A Labor Day of Letting Go
School in our part of the country usually does not start until after Labor Day, which means the long holiday weekend is the last big hurrah of summer.
For more than a decade this particular weekend has been marked by a tradition. Somewhere along the line my friends started calling it Coffee to Cocktails. And this day is no logistical joke to pull off with four kids and often a few of their friends in tow. Sometimes we’re as many as ten couples–two to three kids each, plus kids’ friends. I’m talking 20 to 30 people– ready to take over the small beach parking lot that holds less than thirty car spaces. If you want to hang on Sandy Point beach on Labor Day you better get there early.
The plan entails meeting at sunrise. A friendly competitive race with no actual prize (other than bragging rights) developed at some point, in which case families sprint to be the first to set foot on the beach. Think cars pulling into spaces just as the light of the day reflects in the sky, even yet before a hot orange, pink fireball begins its ascent. Before the engine of the car is turned off, doors fling open as little legs race to touch the sand first and claim they “won.”
Despite no actual prize for reaching the shoreline first, the contest escalated over the years. (Our family may have added to the escalation). There was the year my husband jumped the gates to the state park, (which don’t rise for cars until 6:00 a.m.), with a bicycle. The last few miles to the parking lot are gravel but that didn’t stop my husband from furiously pedaling to reach the beach first. Neither did the flat tire he incurred as he pathetically willed the lopsided frame to its destination. There was also the year we sent our teenage son early with his friend on their mopeds. They may have also illegally skirted the gate to reach the beach before our packed cars were permitted through the rising electric bars. We didn’t win every year but it sure was fun when we did. The state park’s system took the joy out of our game when they timed the gates to open at sunrise instead of 6:00 a.m. None of us wanted to be in our cars waiting in a vehicle lineup to pass through gates at the very moment the sun rose. The whole point was to catch its spectacular embrace of the day!
The race to the beach added a bit of adrenaline to an already complicated execution.
Rewind twenty-four hours prior to Coffee and Cocktails: To be first on the beach you need to be sure your crew is ready to depart somewhere between 5:15 and 5:30 in the morning. This means the car better be packed the night before unless you want to get up in the middle of the night. There is precious little time in the morning to make the coffee, and being the coffee snob I am, the coffee needed to be made in the morning. You also can’t pack the cooler the night before unless of you have a Yeti, or something equally as frigid. We didn’t. Have a Yeti, that is. But you can bet throughout the decade of Coffee and Cocktails, technological upgrades heavily upped the game. Not only did the Yetis come out, but so did the portable grills, beach wagons with huge wheels, and fancy folding camping tables that served as food prep for bacon and eggs in the morning and steaks and sausages in the afternoon.
If you are going to stay on the beach from the early morning hours to the hot, late afternoon, you’ll need enough food, drinks, and toys to keep the couple of dozen people occupying the precious parking spots happy. After all, you can’t leave. Once you do, you forfeit your spot. A line of cars will inevitably be waiting to take your space as soon as you do. This day is a commitment.
On a good year, we plan for Mimosas or Bloody Mary’s in the morning… often both. I make a tradition out of cooking a frittata the night before. And despite the fact that I don’t think that many people actually eat it outside of my husband and me, I somehow remain loyal to my frittata baking every year. My kids mostly mooch bagels or donuts off of some other family who have a much more realistic idea of what kids want to eat on a beach. Never-the-less, the night-before-prep includes frying onions and potatoes, chopping ham and shredding cheese. I never seem to start early enough, which means I get them in the oven around nine o’clock at night dreading how slow they cook but firm in my knowledge that I am no-way getting up at four a.m. to cook frittatas.
“Damn, we need to get to bed!” I lament every year.
But even as the frittatas finally make it into the oven, my husband (and sometimes children) search for beach chairs, the spike ball net, frenetically asking, “Has anyone seen the spike ball?”
They pack lacrosse sticks for the afternoon, maybe a football, a frisbee and we must have the volleyball net and volleyball for the intergenerational family volleyball game of humiliation (sand makes it challenging to maintain balance. So do mimosas). Someone will bring the corn hole. After all, Coffee to Cocktails is a very, very long day and we don’t want to forget anything.
The dry bag needs enough snacks to fuel the sporty activities. The cooler needs to hold breakfast and lunch and all the drinks (including the nonalcoholic ones).
The morning hours are cold so we need sweatshirts and puffy coats. The kids might want their sleeping bags to lay on the beach. We’ll need the beach towels when the sun gets warm and we’ll inevitably make it into the cold Atlantic. For some of us, it’s the easier way to pee after coffee, mimosas and bloodies. It’s a pain to walk back to the beach outhouse. If it’s even open. Which reminds me, we also need extra TP just in case the outhouse is out. May want hand sanitizer and wipes too. Definitely need paper towels, forks, napkins, plates and hopefully we don’t forget the garbage bag this year!
Whew, the beach prep is exhausting.
Over the years, our kids have grown older and left for college, frequently before Labor Day. We’ve dwindled in numbers. We started wearing their college sweatshirts as symbolic tributes to our missing offspring.
This year only one child of the families has yet to go away to school.
This year, the day after Labor Day, for the first year in more than twenty, I have no children to beg into poses on the front porch marking the first day of school. This year, I might stay off of Instagram for a few days as I feel a little wistful watching all the others post photos of smiling kids, sullen teenagers, and adored dogs. I’ll need some time to get used to this empty nest I’ve acquired. I’ll need some time to start new traditions.
Years ago, I remember walking by my wall of baby photos, holding my firstborn child–my two-year old son, on my hip. And as I stopped and studied his infant picture, I recall thinking, “I miss that little baby.” Eventually I would miss that toddler, that grade schooler, that middle schooler, that high school kid. It occurred to me as I mourned the transition of my baby to toddler that parenting is just one long exercise in letting go.
When you’re in it, baking frittatas, you barely have time to catch your breath. Often all I could think of was how little help I was getting outside of my husband, and how little sleep we were getting as parents. When you’re in it, there’s not a lot of time to reflect on a wall of photos. It all feels like so much work, even as it was often so much fun.
This year we skipped Coffee to Cocktails. Instead, five of us met on the beach for a few minutes to watch the sunrise, not quite ready to let go of the tradition. We didn’t pack a thing, though a few of us brought coffee. Rather than take the long and eventually gravelly road to Sandy Point, we settled for the public beach access so we could watch that spectacular pink orange ball stretch its light across the morning horizon.
Yet, this year, the first year in a decade since my family joined the Coffee to Cocktails group, the sun did not come. The clouds obscured its brilliance.
I suppose if we were permitting ourselves to retire a tradition, so too was the sun allowed to break our streak.
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