The Coin of the Realm by Laura Oliver

There are so many things you do in innocence as a child that you can only hope you’re forgiven for once you realize what you’ve done. And by “you,” I mean “me,” and by “things,” I mean this.

My parents’ idea of a vacation, our respite from the river and woods when I was a child, was ocean camping at Cape Hatteras with another family. Fun! Our thick canvas tent weighed a bazillion pounds, was as hot as all get-out, and if you touched any part of it with a tentative finger when it rained, it formed an immediate leak. My father perfectly crafted wooden tent stakes in his workshop that had to be hammered into the sand with a pneumatic pile driver.

Sand infiltrated our sleeping bags, hairbrushes, and hotdogs; there was little to do. We cooked on a camp stove, sat around bonfires at night, roasted marshmallows, and made s’mores. The other mother insisted we put apple slices in our s’mores, which kind of wrecked them, but she was our minister’s wife, my piano teacher, and my sister’s Girl Scout leader, so we complied. We waved the occasional sparkler (my first experience with cool fire) and bobbed about in a cold ocean.

Highlights: I’d been given a rusty pocketknife, which I closed on my little finger while setting the picnic table for dinner. Seeing the line of red seeping from the wound, I instinctively stuck my hand in someone’s drinking glass. Blood curled like smoke in the water—it was quite interesting, almost artistic–but also gross. This was to be a theme of this year’s vacation. The gross and the intriguing. (Like apples in your s’mores.)

The other family had 3 kids, just like my family, and one of their sons was also about 7 years old at the time. Danny and I made a restaurant on the beach out of mounded-up sand, offering seaweed and dead crab shell delicacies to accommodating adults. Tired of that by the third day, we decided to spend the morning exploring further down the windswept beach.

As we crossed the dirt road to the dunes, we passed a Cape Hatteras sanitation truck and a young man, no more than 20, emptying sewer from the Porta-Potties. A huge black hose was stuck inside one, the truck engine humming as the outhouse contents were pumped to the tanker for removal. This young man was probably pretty unhappy with his career choice at that point and on a short fuse. But, to me, he was an adult. As we walked past on the other side of the road, I smiled at him to be polite, but instead of smiling back, he glared at me and yelled, “Hey, kid! How’d you like to suck this up with a straw?”

I was horrified.

First, at his suggestion. (Was I supposed to answer? He was, after all, a grown-up with some authority.) And secondly, I most certainly would not like to suck that up with a straw. It was, in fact, a gag-worthy proposition. But would that be rude to indicate? Mostly, I was horrified that he’d called me “kid.” He might as well have called me “Bub.” The question felt like an assault, and like all subtle violence, it left an indelible impression. What you say to a child is what you do to a child.

I think I shook my head, murmured no thank you, and took back my smile. Danny and I hurried on over the dunes to the shoreline, where the outgoing tide boomed and rushed up the incline of the beach, then shushed in submission as the waves lost purchase and slid back into the ocean’s embrace.

Our parents had established a kind of daily encampment on the beach with brightly colored towels, chairs, and perhaps an umbrella. We stretched a beach towel between us like a hammock so that we could collect shells in it and struck off without telling anyone.

The tide had left a ribbon of mostly broken shells lacing the beach until an hour into our walk, we spotted a perfectly whole sand dollar. Excited, we stopped and started digging in the wet sand, and within a few minutes, we had dug up maybe a dozen more. We put our treasure in our towel and meandered on—our family’s beach chairs long forgotten and out of sight.

Sometime in the midafternoon, a breathless Park Ranger found us miles down the shoreline, still walking with our bounty, completely unaware our panicked parents thought we had drowned.

When we got back, I showed Danny’s mother the sand dollars, which were flawless but the color of tent canvas. She told me to bleach them in the sun on the picnic table. I carefully laid them out, and over the next several days, they whitened. What I didn’t know until later was that they had mostly likely been alive, and I was slowly killing them. I was appalled when I learned what I’d done.

I’m so sorry, sand dollars. I had no idea. Are any of us surprised I still feel bad about this?

Danny’s mother told me that the five slits in each sand dollar represent the wounds of Christ, and the flower pattern in the middle is the star of Bethlehem. If I broke one open, she said, I would find little doves inside, and by releasing the doves, I’d release goodwill and peace in the world.

And Danny’s mother was right. There were indeed doves inside.

How many things die in the service of beauty? If there is goodwill to be released in the world, I hope it is the goodwill of forgiveness for this and so much more.

There is another legend that says sand dollars are the coins of mermaids. And another that claims they are the coinage of lost Atlantis.

If sand dollars are currency, let me buy back every mistake I’ve ever made. Heal every child to whom I ever said a harsh, impatient, or thoughtless comment. Let me ransom joy from regret and spread the wealth of kindness throughout the world.

May love be the coin of the realm.

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