He stands facing the vast ocean, a tiny figure in a bright blue and green bathing suit, clutching a pink plastic shovel and matching pail. He watches families frolic in the water and sea gulls swoop through the sky. He stares, enchanted, as boats float by. He loves boats.

Then he looks at the waves. They are crashing down on the beach, coming at him with a terrifying roar.

He turns and flees.

This is Sean Hack's fourth trip to the beach. The first summer, he sat under an umbrella and ate handfuls of sand until his mother caught him. The next summer, he slept, lulled by the warm sun and the rhythm of the surf. Last year, he dug a hole in the sand and kept his parents busy filling it with buckets of water so he could splash around. He wouldn't go near the relentless, pounding waves.

But this is the summer Sean turns 4, and, suddenly, anything is possible. He used to be afraid of dogs, but not anymore. As he grows, so do the boundaries of his world.

Sean has always been fascinated by water. At home in Maplewood, N.J., he has to be dragged out of the bathtub at night, and he can spend hours dancing under a sprinkler. But he has never ventured into the ocean.

It isn't the water that frightens him; he loves water. It's the unknown. What if he went in, and something bad happened to him?

The sand, though. The sand is another matter. The minute he arrived at the

Rehoboth shore this morning, he flung himself face-down on the sand, rolling around like a puppy, luxuriating in the soft, grainy texture.

There is plenty to do here, a comfortable distance from the waves: He makes sand doughnuts and sand ice cream cones. "Mmm ... chocolate!" he says.

He shapes nine circles in the sand:

"Neptune, Pluto ... Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system," he announces. He buries himself up to his knees. "Is everybody watching?" he asks. "The show is about to begin." He kicks free, creating a shower of golden grains.

"Mary Beth," he asks his mother, "where is the big pink shovel?"

"Mary Beth?" his mother echoes, eyebrows raised. It is the first time he has called her that. She knows it won't be the last.

He is growing so quickly, always testing his limits. Someday soon, the boy will plunge into the ocean without a second thought, while his mother yells at him not to swim out so far. Someday, the young man will come to the beach with his friends, and maybe the waves will seem boring, compared to the boardwalk and bars. He might even bring his own children here one day, and teach them to shape planets in the sand.

The cycles of life roll inexorably forward, as steady, as sure as the waves. And as each generation grows into the next, the beach takes on a different meaning, its lure constantly shifting.

The beach will always have something to offer Sean. But first he must master his fear.

Older children are digging sand crabs near the water. They show Sean their floating foam water noodles. He picks up a bright-blue noodle and studies it.

When the children hold hands and walk into the ocean, he edges closer. He watches as they wrap their arms around noodles and kick their feet up behind them, splashing and laughing in the shallow water.

Sean is motionless. The waves are lapping near his feet now; the danger so close. A few more steps, and he'll be there.

"Wait!" he yells, and everyone turns to look.

He stands uncertainly.

Then he holds up his blue water noodle: "Here you go!" He tries to throw it to the children, but he isn't strong enough. It floats down near his feet.

He can't bring it to them; he can't get that close to the waves. Not yet. Not today.

He hurries back to his towel and digs his fingers into the warm, comforting sand.

Nyla Saleh studies Leslie Kaliner's face, as intent as a surgeon preparing to make a first incision. On the sink, a red and white plastic bag holds her tools: Clinique eye shadow, lipstick and a half-dozen sticks of eyeliner. Nyla selects one called pewter.

"Relax your eyes," she commands.

But Nyla traces only one eyelid before she realizes that pewter is totally, completely wrong. Shady gray is what Leslie's eyes cry out for.

"Take it off," she says, as other girls peer into the bathroom, awaiting their turn.

It's the last night at Rehoboth for the six best friends, the last night to cruise the boardwalk and giggle and point out cute guys. They need to look their best.

