Beach Vacation, Back to School and a Classic Book…THE WATER IS WIDE

Summer has flown and the weather is so hot, but the school busses are running and the kids in our little suburb are back in school. It seems to happen faster every year…summer stretches before us with the start of Memorial Day weekend, then before we know it, summer is gone.

We were looking forward to our family beach trip to St. Simons Island, where we have gone for many years. We all got to the Island on a Saturday, the daughters, their husbands and the granddaughter sharing an Air B & B, with Mr. H. and I in a hotel. We got wonderful takeout from Fox’s Pizza Den, a place I’d not tried before, and shared it at the kids’ place (every Air B & B they’ve rented on SSI has had a great dining area), dividing dinner set-up and baby-to-bed duties.

Breakfast Sunday was on our own-Mr. H. and I went to Waffle House, a well-oiled machine full of friendly people; we enjoy going to every year. We planned another favorite for lunch, takeout from Southern Soul Barbeque; the best this side of Texas. But the heart of the morning was for the beach: sunscreen and sun hats, buckets and sand toys, seashells, reading under a billowing tent and umbrellas, and of course, splashing and jumping over the waves. It was a beautiful morning at the beach!

I don’t know exactly why I thought Pat Conroy’s The Water is Wide would be a good book for reading at the beach, maybe because it was a small paperback. Of course, it helped that Conroy is a favorite southern writer and the book is set on a tiny South Carolina island, not too far from the beach where we were staying. The ocean is intrinsic to the story, yet it seems a world-away from the pleasant, beachfront area where we stayed, full of vacationers. It was an exceptional book for the Back-to-School season, when was when I finally got around to finishing it. I always bring too many books to the beach, along with either knitting or needlework for the car, and if I run out of books, there’s usually a used book store nearby.

A classic, first published in 1972, The Water is Wide is a memoir of Pat Conroy’s year of teaching older elementary students on Yamacraw Island, part of the Beaufort, SC School Board, in 1968. During this time, the south struggled with the issues of segregation, the war in Vietnam, differing opinions about McCarthy, slow but positive changes in regard to equality and interest in organizations that helped underprivileged communities. So why did Conroy, a well-traveled high school teacher, want to teach underprivileged students on a sparsely populated island that had only recently received electricity? Wanting to do good, Conroy volunteered for The Peace Corps, who hadn’t responded. Helping these children would be the next best thing.

This book made me both angry and grateful. Angry for the ways the children hadn’t been taught, most not even to read on a basic level. Angry for the uncaring, disrespectful punishment they had endured as a part of their school days-school should be a happy place, especially at the elementary level! It made me grateful for the teachers I had, who were mostly good ones, and even the others tried to put a positive spin on the school day. I’m grateful for my daughters’ teachers and the collaborative teaching methods-when one teacher was negative or just didn’t connect with my daughters, there was another teacher who was helpful, kind and encouraged learning. (The Middle School’s Band Directors and a few others at every grade level were exceptional!) And now I’m extremely grateful for the work my oldest daughter is doing in a Title I school, encouraging Middle Schoolers and helping them to bring up their reading scores. With an adequate reading ability, the young adults her students become will have a much better chance of coping in our world.

Summer is gone. I wish it were longer and the temperature a bit cooler. If you have a spare minute (we all do!), pick up a book, even an older one you’ve read before or always wanted to read. It doesn’t have to be a book everyone’s talking about, but it could be if that’s what you want. Read two minutes here and five minutes there, or even while you wait in that carpool line. You’ll finish the book before you know it, and you’ll be glad you did. In my spare time, I’ll be enjoying my stack of books from the library!