One grain at a time.. sort of

Last Friday I ventured for the first time over to Revere Beach, the lone T-accessible beach in the Boston area, with a few friends to check out the annual New England Sand Sculpting Festival. There were 8 "professional" sand sculptors from around the country there, each given 48 hours to complete a sand creation from which one would be selected as the winner.

As you can see, these sand castles were pretty amazing, and also included subjects such as a tree full of bananas, broken glass in mid air, a fist with a single extended finger doing something deep and philosophical, and some other stuff that hadn't yet materialized into meaningful objects/ideas by the time I had arrived. There also was a single larger "demonstration" display of a winter cottage amongst trees in the woods that, according to the workers, had been created over the course of a week or so by a small army of sculptors and was not a part of the competition.

Sand castles are pretty cool. I suppose in this case adults were in fact the ones partaking in the fun, but of course it's almost always the little kids out on the beach building things and watching it all wash away in fickle frustration as the tide rolls in. It's not often that you see an adult walking out of the beach shop, neon green plastic pale and shovel in hand.

Not that I am claiming the alternative--laying quietly on the beach listening to the crashing waves--is a consolation prize to cry about. But it wouldn't hurt to see a few more sand castles out there just to prove that imagination doesn't whither away beyond age 12. If nothing else, though, at least entertain the folks around you and let yourself be buried next to one.