In this story, we learn about Josh’s summer days on the beach as a lifeguard. We find out that he has huge self-esteem about his body and his role on the beach. He constantly has girls at his chair trying to get his attention and offering food to him. He loves it so much that this was supposed to be the best summer yet. He knew everyone on the beach and Ric was one of his good adult friends. Ric had a family of his own he would bring to the beach and was once a lifeguard too. Ric had a child die while he was on duty in his prime and he hasn’t let it go since. He talks to Josh about it every weekend and how he used to have all the girls too. He warns Josh to be lucky for what he has, being the king of the beach and having all these girls because it won’t last forever. Ric is foreshadowing this for Josh because he talks about how he misses being a lifeguard and that his job now sucks. Josh talked a lot about Mrs. Lovenheim and how he set up her umbrella every morning. It seems like he likes the fact that she is always watching him while he’s in his chair at work. He says that she never gets in the water but only watches him while reading her book. This makes Josh feel good about himself because not only did he have young girls he also had older women looking at him too. One day on the beach little Becky choked on a grape right when Josh was paying more attention to the girls around his chair. He was so caught up in everything else with a pure shock that he didn’t know what to do and poor Becky almost died. But Mrs. Lovenheim came to the rescue and saved the child, Josh wasn’t the same the rest of the day.
We find out that Josh has been missing something the whole time, true love. He finds this when he goes to Mrs. Lovenheim’s house to thank her for helping Becky that day. She hugs him and he feels something he has never felt before it filled the hole inside of him. She left him there alone and he never saw the beach the same again. Mrs. Lovenheim was superior to Josh. He thought that she liked him while she watched him on the beach but when she saw him that night, he was shocked that she didn’t even know him. We also see Josh change throughout the story, he went from thinking the beach was about being appreciated by girls to later remembering the real reason he is on the beach. Josh misunderstood why he was there on that beach. It wasn’t for people to appreciate his looks, what they appreciated was that he was a lifeguard that saves people. He realized that he couldn’t even do that his whole life changed. I feel like this story was a reflection about Josh and how he took for granted what he had at the moment. We should enjoy things like this when we have them because once we lose them, we will find ourselves thinking about what we missed out on later and regret not cherishing it. Ric was foreshadowing this for Josh in the story the whole time.