When I was a small child, perhaps two or three, one of my first clear memories was walking on Rehoboth Beach. It was a summer day, probably a weekday. It was only me, my sister Angela, and my mother.
I remember Mom – younger then than I am today – rolling up the cuffs of her jeans. As my sister and I ventured in deeper and deeper, pulling her gently seaward, the darkened circles of sea water around the legs of her jeans went higher and higher, almost to the knees.
Because of course, we insisted on going deeper than she first instructed (just to the knees!). She held our hands, and released them, and grabbed them back when the big waves came rolling in. And she didn’t seem to worry that much about getting her jeans soaked. I remember her giving up and laughing about it. She was like that.
It would have been hard to ask for more from that day so many years ago. And that flash of memory – sun splashed and before school, before growing up, before everything – will never leave me (barring old timer’s disease, of course).
Just as excellent is the fact that my own son, Nate, has begun building his own store of memories of Rehoboth.
Every summer, we venture down with our beautiful friends from Singapore. We all gather there together for our annual visit. We stand guard on the beach, watching over the kids as the waves pummel them into the sand. The waves are very rough out there, and I never realized how rough until I sent my own wee lad into the maelstrom.
We walk the boardwalk, and stop at Dolle’s for caramel corn. At the head of main street, where it terminates at the beach, stand the enormous white gazebo, a sort of band stand of dreams. Strolling by, I often imagine it at an earlier time, filled with the brassy cacophony of a live Dixieland band.
As the evenings settle in the summer, the air cools fast. Sweaters come out. The boardwalk turns into a mixture of sweet, hungry, old, young, satisfaction and longing, forever longing. If it’s possible to be nostalgic for a place while your there, to miss it in your heart before you leave, then Rehoboth Beach is that place for me.
I simply love the town, and there is no beach like it anywhere else on earth. And it was part of the inspiration for this song, called Dobro Beach. Hope you enjoy.
THE LOST GUITAR 
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