Natural Talent

We were planning to swim up a city river--Zurich to be precise. It was a long swim, my friend told me, but there was a pretty strong current and we'd be swimming with it.

That's okay, I said, I'm an excellent swimmer anyway.

Another friend laughed when I told her this story, because even I was embarrased when it came out of my mouth. Who can say they are excellent at anything, really? I'd like maybe a heart surgeon to tell me right before he opened my chest that he was excellent at it, but really, I'd like it more if New York Magazine told me, or someone who was allegedly independent. I'd like a man to tell me that he was an excellent lover, but I'd like it more if he proved himself true. (In THEORY, of course, am still married.)

We can almost never toot our own horn without getting rightfully ribbed for it. But, truth be told, on anonymous blogs and the like, I am an excellent swimmer.

It is one of possibly two natural talents I have. I can swim, and I can make people laugh.  As talents go, the latter is more fun at parties since the first is limited to pool parties and we have outgrown racing our friends at this age. But

I. LOVE. TO. SWIM.

I do. I spent most of my childhood underwater and I don't know of anywhere that I am consistently happier. The only shame of getting older and not having my own pool is that I feel like it is possibly inappropriate for a seven-week along pregnant woman to spend an entire afternoon doing backflips in the deep end. Because this is all I really want to do

Instead, I suited up and went to the city pool four blocks from my house. FOUR BLOCKS. Shall I tell you how many times I have been there in the past five years? Zero times.

I swam laps. I swam endless laps and waited for my inner, swimming monologue to come back. I remembered Sundays in the winter at the indoor pool with my Dad. I remembered every summer pool and lake I'd ever swum in. I remembered swim team in high school where I was the fattest girl in the pool and the fastest to do breaststroke. It confused a lot of people. It was maybe the only thing I was proud of until I was 16. Swimming, because it's easy for me, gives me the sort of mental escape and allows me to zone out in the way I think serious runners can. When I run, because really I cannot run, I am only counting the minutes until I no longer must run.

My husband was supposed to join me, but ended up getting there too late--there were only twenty minutes left. He came over to the side to tell me he wasn't going to pay to swim for such a short time.

"But," I sputtered. "Can I stay in?"

I was 8 again, begging for another half hour in the pool, for another go at the diving board. "Please?"

My husband, who was late because I had left our roof open and we feared rain would come in and who walked all the way home to close it when we were a block away from the pool, granted me twenty minutes and  hung out at the snack bar with all the other parents.

When I'd dried off, hair not yet stale with the scent of cholorine I'd worn all through junior high and high school, we walked out hand in hand.

"That," I said, "Made me happier than anything I've done all week."