There is something timeless – and therefore reassuring – in a crowded Vineyard beach on a sunny August day. Out among the blankets and the beach chairs, placed at just enough distance from each other to respect the privacy of those nearby there is a feeling that nothing else in the world matters at just this moment.  "I just loved sitting still," the narrator of Barbara Kingsolver's book, The Bean Tree, says at one point; and that's the way it is at the beach. With the swirl of others around you, sitting still at a crowded beach is a powerful restorative; one leaves regretfully, but renewed.