They've spent the whole day getting ready. They hit the beach at 9:30 a.m., determined to wring every drop of the sun's tanning power out of the day. They squirted lemons into each other's hair, and coated themselves with oil, and shifted their towels with military precision to stay aligned directly under the moving rays.

They barely dipped their toes into the ocean. The beach isn't about sand or swimming when you're on the cusp of 16.

Before the girls even arrived at the beach house rented by Emily Plumb's mom, ground rules were established. Nyla shouted "First dibs," and everyone knew she was talking about boys. Leslie is second in line behind Nyla, even though Leslie already has an imaginary boyfriend, Bob. When the girls pass a pay phone, Leslie sometimes picks up the receiver: "Bob! How sweet of you to call!"

Once their makeup is done, the girls debate whether it's too cold to wear their black tank tops. Emily slips downstairs to ask her mom, the chaperon, for one more gift.

"Twelve o'clock," Diane Plumb says.

"That's not fair!" Emily complains.

"You have to get up early tomorrow," her mother counters. "Are you all packed?"

"Mostly," Emily says, though the upstairs bedrooms are a tangle of hair dryers, rejected outfits and a half-empty box of Cheese Nips.

"Twelve-thirty then," Diane relents. It wasn't so long ago that she was 16.

She also knows she doesn't really have to worry. The girls like to flirt, but from the safety of their pack. They make a show of chafing at the rules, but mostly they feel comfortable and secure within the boundaries their parents have set. Last night, they sneaked out at 3 a.m. - but they only went as far as the outdoor hot tub at the hotel next door. When they heard someone coming, they scrambled out in a pile of squeals and splashes, high-tailing it home before they got caught.

Finally, at 8:30 p.m., the girls assemble downstairs, ready to hit the boardwalk one last time. Pockets filled with lip gloss and gum, arms linked, they set off.

They watch as a lanky guy pushes a giggling girl into the sand.

"Bob did that to me once," Leslie says.

They buy tickets and climb aboard a ride called Gravitron. As soon as the spinning stops, the girls jump off. They're shrieking, but not because of the ride.

"One of those guys just put his arm around me and said, 'Where are we going next?'" Anna Duloy squeals, wrinkling her freckled nose at two guys getting in line for bumper cars.

"We can't go on the bumper cars now," Jamie Holmer says. "They'll think we're following them."

"You could just smell the alcohol on their breath," Nyla adds. "It was, like, so disgusting."

They hurry down the boardwalk, away from the bumper cars and tipsy guys. They pass a shop that sells wish bracelets in a rainbow of colors.

If you make a wish when you put on the bracelet, your wish will be granted when it comes off.

There are so many bracelets, and so many wishes, to choose from. Bracelets with green beads are for a wish about money. Violet beads are for a wish about happiness. Gold beads are for a wish about power.

The girls choose red beads. For love.

It's a brisk, rainy morning in Dewey Beach, and the guys are recovering from a drunken marathon that ended at 3:30 a.m.

Breakfast - steak and eggs, peanut butter sandwiches, canned corn and lemon-lime Gatorade - didn't clear their heads. Now the six best friends are sitting around their living room, which is a tangle of crushed Bud Light cans, golf clubs and a half-empty bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips.

It's been seven years since they last came to the beach together, seven years since they celebrated their release from -- Columbia's Oakland Mills High School and gathered for one final blowout before heading their separate ways.

That was the summer they carved their names into Michael Foschetti's Subaru and pledged that no matter how far they scattered, they would reunite once a year, every year, if only for a weekend.

They kept the promise all through college and beyond, gathering at each other's colleges and new hometowns. But now things are changing. One of the guys just got married. Two more are engaged. They're starting to settle down, to work at serious jobs, to enter the world of mortgages and monogamy. Next year, they know, their wives will want to come along.

But this rainy, freezing, glorious weekend is for the guys only.

Although ... there might be room for just one girl, if Michael has anything to do with it. Michael is currently unattached.

"I'm courting the future Mrs. Vinny Foschetti," Michael has informed his friends.

