When I was in my mid-20s, my wife, Ginny, and I were at a beach on Cape Cod Bay, tossing a tennis ball around with our two young children. The ball went into the water, and I went after it. No matter how far I swam, the tide took the ball farther. By the time I had the ball in my hand, the two of us, the ball and I, had traveled so great a distance, Ginny and the children were dots on the beach.
I didn’t know what a riptide was, but I soon learned. Giving in instead of resisting, I let the tide carry me until it delivered me to my anxious family.
In the water, I remember thinking, what an ignominious end: Man dies pursuing tennis ball.
All this recurs as I am far from Cape Cod and very far from my 20s, pausing in a lap to catch my breath in the swimming pool of a rented house on Long Island. I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.
What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.
As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.
And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray.
No one sings in water (did Esther Williams sing?), but your exuberance may make you feel like singing. Either that, or weeping with inexpressible joy. I know a writer, hardly old but not a girl anymore, who, swimming in a reservoir, was overwhelmed by the sight of ducks and the surrounding pines and broke into tears.
Travel for journalism or for pleasure has allowed me to swim all over the world. Latvia, with its hard, wide beaches; the Pacific; the Great Lakes; Suriname, where I swam with piranhas; Yugoslavia; hotels in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo; the Dead Sea in Israel, so buoyant with salt, you seem to float above the water.
In the Galápagos, sea lions swam playfully between my legs. “Are they dangerous?” I asked a guide. “Only if the males think you’re after their women,” he said. I tried to look as uncompetitive as possible.
Something about swimming in a foreign place allows you to feel at home wherever you may be. Water is the same everywhere.
John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” always puzzled me. I could not tell if the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, was making his way home, from swimming pool to swimming pool, to protest the banality of his suburban life or to celebrate it. In the end, there’s little question as to the disillusionment he feels. And it’s the swimming that brings that to him. Each pool an emblem of empty success; Neddy’s swimming, a dirge.
Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.
Whenever I go swimming in the pool in our apartment house, I often see other old men doing an assertive crawl or a self-confident breaststroke. We greet each other briefly, then each returns to his private satisfaction, smashing the clocks, discovering new meaning in killing time.
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Cold Moon” and “Rules for Aging.”.
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