NOTE: There is nothing scientifically provable in this story. But it is still 100% true.

This weekend my kids and I had the occasion to visit my dad’s favorite beach. We were visiting one of my dad’s favorite people, Patsi. It was Patsi who whispered in my ear at my dad’s service 12 years ago that I was his favorite child. And Patsi and I were walking on the beach with my dad’s favorite grandchildren he’s never met.

You can see where I’m going with this. It was a powerful place.

As we walked on the beach, we were hunting for agates. I’ll insert the dictionary definition here because the “you know them when you see them” approach doesn’t work well with writing. Miriam-Webster describes these rocks as: “a fine-grained variegated chalcedony having its colors arranged in stripes, blended in clouds, or showing mosslike forms.”

We walked 40 minutes at beachcombing pace to get to my dad’s favorite beach. As we strolled, Patsi and I told the kids about Dad’s uncanny ability to find agates. My dad had a lazy eye so he essentially could only see out of one eye. This meant he lacked depth perception (in the visual sense, not the spiritual sense). But somehow he developed the timing to hit the tennis ball, the coordination to swing at a softball, and the ability to help everyone find where their errant golf balls were hit. And he could spot agates on the beach.

One of my dad’s favorite antics was to slyly pick up an agate he found and then toss it in front of whoever he was with so they could “find” it. This happened often to both Patsi and me. If we failed to notice the “planted” agate, he’d point it out and tease, “how could you miss this? It’s practically the size of a boulder?”

As we beachcombed with the kids, I was starting to regret talking up the agates so much. It’d been almost 20 years since I’d been to this beach, what if there weren’t agates any more? Was I setting my kids up for a failure?

And then my 11-year-old daughter, Miss O, exclaimed, “I found one!” Patsi, the official verifier, declared it not just an agate, but a boulder of one.

I was feeling the parental anxiety of one kid getting one when it was unlikely that the other would. Then less than three minutes after Miss O’s find, my six-year-old son said, “there’s one!” He found a beautifully colored and shaped one.

We idly kept beach combing. Now that my kids had theirs, I felt more alive to the sunshine and water sounds. As I relaxed in the breath-taking scenery in a place my beloved father loved, I looked down – and there was a beautiful agate directly in front of my left toe.

Completely unprovable but I’m 100% certain my dad was there, “planting” the agates, reveling in our joy, soothing our worries, and surrounding us with love, as he always did.

P.S. Patsi confessed later that she didn’t think we’d find any. She’s lived on that beach for 31 years so she has a pretty good sense. But there’s no accounting for magic.

(photos are mine from Guemes Island, Washington)

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