I meet my Grandad on the beach. His name is Sandy.
I can see him coming to me in the distance. Like me, he is also holding his two sandals in
his hands. We both like to walk barefoot on the beach. As he is slowly approaching me, I feel a
warm sensation in my chest; his walk is typically his own, and his face makes me think of my
Dad.
We have been smiling all the way up to here, standing across from each other. He looks at
me, takes in my clothes, and says, "Have you been sleeping on the beach?" A joke he likes to make.
I reply, "Luckily not." His eyes scan my T-shirt, which says ‘Sporty Sunday’ in bright blue letters,
and he says, "I like your T-shirt."
Although he is 94 years old, he likes running to the water. We sprint a little hesitantly,
afraid to get shells into our toes or slip. I look over at him, running there with his pretty white
hair and clever face. His two sandals in his hands, his white linen shirt flying around his body.
When we have dipped our unscratched toes in the water, we walk back to the shore and
move to the café. The beach café is right in the middle, it’s where we always meet. He lives East
of it; my parents live West of it. As we walk along the shore, people pass by, and we say hello or
good morning. As we always do, when people don’t greet us, we look at each other, shocked, and
we raise our eyebrows. We have already discussed many times how absurd we think it is when
people don’t say good morning. Aren’t we two individuals? Two bodies? Isn’t that the least we can
do? That’s what we always say, as we walk on. It’s a game we play.
We find a table at the beach café, after greeting the owner, Lloyd. Then my Grandad,
before sitting down, gets a folded newspaper out of his back pocket and puts it on the table. We
prefer the Times. We never do the crossword (too bloody difficult), we do the codeword. And from
his other back pocket, he gets the additional small white pencil, with which we fill in all the e’s
and a’s first.
Jeremy, Lloyd’s son, gets our coffee order. We chat a little. Since it’s the end of summer,
Jeremy almost gets back to Cardiff to resume his studies. Sandy asks him if it has been a busy
summer, a busy week, a busy weekend - if the business has been good. Jeremy looks away at the
sea while he speaks. He says it has been good, the usual. Sandy nods, he orders a coffee with milk
for himself, he points at me and says: black?
This moment we enter the perfect peace the morning has to offer us. It takes two cups of
coffee to finish the codeword. Miraculously, the word ‘sporty’ was part of its solution, upon after
its finding my Grandad laughed quite hard. We say goodbye to Lloyd and Jeremy, pay for our
cups, and start walking direction West, to spend the day with my Mom and Dad. Although he
never says so, I don’t think he likes to spend his Sundays alone.