What a year it’s already been as we reach the midway point of 2021—the Summer Solstice! Masks, lockdowns, the VACCINE. While it’s been hard for many to stay focused and productive, I had no problem with that. With fewer distractions, I focused my energies in a few areas…
swimming
Water Magic
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.”
My Connection to Manhattan
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.