author, creative director, swimmer
I learned to swim when I was six or seven. In Miami Beach.
Our family was on summer vacation at one of those big beachside hotels. The ones with the vast pools and cocktail bars. Not that I knew what a cocktail was. But the pool was awesome. For a small tot, it was a lake—giant and blue with funny drawings of fish on the bottom.
One day I was playing on the steps in the shallow end, and my Dad comes over and says: “It’s time you learned how to swim.”
Here’s what happened…
The story of New York City begins with the arrival of Henry Hudson’s ship Half Moon into New York’s Upper Bay and then on to the island of Mannahatta (Manhattan) on September 12, 1609.
It was almost noon on that Saturday, and Hudson stood on the quarterdeck with his son, John, and took in a bay such as he had never before seen. Excerpt from my book New York 1609:
… I swam around Manhattan island, New York City. That’s 30 miles. Nonstop.
I’ve written about this event elsewhere, but I’ll take this anniversary day to reveal a bit more. About the swim. And how it relates to what I’m now doing.
The longest day of the year—the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere—is special to me beyond its symbolic, naturalistic, and astronomical significance. On top of this being the first major calendar point since publishing my full-length, 579-page historical fiction novel in its omnibus edition, the characters in New York 1609 place enormous value on this day for good reasons. The Turning of the Days is a time of change. The strawberries are ready for picking. Trading and raiding are in full swing. And the days now start their steady march toward fall and then winter. Time starts to compress from this day forward.
