Dear Ben,
I know how much you love a good correspondence, communing with a faraway mind, so I figured you wouldn’t mind one more letter.
I wish you could see me. I am naked. Okay, not exactly naked but close. I am wearing something called a “bathing suit.” Imagine an undergarment you wear in public—a partial air bath. You’d question the need for this invention, I’m sure. That which conceals also constricts.
Anyway, I digress, and I know how you hate that. Brevity, always. Picture, if you will, a man of a certain age plunging into Lake Michigan one summer morning in search of a hard-boiled egg. Are you with me, Ben?
Of course you are. It was your idea. Surely you recall the advice you gave a friend, Oliver Neave, who wanted to know if, as a middle-aged man, he could learn to swim.
Absolutely, you replied, without hesitation, and supplied detailed instructions. Find an egg, you counseled, and drop it deep in the water. Then swallow your fear and dive for it. You will not drown, you assured Oliver. Instead, “you will find that the water buoys you up against your inclination,” you said, before adding a sentence that has stuck with me. “It is not so easy a thing to sink as you imagined.” I want to believe you, Ben, honest I do, but I struggle, even after these past few years I’ve spent with you, the most sanguine of possibilians.
I procure a hard-boiled egg at a Greek diner, then toss it into the lake, as you suggested, and follow close behind. Submerged in the unseasonably cool water, I pump my arms and legs in a controlled flail I call swimming when a familiar fear flashes across my brain like an electric shock. It’s nothing I can name, this trepidation, but I have associated it with water for as long as I can remember. I nearly abandon my attempt to reach the egg when I recall your words: “Feel the power of the water to support you, and learn to confide in that power.”
It was easy enough to confide in that power, that Powerful Goodness, when I was floating in two feet of highly salinized water at a spa in southern England. It is a different story here, in the twelve-foot depths of brisk and saltless Lake Michigan. This is the paradox of water. We need it. We are it. Yet it can kill us.
I persist. Legs frog-kicking, arms arcing, I dive deeper and deeper. It dawns on me that the lake doesn’t want me to sink. It wants me to swim—or at least not drown, and as far as I’m concerned, that is good enough.
I am not alone. Others have gathered lakeside for an early morning swim. Most are older than me, including my friend Barbara, a Chicago transplant and retired newspaper columnist. You’d like her, Ben, and not only because of the printer’s ink coursing through her older (but not old) veins. She is an avid swimmer and loves the water as much as you do.
As I dive for the egg, I am vaguely aware of Barbara and the others. Humans gliding next to me, over me, through me, or so it seems. Up there, on the surface, they were specific persons with specific identities. Down here, they are nameless mammals, indistinguishable from one another and from me. Up there, they had wrinkled, walrus skin, varicose veins, arthritic knees, scar tissue, keratoses, artificial hips, pacemakers, dentures, and other stigmata of bodies in decline. Down here, their oldness, their otherness, disappears, dissolved in the welcoming waters.
Old. Young. Adolescent. Middle-aged. Late-middle-aged. These are labels, roles we assume for a short while. Like all labels, they are not meaningless, but they mean less than we think. Time, formless and fluid, refuses to play our category game.
It is not so easy a thing to sink as you imagined. In the months since we parted ways, Ben, life has tested your proposition. I have buried my mother, sent my only child to college, undergone surgery, and turned sixty. There, I said it!
I’d like to report I navigated these turbulent waters with your easy equanimity, Ben, but that would be a lie, and not a helpful one. The truth is I fought the riptides. I distrusted providence. Yet I did not sink. I did not swim either. I floated. Despite it all. Because of it all.
I don’t know what lies ahead for me, Ben. An overflowing cup or the dregs? Obscurity or fame (perhaps a celebrity that extends beyond the territorial waters of Bulgaria)? I do know choppy seas await me, such is the way of the world. But you will be there, in some form or another, nudging me, buoying me, sharing a laugh with me.
I see why you suggested an egg. Bright white, it gives me something clear to aim for. A beacon. I kick once more, then stretch my right arm and in a surprisingly fluent motion, pluck the egg off the lake bed. Then I pivot, like you did so many times, and kick again. Up, up, up, I glide, the lake lifting me, pulling me, willing me toward the surface, and the light.
I rub my eyes and shake the water from my ears like a dog after a bath. The air is soft and plump with the sounds of a city stirring. I spot Barbara. She is standing on shore, clearly relieved to see me intact, a smile on my face and a hard-boiled egg in my hand. I raise it triumphantly above my head, as if it were the Nobel Peace Prize or an honorary degree from Bulgaria’s second-most-prestigious university.
You were right, Ben. All in all, it is a pretty good sort of a world.