Blinds open. A light on across the street. Dead quiet. He sits in his living room on a Shibumi beach chair in a pile of sand. A large umbrella is raised overhead.  It blocks out the light directly above. He turns it on when it’s cloudy outside.

He listens to The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Dick Dale, Mungo Jerry, and The Drifters on a turntable with speakers giving way to crackles, scratches, and pops. A six-pack of Corona sits in a bucket of ice by his side. He squeezes limes into the bottles of cerveza and drinks them down one at a time. Fruit flies and gnats hover around a garbage can in the corner.

The old man wears the same boxers every day, and a button-up shirt with flowers on it opened just a bit to expose the gray hair on his chest. His body reeks of tanning oil; hair disheveled, Wayfarers pushed up on his nose. 

It’s five o’clock in the morning. Soon, the sun will rise, and it will be another perfect day at the beach.

He and his wife used to go to North Avenue every day in the summertime. They’d pack a lunch, carry their chairs, and drag an old umbrella alongside. Soda pop in a cooler.

They’d sit at the beach all day long and into the evening with a portable radio tuned to an oldies station. Metal antenna reaching as high as it could go.

The two held hands and would walk into Lake Michigan. Sometimes, he’d carry her like Burt Lancaster carried Deborah Kerr in From Here To Eternity. He placed his wife in the sand and kissed her passionately as darkness fell over Lake Shore Drive. Forty-five years of marriage always seemed new.

And now he sits by himself, alone in a studio apartment on Clark Street waiting to see her again. He raises a bottle and says, til we meet again.