My family’s annual June sojourns at the Wilmington Avenue cottage in the resort by the sea covered four years, from a week in 1957, to full Junes in 1958 and 1959 and an abbreviated late May dip in 1960, after which came life in Madrid — my adventures there already amply chronicled. Of the second June, I remember little because I was too busy building an array of castles, none of which have endured the test of time, making me a failed sand construction mogul. The final June stands out because by then I actually knew English and might even have had the wherewithal to make sense of words like mogul or tycoon. Such was my father’s verbal bombardment and presence, like an Axis power (yes, now I knew), and I was forced to reap the whirlwind.

In this final June, having wrought havoc in Washington, my truancy known, I sought to bring my reign of terror to the beach.

For example, I stole candy and sunglasses. I threw pebbles at anyone that dared kiss under my stretch of boardwalk, which is where I hid my stash. I even stole a quarter or two from a man who’d left a bunch of them on a plank as he played a pinball machine, which by now I, too, could play — if I stood on a buster box (a phrase I coined, one of my first).

But all this havoc, and I’d concocted whole lootings and sackings, were undone by something I could never have expected, and which I lacked in Washington, D.C.: I made a friend.

One day I was building a sandscape when a boy of my age came up to me, extended his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Kevin.” I was flummoxed, or close, since such a word can’t but suggest a state of bewilderment. No one had ever done this before. I stammered my name, reluctantly because I did not want a friend, but then, this Kevin boldly made a suggestion about how to improve my sandscape by placing a stick in its middle section to hold it at least for a while against the tide.

We even went to the dime store, where I forgot to steal something, which suggested this Kevin was the real deal.

This we did together and it worked, and we laughed, and then we walked on the boardwalk and ate cotton candy. We even went to the dime store, where I forgot to steal something, which suggested this Kevin was, to quote vernacular that would only come into play decades later, the real deal. I liked him. He liked me.

He lived with his grandmother Dolores and lived in Wilmington, a big city in Delaware, the beach state. He came to the house his family owned each summer for a month, much as we did, and usually played alone, as I did. He, too, was an only child. His only goal in life, already far more ambitious than anything I’d concocted, was to become a U.S. Marine, a kind of soldier that by then I understood. I’d even heard of Boot Camp.

But we talked little of that because to do so would have been to admit the future, and we were dedicated to living one June at a time. I told him about my one-time fondness for the Nash and he countered with a love for sports cars, especially the Corvette, soon to become my favorite also, because it had a real porthole, as oval as that of a ship.

He taught me that RPM was revolutions per minute, and unlike my father, he did not add Karl Marx. He told me about a cute girl he liked and pointed her out, her braids like two spades near her ears, and this fondness for girls made me for the first time acknowledge such a thing might be possible, aside from liking my mother, and I did, very much, maybe even more than very much. And that’s what Kevin told me when he explained this strange feeling about the girl with the spade braids, that he felt something toward her that was fond and inexplicable and that he liked the feeling. I promised myself to eventually learn more about this. I even promised that one day I’d take a girl I liked to the end of the boardwalk, and this would happen — a quarter of a century later.

Kevin was the whole of that summer and one night all of us, my troika and Kevin and his grandmother, met to have a 5:30 dinner at Mrs. Simpler’s Avenue Restaurant. Mrs. Simpler knew Dolores from her youth so for the first time ever, she sat in our booth and we chatted. It was so congenial I burst into tears, perplexing everyone. It was perhaps the first time I understood the elusive state many call happiness but I call contentment, since I always saw happiness as a gust of wind, too much in passing to announce as a sentiment.

I walked to the turrets with Kevin and he walked me to the lake behind the lighthouse because he liked lighthouses and also liked feeding the ducks. So it was that I began begging crumbs from my mother to take to the lake for the ducks. She was astounded, as was my father, who might also have been annoyed, since Kevin cut into our ritual talk time.

Kevin also explained the idea of an auction — there was a fancy auction house on the boardwalk — explaining that an auction involved used goods and a fast-talking, odd man who’d shout at a generally silent audience that would make bids, often with gestures alone, without saying a word. That he knew about all this also made me reconsider a notion I’d dismissed: that people my own age could contribute to the inner tick of my life and times.

Kevin was tall and blond; I had dark hair, freckles, and was smallish, but never once did this come up. We behaved as boys did, friendly boys, and the newness of it, the lack of mischief, took me entirely by surprise. My private truant antics in Washington seemed a little less “cool,” to quote Gus, who had left the beach town for California, where he intended to be “with it,” an idea not even Kevin understood. When someone mentioned the Beat Generation, we boys thought maybe it had to do with savages or a footrace, people who worked to beat each other to the finish line.

A chord snagged around Kevin’s neck and broke it, killing him at seventeen, something I learned by chance much later.

I did not know, at the end of that June 1959, that I would visit only briefly the next year (so no Kevin; he arrived on June 10), nor that after that stunted stay I wouldn’t return to cotton-candy town for many, many years. I could not imagine that the cottage’s years were numbered, coveted by developers who wanted to clear the lot to make way for a supermarket, which they did by obliterating the little house and paving the sandy green around it. I knew only that I’d had a wonderful time and I did not want to board the Trailways bus home to Washington.

Kevin just said, “See you soon,” and I said the same. And that was that, until next summer. And when next summer at the beach didn’t come, I wondered about Kevin.

In the next few years we exchanged postcards (a concept I didn’t know until my mother taught me) and most contained a line at best. Within a few years, all contact ended. I tried again in my teens, this time with a note, but it was returned with a stamp saying “return to addressee.”

In 1971, by then in his late teens, Kevin apparently enrolled in a military academy, a precursor to his Marine dream. At this camp they taught young soldiers-to-be about weapons and even trained them in mock parachute-jumping from a tower. In one such jump, a chord snagged around Kevin’s neck and broke it, killing him at seventeen. This I would learn much later, and by chance, on a return visit to the beach.

During that return I walked to the end of the boardwalk, sat on the white bench, and let Kevin tell me about how it had all gone in the intervening years, and how it had ended. He did that and I listened, much like a character in a sentimental Hollywood movie. KEVIN IS DEAD. Afterward I returned to my hotel, stared out over the sea, and decided to tuck the expanse of my memories away until the need truly arose to speak of my past. That time has come, in my twilight, when  though little that is said or written matters much, the act itself permits me to indulge the phrase I liked above all others, “Once upon a time,” the spirit of which sends you frolicking down to boardwalks of memory, until even those charmed planks run out. The child’s appeal for more magic, drowned out by the howl of ocean wind, is uninterested in Cadillac fins or undersea tunnels, but instead is bluntly determined to have its way with the dunes it owns and puts boyhood fairy tales to rest.

— This is one in a loosely linked series of autobiographical essays in which the author recollects his childhood years, spent largely in Washington, D.C., and Madrid, Spain. Some names and details have been altered for reasons of privacy.