I first dipped my toes into a swimming pool when I was five years old. I was at a hotel in Miami, Florida on holiday with my parents. We had a week in the sun before traveling back to Paterson, New Jersey, where we lived at the time. I was absolutely terrified of swimming, but was attracted to the water, and moreover the freedom everyone in the pool seemed to possess with such remarkable ease. There was something thrilling, sensual and dangerous about the pool, and I was eager to let go of my fear and take my first stab at this thing called “swimming.”
My dad, a former athlete and enviably powerful swimmer, called at me from inside the hotel pool. “Dip your toes in,” he said in his Argentine-inflected Spanish, “and then slowly let yourself in. We’ll learn one step at a time.” The combination of south Florida sun and the slightly inappropriate beauty of a hotel swimming pool steps away from the Atlantic Ocean was too much to resist, and so, I, stepped in.
I don’t know what I expected. Some sort of magic? Life transformation? But the water was just water. Warm from the sun with a slightly cool undertow. I tugged at my blue bathing suit and kept walking into it. My dad was waiting for me and held my hand, and slowly, slowly, I had my first swimming lesson. What I remember most was the feeling—one that continues to this day when I swim, especially in pool water—of absolute yet controlled freedom, and at the same time, eerie otherworldliness. If swimming in the ocean is meeting Nature, swimming in a pool is about meeting yourself, and also an extension of yourself.