Vinny is Michael's alter ego, the guy who comes out after a couple of beers. One clue Vinny is around: He likes to wear sunglasses, especially at night.

Last night, Vinny popped out at the Rusty Rudder, where the guys danced in the rain on the bar's wooden deck to a band called Love Seed Mama Jump. They huddled in a circle and jumped up and down hard enough to make the floor shake. They reminisced about how Joe Drissel leapt, fully clothed, into the bay at 1:30 the previous morning on a $25 bet, and how Chris Brosnan jumped in after him for $20.

Between songs, Chris Noon dashed to the bar for a fresh round. "Who missed me?" he shouted when he returned, and the guys plied him with sloppy, oversized hugs, shouting, "Paya!"

Paya is a word the guys use often, their own private shorthand code from high school. It's a versatile word, used to express joy, command attention or halt arguments during drinking games.

At some point between Chris' trip to the bar and Rich Dopp's back flip across the deck, Vinny surfaced, conjured by a slim brunette smoking Marlboro Lights.

Vinny quickly procured a lighter and tested it by trying to set fire to one of his buddy's arm hairs.

"The goal," he explained, "is the split second she takes out another cigarette, I go like this" - he lunged into a fencer's stance, the lighter flickering in his raised right hand.

But the brunette had a surly look on her face, so after lighting two cigarettes, Vinny retreated. He consoled himself with pizza on the way home.

Now it's morning, and the guys are watching the waves from their window. It's so cold even the lifeguards are wearing sweat suits. But there might not be another weekend like this.

They put on bathing suits and race outside. They hit the icy water, wrestling and yelling and diving. As they bob to the surface, one tilts his head up at the sky, raises his fist and releases a bellow that can be heard a block away:

"PAYA!"

CODY!" In an instant, Bob Mauri is off his deck chair, racing toward the kitchen and his 2-year-old son.

It's a little different, coming to Rehoboth these days. Before Bob married his wife, Martha, he spent summers crammed into a house with hard-partying friends. He's done the late-night bar scene and the morning-after-stagger-to-the-beach scene. Now, if he staggers to the beach in the morning, it's because his children kept him from getting enough sleep the night before.

"When you're on your own, you sit on the beach and read a book," Bob says. "When you have two kids, you can't possibly ... Cody, what are you doing?"

Martha picks up his thread of thought easily, accustomed to the abrupt bumps and jolts in their conversations. She has been coming to the beach for years, too, ever since she was a little girl who loved to play in the sand. As a red-haired, fair-skinned teen-ager, she coated herself with baby oil.

Now she wears SPF 45 sunscreen and frets about the faint lines around her eyes.

They have vowed that every year, no matter how busy they are, they will bring their children to the beach, to the same house where Martha's parents always took her and her eight siblings.

The beach was where their romance began. They came here one weekend with friends from church, piling into the little wood-frame house Martha's parents owned. One afternoon, they ended up alone on a bike ride. It was the first time they'd ever really talked, just the two of them.

After they married, they spent lazy weekends here. Bob fished in the morning while Martha read on her favorite old lounge chair, and they fried up his catch for dinner.

Bob hasn't been fishing in two years, and Martha has read less than 30 pages in her book this summer. They have new traditions now.

Martha teaches 4-year-old Benny to dig for sand crabs, and he surprises her by bringing one home, tucked in the middle of a sand-filled pail like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. When Cody wakes at 6 a.m., Bob bundles him into a stroller and takes a walk in the early-morning stillness.

Their days at the beach pass in a blur of Funland and fort-building, sand castles and squabbles. By dinner time, the Mauris are always exhausted. They order pizza from Nicola's and laugh at the memory of their quiet dinners for two.

These vacations are so different from the carefree summers of their youth - a different kind of happiness.

We were driving down the highway one time, and I said, 'Can you believe I'm going to be 50 next year, then 65 in 15 years?' " Bob Nowicki says. "Then the time went by - boom, boom, boom." With each "boom," he snaps his fingers.

