Beach reflections: Seeing our lives in lives of others

I'm sure the guitarist at the Ocean House restaurant thought I was crazy. I know my family did.

One minute I was at an outdoor table, happily eating my she-crab soup and listening to my 17-year-old son making his college/Army plans with his dad. The next minute the guitarist was playing Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" and the sky and sand turned sunset-pink and I could not stop crying.

"Are you OK?" my husband asked.

I nodded and buried my face in my paper napkin.

My son laughed. "Thanks for the ball, Dad. Come on let's play," he quoted from the lyrics. "Can you teach me to throw?"

"Not today," my husband replied on cue. "I got a lot to do."

"That's OK."

They thought they were hilarious.

They were killing me.

I could not exactly explain why. We had just experienced one of those days that make Virginia Beach the most perfect beach in the world. The green waves were cool but not cold. The sun shone but did not glare.

We walked up a beach full of babies and their daddies, full of sisters bossing little brothers, full of couples who illustrated just why "Virginia is for Lovers." I was surrounded by the people I love. I had nothing to cry about.

Still, I cried. To quote Deborah Kerr in "An Affair to Remember," "Beauty does that to me."

Really, this is what makes Virginia Beach my favorite, the best, the most beach in the world. It isn't the sand or the porpoises or the setting sun. Virginia Beach is my favorite because every time I visit here I meet my own self coming and going.

I'm the toddler in the surf clutching her daddy by the leg hairs. I'm the girl smooching with her sailor boyfriend on a striped beach towel. I am the young mom with a video camera, chasing her baby daughter so I can send something of her to her deployed daddy.

I am even that old lady in the skirted swimsuit and with varicose veins who will someday be found toddling along the shore holding hands with the old man I married. If I'm really, really lucky.

So much of the time, we can't really see this kind of beauty in the midst of life, can we? Yet on this beach, we can see our lives reflected in the lives of other people.

In the families struggling with those ridiculous four-wheeled bikes. In the people rinsing sand from their boogie boards and bony feet and babies' backsides. In the impatient dads and the whining preschoolers and the standoffish tweens practicing what it will be like when they are free from their stupid families and somehow, suddenly, cool.

It makes me think of something my mom is always quoting to me from Robert Frost.

"The present is too much for the senses," Frost wrote in 1923. "Too crowding, too confusing - too present to imagine."

Which must be one of the reasons why we come to Virginia Beach year after year - so we can meet the present coming and going and going and going.