Kina Meets Jersey Julian At His Eponymous Shore

Kina calls him “Jersey Julian” because Julian was already taken by Sloane’s brother. He is twelve years old and a boy, and every time Kina visits him in New Jersey (which is why he is called “Jersey Julian”), the two of them spend the entire day alone together talking and playing. Julian seems not just amused by Kina, but genuinely engaged and conversational. It is a strange and beautiful friendship that we revisit every year.

At Belmar Beach yesterday, the two of them dived and tumbled in the waves—Julian on his own, as a large kid, and Kina with me, as a small one. Both could have spent the entire day being swallowed up by the breakers and plucking stranded jellyfish from the high-tide line, except that one of the pair had a parent who was waterlogged and exhausted and needed to spend some time on the sand.

While Kina’s daddy recovered, Kina and Julian gathered up tiny sand crabs in the surf and stashed them in a bucket that Kina called “a sizable bucket”—meaning a bucket that can be made smaller and larger, not a bucket that is unusually large, because it was not unusually large and held only a few cups of sand and sand crabs. I don’t know whose idea it was to add a few clams “for friendship”, but the crabs and clams did seem to get along well.

Much as Kina and Jersey Julian do.

Next year, Jersey Julian will be a teenager, officially. His older sisters, who once clamored to entertain Kina’s parents when they were childless, are now almost too old to spend time with us—being in college and high school, respectively—and hovered politely and patiently at the margins. This seemed to me to be a harbinger of things to come with Kina, and with Jersey Julian. Will he be as tolerant next year of Kina’s adventurous chumminess? Will it be manifestly uncool to pal about with a first-grader? Kina likes him so much, but there were moments yesterday when he seemed to want to escape on his own for a swim, and I collared Kina for a little digging in the sand as he did. She didn’t seem to notice, and he was able to be on the cusp of his teens for a few waves or so.

On our way out, Jersey Julian offered Kina a tiny dismembered crab leg as a memento of their day together. Kina declined, having already accepted from him a little rock “that transformed into a crystal”, which she had been carrying around in her palm the entire day, even in the surf as she clung to my neck. It was a beautiful gift that she promptly lost in the car on the way home, but it left a mark. They’ll find another diamond next year, she said.

Hope so.

I love it when Kina uses the pastel markers for Parade. They’re so vibrant, and it always brings out weird, bold little pictures like this tree underneath a sky hemmed in by her ever-present rainbow, under the caring gaze of a single, burning star.

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