The Sandman Taketh

There doesn't seem to be anything that doesn't remind me of something else.

Take the story I was lead to by someone's return tweet (RT) this morning. It was a news story about the theft of sand. Large scale theft of sand. Cubic yards and yards of the stuff transported off beaches, even vacuumed out onto anchored boats. Proof positive, there isn't anything that can't be taken.

The story appears in the online English version of Le Monde, the French newspaper. The sand is needed for making bricks and mixing with cement to make concrete. The legal sand production methods are not keeping up with the surging demand needed for construction projects.

One sentence in the story brought it all back for me: In mid-May, Liberia’s Mines and Energy Ministry arrested men who were “helping themselves” illegally to sand on the beaches around Monrovia.

My father was never arrested, nor was our neighbor. But in the early 1950s they did help themselves to sand from New York City's Rockaway Beach as they filled up a few burlap bags of the granular stuff and plopped it into the neighbor's pickup truck to be added to my backyard sandbox. At a very early age I was playing with stolen goods.

They did this is broad daylight when our trip to the beach was over. My father and neighbor liked to take myself and the neighbor's son early, before any crowd appeared. Thus, we were usually pulling up stakes by noon, or even earlier, and if needed, were hauling some sand back to the truck.

This didn't happen on every trip to the beach. After awhile, there was certainly enough sand in the sandbox. And when my father later needed sand for building something, he did seem to buy it, as a truck dumped some in the driveway.

The removal of sand for the sandbox was a drop in the bucket compared to the wholesale removal that the story describes.

I even responded to the RT by admitting that my sandbox sand was removed from the Rockaway peninsula by my father. The statue of limitations for this offense has long passed, I'm sure. And anyway, my father has also long passed away. I don't think I'm going to have to "lawyer up."

As to playing with stolen goods at such an early age, I've long gotten over it. But I have paid for any sand I've ever needed.

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