How About a Hand for Sand?

I have written about many aspects of Avalon and Stone Harbor. The ocean … the nightlife … 96th Street… deck life.

But I’ve never discussed one of the true – but to some people, annoying – aspects of the beach, and that’s sand.

Sand. A photo of a beach would not be appealing to the eye without it. A photo of the surf crashing up against the rocks is cool, I really dig it. But a picture of a beautiful beach with sand in it? Now I picture myself sitting on it, taking in the sun. Watching surfers. Seeing pretty girls going by. Reading my magazines. Swatting flies. Hiding from the beach-tag police.

But the unique aspect of sand is that without it there’s no beach … but it’s the sand itself that keeps some folks from going to it. I have a fair number of friends who love the Jersey Shore, who own a house at the Jersey Shore, yet they never go to the beach. (And the bars are thrilled about those people.)

And 90% of the time, sand is what keeps them off it. It’s too hot. It’s too “shelly.” It blows onto your meatball grinder.

Parents with small children are always battling against it. “Stop throwing sand!” “Stop eating sand.” “Make sure you get all the sand off your feet before you go in the house!” God forbid, you get sand on the bed. That’s a life sentence in little-kid prison.

Me? I love it. Every aspect of it, but particularly its beauty. So, just for the fun of it, here are the first thoughts that came to my mind when I decided to write about “sand.”

Springsteen ‘4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)’

As Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys made southern California famous, no artist has ever done more for the Jersey Shore than Bruce. Many of Bruce’s songs reference it, but “Sandy”? Though it has over the years not become a true Bruce staple like “Thunder Road,” “Hungry Heart” and “Born To Run,” it was a key song in the beginning of his career, appearing on the same album as “Rosalita,” and got a ton of local radio airplay as Philly proudly became a key town in the making of Springsteen’s legend. Soak in some of these lyrics:

• “This pier lights our carnival life forever”

• “Chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk”

• “Tilt-a-whirl”

• “The girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio”

And just to make sure you don’t miss the locale of the song, what does he name our heroine? “Sandy.”

White Beaches

I admit that because of my love for the Jersey Shore, and because I’ve been lucky enough to own property down here, I usually don’t travel to exotic islands during the offseason. I spend months and endless hours sitting on the beach down here between May and October, so my wife and I tend to vacation during the offseason anywhere but a beach.

But I’ve been to Hawaii, Malibu, Nags Head, the Bahamas, and I’ve yet to encounter pure white sand that I am going to assume you need to make up a “white” beach. The color of all these beaches has been pretty much the same as ours. Yet many beach-resort areas just love to advertise their “white, sandy beaches.” Please, stop it. It’s a beach. It’s the same vacationers who come back from some island raving about how they could see their feet in the water. Who cares?! I can see my feet in my shower. Ten toes. Size 13.

Sandy Koufax

My mother started taking me to the beach almost as soon as she deemed me old enough to get on a bus. That’s how we used to get to the shore. A bus that left 13th & Arch, an area of Philly that resembled a beach as much as Kathy Bates resembles Scarlett Johansson. But believe me, I fell in love with the sand as soon as I stepped on my first beach, and I wasn’t even 6 years old.

So when, a couple years later, I started following baseball, the first non-Phillie that I became a huge fan of was Sandy Koufax. It was the first time I ever heard of a man with that name, and I thought it was amazingly cool. It didn’t hurt that he was the best pitcher in the league at that time. I wanted to be called that. “Sandy.”

It wasn’t till some time later that I found out that Sandy’s real first name was Sanford and that he was from Brooklyn and that his name had zero to do with sand or beaches at all.

‘Lawrence of Arabia’

When I think of sand and the cinema, I immediately think of “Lawrence of Arabia.” Almost the entire movie was shot in the desert, and there’s just sand everywhere. When I first saw it as a kid, I didn’t even know there was sand that wasn’t connected to a beach. There was no sand whatsoever in Southwest Philly.

“Lawrence” is one of my top-10 films ever, but for some reason it has fallen through the cracks. When I am having fun movie discussions on the air at 94WIP, I am always amazed at how many people had not only never seen it but never heard of it. I get that it came out in 1962, which is an eternity ago, but it won the Best Picture Oscar and there are movies like “Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Casablanca,” and “West Side Story” that are older than “Lawrence,” and moviegoers seem very familiar with those other flicks.

I get it. It’s a 3-hour, 48-minute military “art” film, but I feel it’s my job as your faithful writer to highly, highly recommend that you see it. Just please don’t watch it on an iPhone. Its cinematography and soundtrack are amazing.

Like Sand Through an Hourglass

There’s a soap opera by the name of “Days of Our Lives.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s only the longest-running soap opera of all time. It’s been on since 1965. As of this writing, there have been 13,635 episodes, of which my mother saw at least 10,000. They all started with a voiceover going “Like sand though an hourglass” and a shot of an hourglass with the sand draining from the top to the bottom. Another term for it would be “egg timer,” and many board games like “Taboo” came with one.

I once lost a bet when I was 11 that it was not sand in an hourglass, but salt. I know, I lost. But hopefully, this article will lead you to appreciate a key component to our love for the Jersey Shore – sand!