On Learning to Swim at Forty-Three

I grew up four hundred miles from the nearest ocean, in a family that regarded public pools as places where you caught things. By the time I was an adult, not knowing how to swim had hardened into an identity. I was the one who watched the bags.

Last winter I signed up for a beginner class at the community center. There were five of us: a retired postman, two college students, a woman who had nearly drowned as a child, and me. The instructor, who could not have been older than twenty, treated us with a patience I have rarely encountered anywhere.

The first lesson was putting our faces in the water. The second was blowing bubbles. By the sixth, I could float on my back without panicking, staring up at the ceiling tiles, listening to my own breathing, astonished that the water would hold me if I let it.

I can swim now, badly. A length of the pool leaves me gasping. But there is a particular freedom in doing something you had decided, long ago, you would never do. It reopens the question of what else you decided.