How a half sand dollar taught me to be present

A trip to the beach with my children yielded a valuable lesson: when I relinquished perfection, I found presence. 

Of the first sand dollar my children find, fifty cents’ worth is left. Cleft down the middle, jagged-edged with wet sand packed inside, a fragment of something grander.

“Look!” my children say, holding this once-live, once-whole animal between their small fingers. “Look here – a design!” They point out the indentations on the sand dollar’s half-back and half-front: fine strokes, symmetrical shapes, a few imperfections – reminders of life’s whimsy.

But our family has only just stepped onto this Oregon beach. We’d hustled through jet lag and breakfast. It’s minus tide, a cool misty morning, the sand wide and dark and hard-packed. Out farther, closer to the still-receding Pacific, is where there will be whole sand dollars, smooth and unblemished, perfect finds. The half dollar is pretty, silvery white, the first my children have found. But I’m also thinking of the brighter, better future, their toothier smiles, a moment I’ve already created in my mind without one particle or pulse of the actual thing.

I’m a fan of the imagination. To read in a tourist magazine about sand dollars. To travel backward in time to my girlhood memories of a week in Florida, beachcombing for sand dollars. To imagine the palms of my children holding the whimsical skeletons of sand dollars, a creature I haven’t touched with anything but my imagination in 20 years. To conjure this moment ahead of its existence – it’s an astonishing capacity.

It’s the same capacity that allows me to imagine the story of that sand dollar’s other half: a hard-beaked gull, the heavy boot or shovel of someone digging for razor clams, the smash of a sneaker wave. Or even further back, when the two half sand dollars were one whole: how its body was not white but purple, how it moved and ate with millions of tiny spines, how it broke down plankton with its five small teeth that someone once imagined resembled the shape of little birds, little doves.

I watch my children twist on their heels and run toward the ocean, equal halves of my mother-heart. They return triumphant, elated, shouting, almost singing. The razor clam diggers turn and look at these children, arms and sagging shirts full of dozens of perfect sand dollars, so many we can’t carry them all. We lay them in rows, suss out the whimsical bits, choose what to keep.

When we leave the beach, we abandon that half dollar. Within a few hours, the tide comes in and washes it away. 

I don’t think about it again until days later, when we’re flying home. “Look,” my children say, peering from their window seats over the whole unplanned world. In my mind, I see us there on that misty beach. The indentations we left on the sand, the smell of salt and seaweed in our hair, my children’s perfect smiles – the full story, exactly as I’d imagined. Still, some half-buried fragment of me washes up: What if I hadn’t rushed them ahead? What kind of imagination would it have taken for me to see that half dollar for what it was: precious, perfect in its imperfection.