A curious thing happened recently. I was going through an old family photo album my mother had just sent me. The kind with the black pages and little B&W prints with the cute scalloped edges. I had carefully placed the crumbling pages with mother’s handwritten notes in white ink next to a binder I had opened earlier. The binder held my clippings from the day I won the second annual Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in 1983. (I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account of that eight-hour, 30-mile circumswim around the island here; you can read more about it on Quora.