One of my earliest memories and I'm guessing about the years here, was when I was six or maybe seven and my parents had a beach house (not really, they rented a bungalow), in the same colony that Mom's parents had one, in/near Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.
All the bungalows were on concrete block stilts (and this is the fuzzy part of the memory) and were probably three-plus feet off the ground. They were made that way for hurricane season when the high tides came all the way up the beach and into the town and practically all the way to Route 36. Because I was a runt, I could walk under our bungalow and all of us kids used to play underneath them when we weren't at the beach which was just a short walk at the end of the path.
I don't think I've been as carefree and careless in my life since then and the irony, of course, is that I had no way of knowing that those moments were in many respects as good as it gets. The tragedy of youth is wasted on the young and I was decades away from getting wasted but still...
All those hours at the beach made me an expert at digging holes ('to China if you keep going,' insisted Grampy) and building elaborate forts by filling the sand bucket with still-wet sand and turning it upside down and stacking the mounds one atop the other. If I'd known then who he was I'd have considered myself the next Frank Lloyd Wright until an incoming wave crashed my fantasy.
However, my ambitions were nothing in comparison to Leonardo Ugolino who, unlike another well-known Leonardo, stays away from ceilings and gets down to it.
The purpose of art is to conceal art and while the creations do not last forever, they last long enough to be more than memorable.
-bill kenny
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