Mid-life crisis, stage seven (or so)

Wherein our hero continues to try to make up for being in his forties by learning how to do things he’s never done before — though fine cooking is not among them.

Well, let’s go over the list of things I’ve taken up since I passed 40, shall we? Running; skiing; bicycling; French; a growing fondness for certain world music; Bob Dylan songs. Add to this now: swimming. For years, I have blamed my mother for the fact that I never learned to swim properly, but I have finally decided to take matters in my own hands and have enrolled in an adult swim class at the Y. You might think an ability to swim was actually essential for someone who has spent a great deal of his life on or near the water, but you would be wrong. This isn’t to say I can’t swim at all, but I have no ability to swim efficiently, to breathe properly, etc. I flail and spend a lot of energy getting anywhere.

I realized sometime last year (which is to say, the year that ended so recently) that if I was ever going to be able to do a triathlon, I was going to have to learn to swim. So, tonight was my second lesson. Oddly, there’s another person in the class who is also learning so she can do a tri. There are two teenage brothers, one who can swim a little and one who is rather hopeless. And there’s a new guy who joined tonight whose sole purpose is to make the two triathlete-wanna-bes look like the real deal.

The village where we grew up had a delightful little lake and a very good learn-to-swim program, but for some reason I was never enrolled in it despite both my parents’ frequent avowals that they wanted their children to know how to swim, because they didn’t know how. Those avowals didn’t turn into any sort of action, such as signing us up or anything radical like that. It was just a vague desire they had, and they seemed to have no idea how to act on it. Meanwhile, every kid I knew was inaccessible for summertime play nearly every morning of the summer because they were all at swim lessons. Officially, Mom says that it was too hard to work out the logistics with our sitter, my great-great aunt, but that makes no sense at all. And in fact, once I was 12 or so, I could have gotten to the park on my own, and I often did, but somehow it didn’t occur to me that I could have just put myself into the classes. (My mother will have a different view of this whole thing, I know, but she will be wrong.) I picked up enough from my friends to keep from drowning, but that was about it.

If my children learn nothing else from me, it will be that it’s never too late to learn to do something.