Meet Dave.
Dave has not fully relaxed since approximately eight minutes before his first daughter Lily was born twenty-three years ago.
Before children, Dave used to nap on beaches.
He used to float in the ocean.
He used to sit quietly and stare at clouds.
Those memories now seem less like reality and more like stories he once heard about another man entirely.
Locals know him as The Forever Frantic Father, and this species can be identified by constant movement and a facial expression suggesting that somewhere nearby, physics itself is beginning to fail.
At Sandy Hook, Dave establishes beach camp with military precision. Chairs positioned. Umbrellas anchored. Towels aligned. Snacks organized according to some invisible classification system known only to him.
Then the monitoring begins.
“Did somebody put sunscreen on?”
“Did the cooler close all the way?”
“Is the tide coming in?”
“Should we move six feet that way?”
“Is that cloud getting bigger?”
“Did you hear that?”
Meanwhile Lily, now fully grown, sleeps beneath an umbrella.
His wife sleeps.
His son sleeps.
The dog sleeps.
Possibly nearby seagulls are sleeping.
Dave alone remains alert.
Scanning.
Calculating.
Preparing.
Then suddenly Dave freezes.
Points toward the water.
“SHARK!”
Everyone looks.
Nothing.
“Right there!”
Everyone looks harder.
Still nothing.
A passing wave.
Maybe a dolphin.
Possibly seaweed.
Dave narrows his eyes.
“No…no, I definitely saw something.”
Ten minutes later:
“Okay maybe it wasn’t a shark.”
Three minutes later:
“Still though…keep an eye out.”
And somehow, despite the constant fretting and emergency preparedness for disasters nobody else can detect, Dave keeps returning every year.
Because beneath all the stress and scanning and imagined aquatic threats lives a simple truth:
Dave isn’t worried because he dislikes the beach.
Dave worries because everybody he loves is on it.