My parents have two essential pieces of kit they have taken to the beach for decades.

The first, a green umbrella, would be familiar to anyone trying to stay out of the sun.

The second is a blue and white-striped windbreaker.

The windbreaker is and does pretty much what the name suggests.

It’s a heavy rectangular strip of canvas stitched to wooden poles that you unfurl and stake into the sand so you can huddle behind it when the wind is fierce.

I’m not sure when the heyday of windbreakers was, but you don’t see many anymore.

These days when the wind blows, people leave the beach. They don’t tough it out.

I have great memories growing up lying on the beach behind the windbreaker.

I told Dad that I couldn’t believe both were still working.

“They don’t make anything like they used to,” he said.

I asked how long he’s had them.

He said they were both from the 1950s, making them about 75 years old.

He got the umbrella was from his mother, who bought it.

The windbreaker, however, was pilfered from the Allenhurst Beach Club.

Dad’s family joined the club in the 1930s. They would drive over on weekends in suits and dress shoes and change into bathing attire in cabanas they rented for the season.

He learned to dive at the club and later worked as a lifeguard. The pool was filled with salt water and drained every night, something they no longer bother to do.

He said the staff that put out beach chairs and umbrellas for clients didn’t relish rolling up the windbreakers at the end of the day so they tended not to offer them to customers.

At some point, he realized the club had a dozen windbreakers in a storage room they rarely used. He figured they wouldn’t miss one.

I was surprised he would take one because it seemed so out of character. Dad is the model of civic mindedness. He gave blood every six months, coached Little Leage and served as a deacon at church.

But evidently the idea that something so obviously useful wasn’t being put to good use outweighed any concerns about permanently “borrowing” the windbreaker.

I asked him if he had any regrets about pinching one of the windbreakers from the club.

“Yes,” he said. “I should have taken two.”

(Part of a series of life lessons based on conversations with my parents.)