It is the symbolic start of summer, and thousands of people will be heading to the beaches this week, restrictions or no restrictions. There's something magnetic about the seashore. Seventy-five percent of Americans choose to live within fifty miles of the coast. We are especially lucky on Long Island because the whole place is basically nothing but a beach, a narrow finger of sand, getting narrower every year. So we are never far from the sea just as we are never far from a pizza place. We scarcely ever see the sea, because so much of the shoreline is private property. But it's nice to know that the sea is there for those who can afford it, and that the occasional public beach provides some access to it. I never enjoyed the beach when I was a kid. I vividly remember our family vacations by the sea, including the peculiarly nasty texture of wet sand, and our picnics in the car or the bus shelter with the rain sheeting down outside. When we did manage to picnic on the beach the food was