way that I do. I don't want buckets and molds. I want the rough idea of what a tower or a castle or a city looks like and to watch it form from there. I want the faint idea that maybe I could put a tunnel over yonder...if it works out when I get there. I want the idea, sudden and surprising, that maybe that piece of seagrass can become a bridge (it couldn’t. I really tried, too.) It sounds pretentious as hell, but I find joy in reading the story as I write it. Truly.
Now sure, there are some situations where there are, say, a bunch of sticks on the shore when you arrive at it, or a small basin has already been dug and filled with water. Those things inspire you before you start and set the course in a specific direction.
It's still unique, it's still a creative adventure.
I wrote this vignette or dissertation or essay or whatever the hell these things are called, seated at the outdoor peninsula at my dad’s cousin's (my first cousin once removed, I BELIEVE) winter home or vacation home or snowbird home or whatever the hell those things are called. It was a truly unforgettable, delightful time staying with them for over a week. They were amazing hosts and absolutely enjoyable to be with for days on end after years of only interacting at funerals and weddings. Their generosity allowed us to be loose, not get too stressed by the planning that we so loath, and genuinely unwind and enjoy ourselves.
Then I thought, this isn’t just about writing, is it? It’s about living, too.
This whole plan was conceived at, go figure, my grandma’s funeral. Vinno (Mike) and Jamie told us to come visit, told us again, and then one more time for good measure. It seemed like they meant it, so when the time for vacation planning had long passed, and I figured I better get down to it after all, I looked Jamie up on Facebook. It felt awkward, and I didn’t want to “invite ourselves” (we’d already been invited), but I reached out anyway. After all, I wouldn’t invite someone to my home and then secretly hope they wouldn’t take me up on the offer.
And so, we stumbled upon our little bowl in the sand, our little smattering of sticks. What started as a passing conversation became one of the best trips we ever took and the memories of a lifetime.
The sand dripped and became something more.2
In the revising/editing process for this post—something I once avoided but now live by—I felt I needed to delete the following paragraph. I’m not that good at killing/murdering my darlings, though, no matter how often Sai King repeats the famous Arthur Quiller-Couch line, but to go through this experience and not comment on my own direct family would be a shame. So here it is, almost unedited and in the context in which it was written:
“Today, we had a "Pirate Sunset Cruise" planned in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. We left early because the traffic can be dicey down here and arrived quite a bit earlier than necessary. As we passed through Fort Myers, we saw a good handful of things we could do but not a lot of places to park. I kept driving until we passed over a sizeable bridge to where our boat ride was set to disembark and found there was very little to do. We could have rushed back over the bridge on foot to find something to occupy our time but instead, we walked into the restaurant we planned to eat at and spent about three hours there. That’s where the first drips of our castle had fallen, and that's where we built our day. We played cards, watched pelicans, looked through the kids’ new pirate-looking glasses that magnified things nearly imperceptibly, and otherwise enjoyed simply being in one place together. There was no plan other than to be ready for our boat ride when the time came.
And it was beautiful.”
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I feel like this sentence is on par with: “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” - Bilbo Baggins. It only makes sense if you think about it for a minute.
It seems criminal not to include more photos or anecdotes but I’ve got a narrative to stick to here, ok? We were so thankful to see TR and Cheri, listen to Jim play his mind out on the piano/accordion, swim in Jim and Jude’s pool, and have dinner/play Mexican trains with the whole Aittama crew. What a delight.