We can never spend a weekend on the beach without thinking back to a simpler time, a time when eating a whole fruit ‘n nut bar rather than just three frozen squares a day was acceptable, a time when this dining room table was awesome.

Lounging on the beach used to consist of exactly that. We didn’t move. Not to take a walk. Not to go for an ice-cream. Not to go to town to spend the day browsing at a flea market. Not to take the girls to the bathroom seventeen hundred times before first snack. We sat. We talked. We listened to our walk-mans.

We once watched a seagull dive-bomb into the water with great purpose and retract victorious, dangling a stringy, thick black, mystery object twenty yards down the beach. It dropped its treasure, danced around it, tried to chew it, swallowed a portion, gagged it back up and quickly found itself disinterested……but I wasn’t.

I think Greg and I were testing each other to see how lazy we really were by not budging to hike a mere twenty yards to check out the chewed up find.

I made my move, head-rushing from the change of position and headed towards the tiny pile. I was expecting a piece of VCR tape, a small garden snake or some sort of sweat band.

It was a men’s diving watch.

We call it “the seagull” and Greg still has it. In ten years, he has had to change the battery once and the seaweed band because of the stench.

I wonder if we were given the gift of time for a reason. To remind us there is always time to write this book, you just have to be willing to go after it.

Also, if a seagull slyly drops a watch on the beach and flies away, he’s probably waiting for you to leave your sandwich unattended.