Travels with my Family Read Free Page A

cones. Pecan was my favorite flavor.
    One day my father went fishing for crabs with some men he had met on the beach. I wanted to go, too, but he said there was no room in the boat for me. But how much room do I take up? I guess he wanted to have his own adventure without me. So I was left behind with my brother and my mother.
    I was pretty mad, and pretty bored. I went down to the beach by myself. I wished Miro was there. He could have kept me entertained by chasing the little transparent crabs that disappeared into holes in the sand when I got too close to them. I read all the notices on the notice board at the edge of the beach. There were ads for nature walks at sunset with a guide. Who needed a guide just to walk along the beach? Then there was a notice for a lost dog. “Lost: one fat beagle,” it said. “Name: Ninny. Place: Oceanville Cemetery.” I couldn’t believe that anyone would name his dog Ninny, and admit in public that it was fat. And anyway, how does a dog get lost in a cemetery? Unless it got kidnapped by a ghost?
    I saw dolphins jumping out of the water, so close to the shore that you could hear the noises they made. People say that dolphins sing beautiful songs, but they sounded more like old men blowing their noses to me. But maybe they sounded that way because I was mad about not being able to go fishing.

    Then I saw Mr. Sandcastle at his usual spot. Not too many grownups build sandcastles unless they have kids, but Mr. Sandcastle was different. He was a very big man with small, delicate hands, and he was famous for his castles. They were huge, with turrets, drawbridges and moats. You could almost picture the tiny sand-colored knights riding out of the castle, off on a quest. Mr. Sandcastle even spray-painted the walls and turrets with colors from aerosol cans, and he didn’t seem to care that the waves swept the castles away after he’d finished building them.
    I was poking at a washed-up jellyfish with a piece of driftwood when suddenly I heard my mother screaming all the way from the porch of our house. She was standing on a chair and slapping at her hair and arms and legs. That was nothing special. She screamed every time a palmetto bug fell off the roof and landed on her.
    I think palmetto bugs are cool. They look like gigantic cockroaches wearing black, shiny helmets. My brother and I were always trying to catch one. We built traps with driftwood and seaweed. We wanted to train them to do tricks, like jumping through hoops or tightrope-walking. But the bugs were much too fast.
    After she calmed down, my mother told my brother and me that we were going to go on a sand-dollar hunt. My brother was excited. Maybe he thought that sand dollars were real money. But I knew better.
    Pretty soon we were wading through the warm water over to Little Tybee Island. It’s the kind of island that disappears when the tide is high. But when the tide is low, it comes back out of the water, like magic. Actually, Little Tybee Island is the bottom of the sea when the tide goes out.
    If my father had been there, he would have explained all about how the tides worked. But not my mother. She wandered around the island, daydreaming and looking at the pelicans flying low over the water, collecting shells and bits of driftwood, and probably getting ideas for the drawings she does. Meanwhile, I was working hard as usual, gathering up sand dollars and putting them in a plastic bag with holes in it for the water to run out, My brother splashed in the warm tidal pools like a baby seal.
    A little while later, I looked up. All around us, Little Tybee Island was starting to shrink. The water was gobbling up the sand. We were the only ones out there now. Meanwhile, my mother was still daydreaming.
    But I saw what was happening. Our little island of sand was being cut off from the beach by a deep channel of rushing water, and it was growing deeper by the minute. Soon the whole