He built the most amazing sandcastles.

I don’t know how he did it.

We spent our childhood summer days on the beach coated in sand from head to toe, carrying bright yellow plastic shovels and green falling-apart buckets, the same ones we used to wrangle jellyfish with nets on inner tubes. We built giant sand crabs with tunnels underneath all the different legs, giant octopuses and sharks that Mitchell would pretend were eating him, and even giant flip flops to make my mom smile.

But the sandcastles!!!

They were masterpieces: medieval mansions with the tallest shell-topped towers, volcanos with lava drizzled all over the sides, and even a Greek temple, including, of course, a history lesson on Zeus and Greek mythology, since nothing happened in the Garrett family that couldn’t be considered educational. My dad called himself a “student of life” and he adeptly passed that love of learning on…