Chicken Soup for the Beach Lover's Soul by Jack Canfield Read Free Book Online Page B

the beach. There are girls.”
    â€œGirls are dumb.”
    â€œSays the kid who keeps the past ten years’ Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in a safety deposit box under his bed?”
    Kid One ponders this security breach while he peels open the wrapper on his third biscuit.
    Kid Two comes to life at the mention of the beach. “Do I have to wear my swim trunks?” he whines. “They give me a supersized wedgie.” Kid Two is twelve, but qualifies as a teenager because he could capture first place in a worldwide pouting contest using just one lip. He is breakfasting on French fries because he doesn’t eat anything that has crust.
    â€œWell, you can’t wear your shorts because if they get wet they’ll drop another six inches below your waist and bind your knees together. You’ll cause the beach patrol to issue a warning, and you’ll scare the fish. Whales have beached themselves over less stress.”
    Three hours later, we’re in Charleston, as goal-oriented a bunch of travelers as have hit the road since the Swamp Fox turned east on I-26.
    â€œWhen do we eat?” asks Kid One.
    â€œDoes Spanish moss hang on the north side of trees?” inquires Kid Two.
    â€œDo you think there’s a gas station with clean restrooms?” queries Helpful Wife.
    â€œBlast!” says a husband who should be concentrating on driving but whips past the beach exit.
    All signs pointed to an exciting trip. Especially the one that said if we drove any farther we’d drive off the end of the country. Who says the world isn’t flat?
    We stopped for lunch at a quaint roadside grill where, with luck and careful selection, you could feed a family of four for the price of a ticket to the International Space Station. “Let’s stop here again on the way back home,” says Kid Two, enthused, licking sea salt from a twelve-dollar French fry.
    Sixteen hours after we left the house, we trundled back in the driveway, weary yet somehow exhausted. We’d feasted, played, shopped, surfed, and threatened, at least once, to clear a wide section of the beach when a particularly cunning wave hit Kid One’s shorts at just the right angle. We bore prizes: a fork with an extension handle, a rubber toy on a string that looked like a blowfish in desperate need of a good Roto-Rooter man, bubblegum that turns your tongue blue, a clump of seaweed still bearing copious amounts of sea, and a plastic grocery bag filled with shell bits—altogether a very successful trip.
    The toys cost next to nothing, the food was exorbitant, and the look on Pop’s face when he realized the next stop was the Atlantic Ocean: Priceless.
    Amy Ammons Mullis

The Shiny Half-Dollar
    F aith is like radar that sees through the fog.
    Corrie ten Boom
    My grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins crammed into a small bungalow for two weeks, every summer, in West Wildwood, New Jersey. I got an allowance of fifty cents each day. My grandmother gave me an extra, shiny half-dollar. She knew I liked to buy comic books. I put it in my pocket and forgot it was there.
    I slept in the kitchen on a cot with coils that made grating music every time I turned. Some mornings, before sunrise, I woke up my grandmother. The bathroom had a spring-loaded toilet seat that would send me airborne, flying out the door. I literally learned how to land on my own two feet.
    After about three days of playing jacks on the linoleum, swimming in the bay, swatting green flies, and reading too many comic books, I begged my mother to let me cross the wooden bridge from West Wildwood that led to the main island and the biggest boardwalk and amusement pier I’d ever seen. Everything always looks bigger when you’re eight. Amusements were the only things I envisioned. I had my sights set on the roller coaster and the huge Ferris wheel. My mother finally gave in. She let my big ten-year-old brother take me. He had to promise not to run