Swimming

A Personal History

Summer vacation is here. It’s time to go to the pool.

I have a complicated relationship with swimming. As a timid kid, the idea of diving headfirst into cold water at morning swim lessons freaked me out. The high dive was scary—still is, in fact. I loved the waterslide, but I didn’t care for the bossy teenage lifeguards at the city pool. They always made you rinse off before getting in—which killed the joy of plunging into cool water on a hot day.

At scout camp I had to stay in the shallow end because I couldn’t pass the swim test. The goal was to make it across the pool and back without stopping. I gave up halfway through and clung to the side, breathing sharply, my arms like jello. As a less timid teenager I tried flips off the diving board—this went fine until I smacked my back on the water, hard. No more flips for me. Meanwhile, my wife grew up competing in summer swim club and high school swim team. She can swim circles around me.

A few years ago I decided I’d learn to swim for real. I go through periodic obsessions (mini mid-life crises, maybe?)—a month spent trying to master the piano, a season of training intensely for a road race, a constant nagging feeling my life will not be complete unless I write a novel. My aquatic education involved frequent trips to the neighborhood pool and the YMCA. I checked out books and watched countless YouTube videos on perfecting the freestyle stroke.

Slowly, painfully, I improved my swimming technique—but I never figured out the breathing part. To this day I can only swim laps while wearing a snorkel. My wife laughs at me, and likely everyone else at the pool does too. Thankfully, I’m less affected by humiliation than I was at a young age.

Now I’m back to exercising entirely on dry land. The pool is purely for leisure. While my kids play at the pool, I relax in my incompetence. I don’t dive in headfirst. I definitely don’t attempt a flip. I still enjoy the waterslide, though last time I went down one my back was sore for a week. In rare cases I’ll make myself scale the high dive.

I’ll never feel at home in the water, but I can still find joy in the sensory experience of swimming: the exhilaration of leaping off the board, the quiet feeling of being underwater, the sensation of gliding along with little effort, then floating on my back and gazing up at the summer sky. If I float long enough, maybe that perfect idea for a novel will find me…

These comics appear in my books THE SHAPE OF IDEAS and THE ART OF LIVING, published by Abrams ComicArts.