I am a swimmer. I swim. It is what I do and it has become who I am, in a way. It started fourteen years ago when my friend Lisa finally convinced me that swimming would help me overcome chronic back pain. She was right, of course, but it took me about five years to hear her wisdom. Now, if I’m a swimmer, Lisa is a mermaid. Her arms are strong, her stroke is so beautiful, so sure she could well cross the Channel with one of those arms tied behind her back. During college she swam in the early hours, often the only person in the huge, silent pool. When she visited me in East Hampton, she marched down to the bay, goggles in hand and I watched her cut back and forth, far out, perfectly parallel to the shoreline. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a school of fish following her she was so at home in the water. She still swims in those dawn hours. I know that because my emails are returned at five or six a.m. as she packs up for the pool.
My need to swim every day borders on the pathological, I know that, too. This weekend we had a lunch and a dinner on both days. I swam in the morning before the lunch and when we got back, I went to the pool again, craving the silence, the isolation of being under water. My pool is no Olympic , Hockney-esque beauty. It is the local health club puddle with proportions that rival a blow-up paddling pool. It takes me 80 lengths to swim a mile and it is also true that rarely am I alone in the water. Still, between the foggy goggles and the waterproof earplugs, I can disappear into lambent depths, at least for a mile. Lisa executes perfect flip turns, her fingers barely brushing the wall as she spins. This is something she spent hours trying to teach me in our pool in East Hampton. All I ever managed was a graceless tumble that filled my nose with water and bumped my head against the wall. I still simply swerve as I reach the end of each length, barely pushing off to give me more strokes, less glide.
Lisa did manage to teach me pool etiquette, however. She taught me the “you are too slow, I want to pass” leg tap, the “go ahead of me, I’m getting the water out of goggles” nod, and the “sorry I kicked you ” grimace. She also taught me the importance of pattern, routine. She made me believe that the very implacability of a set activity holds its own kind of freedom. Lisa is as clean and tidy in herself as she is in her lifestyle. She showed me that when your desk–mine happens to be the kitchen counter–is clear and uncluttered, your mind can go wild and crazy and you can imagine, and then do, almost anything.
In a way, Lisa is the reason I write. She began writing poetry, seriously, in college. In the years of first jobs and apartments when people asked what she did for work she told them she worked to support her habit: writing. She continued to study her craft in graduate school, while she worked so that she could pay for her drug of choice. She still does and when you get a letter, or even an email from Lisa, you must sit down and read it mindfully because there are so many messages and lessons hidden like Easter eggs amidst the news.
When my mother lay dying, endlessly it felt, Lisa came to my father at least once a week. She had just returned from giving up her own life to re-align the disparate, but profitable, pieces of her father’s business. He had died only a couple years before and Lisa both mourned his loss and put away her grief to make sure her family steadied themselves. Anyway, each time she came to the apartment she brought salmon pink roses and several days worth of delicious food. As much value as those physical, nourishing things had, and as needed, it was the way she gave of herself that enriched us all. She held my father’s hand and talked with him. She listened, attentive and still as he spun completely impossible scenarios of how everything would be fine once Mommy came home from the hospital. She stood at our door, no doubt hopelessly late for too many things, as we grabbed at her sleeve, silently begging her to stay with us, to feed us until we could be calm and sleepy with comfort. When she hugged us the faint smell of chlorine drifted up. It was a clean smell, full with images of blue-green water rippling as she passed through it.
Soon, Lisa and I will be on the same side of the ocean for the first time in sixteen years. We will be near again, swimming if not actually side by side (she would so outpace me, tapping repeatedly at my leg, passing, passing along the narrow lane), at least together in the patterns she taught me. At dawn, in the pool, at the end of the day, writing when we can, we will continue our laps until we reach the wall together.