We used to have fun, the nieces and me, for hours on end.

We’d get on all fours and run down the beach like ponies, like the half-wild horses at Harbour Island, splashing, neighing, kicking and biting just like horses and laughing.
The girls each picked pony names — Star, Beauty, Lightning, Fury — and had fun listening for them and jumped up when they realized they were being summoned and frisked around the corral, bucking, crazed by the sun and the sand and the roar of the sea and Froot Loops and suckers. I’d say: “Are you guys all jacked up on sugar or what?!” and they’d all nod furiously and yell: “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” They would blaze like comets and crash like planes.

Now they are zombies.

And I’m just a dork.

They would line up at a starting line drawn in the sand like the Kentucky Derby and sprint down the beach and shun the lone boy in the group, Franklin, their cousin and brother and shortest.

They’d hide in the great beards of grass that festoon the eroded dunes along the beach, then pounce on unsuspecting prey like morays hunting out of their reef holes. They would run up behind each other and give each other wedgies and run away laughing. I taught them that. I was the bad uncle.

I’d get them revved up before bedtime and be soundly reprimanded on a regular basis by the matriarchs of the clan, who tried in vain to sound stern between bursts of laughter at the antics of the youngsters.

Time is a cruel mistress, however, and a decade of corporate marketing and the Disney Channel have transformed a gaggle of giggling girls into a pack of pouting, pampered, primping princesses on parade.

There are no more early morning walks down the hill to the tangerine grove, no more lifting up little girls to reach grapefruits and limes in the high branches of the trees in the hillside orchard alongside the family house, sunlight playing through the leaves, the waves a sweet music on the limestone cliffs below.

“Hey, wanna go pick oranges?” nowadays elicits, not a happy-go-lucky “Sure!” but a disdainful “You’ve got to be kidding me.” That is, if any of them wakes up before 11.

Gone are the swims off the dock, the carefree leaps into the water, the snorkeling in shimmering rainbow shafts of light below dancing sunlit waves. No more hikes out onto the sandbar at low tide, the water ankle-deep a quarter-mile out. Gone, gone like the birds to their nest, like the wind to the west.

Freckles and sunburn have been replaced by buckets of makeup. The nieces are sporting enough war paint to scare a cavalry troop. Spontaneous laughter has been replaced by yawns of boredom, squeals of delight by groans, innocence by insolence.
Jokes and songs have over the years turned to jeers and ridicule, naiveté to know-it-all-edness. Put-downs, interruptions and hissy fits are the order of the day, eyes raised to heaven, hair tossed impatiently. It’s like hanging out with a bunch of cats.

Wash the dishes? “No way, José.” Help prepare a meal? “You don’t understand; I don’t do that kinda stuff.” Help clean the house? “Mister, you are duh-reaming.”

One thing does remain sacrosanct: the universal ignoring of poor Franklin, who still yearns for inclusion, ostracized, a terminal tag-along. He’s like a fatted calf on the riverbank wishing with all his heart to swim with a school of piranhas. 

Lively conversations are, sadly, a forgotten relic of ancient history, consisting now of sporadic exchanges of monosyllabic grunts, the girls not really active participants, preoccupied as they are with texting parties unknown on omnipresent cell phones. Perhaps I could break through by using their language: Hy hws it goin? Rmmbr hw mch fn we usd to hve? Swmmng? Gfng off? Jst hngng out?

The probable response: Wht a jrk I hte u U r sch a lsr Jst go awy U sck U r pthtc Gt lst Wht an idiot. C U ltr!

Myb its fr th bst & I shld jst cme to trms w/ being a sqr. 1 mnt I ws the fn gy; now Im jst anthr lsr. Hro 2 zro in 60 sec. Rgh stff. Yt lf goes on. Ill hld out hpe tht the dy wll cme whn being cl aint so cl anymre.

Sean McNamara can be reached at seanmcnamara@earthlink.net.