"Don't think about it," says his wife, Bernice.

She is 63; he is 67. They came to the ocean every summer while their children were growing up. Then, eight years ago, they moved to Dewey Beach. They wanted to savor every single, precious, speeding-by minute.

Their days are filled with synchronized events: Bob's racquetball games and Bernice's line-dancing classes; gatherings at the local senior center, where Bob is membership president and Bernice is treasurer; meetings for their condo association, where Bob is president and Bernice is secretary/treasurer. Bob fishes for flounder; Bernice fries up his catch. They sing in a choir, and even their clothing harmonizes.

"If I get up in the morning and have on something different than she does, I have to go back and change," Bob says. "I'm still learning."

They have been married 45 years.

Every evening, they set out for a stroll, pausing to greet neighbors, slowly making their way to the pier where they keep their 22-foot cuttycabin. They named it "B&B.;"

"This is where I take the girls at nighttime," Bob says, pointing to a tiny sleeping compartment.

Bernice shoots him a look.

"In my dreams," he says.

"I call them your hallucinations," she says.

Sometimes they go for a sunset cruise, sometimes they simply sit on the docked boat, enjoying the music that wafts over from bands at the Rusty Rudder. They share a six-pack of Coors Light and feel the boat gently rock in the waves. His blue eyes still fasten on her when she talks, and she still laughs louder than anyone else at his jokes.

Their daughters "always say, 'What do you do down there at the beach?' " Bob says. He grins, incredulous that they might think he is ever bored, being retired at the beach.

"I told the Lord the other day, 'I'm having so much fun down here, I don't want to die and go to heaven,' " he says.

But there is one thing that worries Bob.

"My son works morning, noon and night," he says. Slow down, Bob tries to tell him. Don't work as hard as I did. Take a few days off, come to the beach. His son doesn't know yet that the years go by, as quickly as a snap.

It has been a long time since Katharine has gone swimming.

"It's my eyes," she says. They loom large behind her glasses, weakened by cataracts and more than eight decades of use.

As her vision recedes, so do the boundaries of her world.

"My eyes don't let me drive," she says. "Let's put it this way: I hit a little tree."

Katharine Smith and her husband moved to Rehoboth in 1975, as soon as Elmer retired. The ocean was where Katharine had spent one of her favorite summers, crowded into a little house with her closest girlfriends. Later, after she married Elmer, it was where the two of them vacationed together every year. Their lives weren't always easy, but the beach held only happy memories for them.

They never considered retiring anyplace else.

For nine years, they lived their dream: Elmer fished during the day, and they strolled the sand at sunset, searching for pretty shells. Katharine loved to swim, and Elmer always stood vigil on the beach, making sure she was safe.

He has been gone 14 years. She still awakens every morning at 5:30, the time she used to rise to see him off to work.

Katharine could walk the three blocks from her home to the beach, but she

doesn't.

It isn't the water that frightens her; she loves water. It's the unknown.

Something bad might happen to her if she ventured out of her quiet neighborhood and walked down the boardwalk. Something bad might happen if she swam the way she used to, without

Elmer there to keep her safe.

She has always loved the beach, but she can't go there. Not anymore. Not alone.

And yet ...

There are a few days every summer when storms gather, when the families and giggling teen-agers and roughhousing guys pack up their towels and hurry home before the rain. Then the beach is deserted.

On those days, Katharine opens her windows wide. She breathes deeply as the wind carries the scent of the ocean into her home. She listens as the surf gathers force and the waves crash down louder and louder. She closes her eyes and breathes and listens. And she remembers.

She can no longer go to the beach, so it comes to her.

For many Marylanders, the high point of summer is going "down the ocean" - the sand, the surf, the rides, the rituals, the tube tops and flip-flops. This season, The Sun will take you there every week with "Beach Life," dispatches from the shore that begin today.

Pub Date: 7/05/98