Absent Minding

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report 9/26/25

Once, and for many months—years, even—I walked the long way down to the pool using my own eyesight, the moon, the stars, the clouds to guide me. Brighter, when the sky is overcast: the city lights bounce back to earth. (I have no idea whether this is scientifically true, but it’s my experience.) In the past year and a half I’ve become leerier of wildlife, and now I use the flashlight on my phone. This morning, I was almost to the gate before realizing I was phoneless: not in my hand or my pocket or my bag. I went back to the car and couldn’t find it, even got in and pulled out of the parking space to see if I’d dropped it. The phone had vanished. I’ve been muddleheaded for twenty-four hours, really, one of those days (all teachers I have them, I think) when I said things in class and thought of myself, as if observing from another room, “What a fatuous thing to say aloud.” Today I took the stairs down to the pool and thought, as I always do when walking down stairs in the dark, This is how I will die, descending a staircase. I feel walking down staircases is something I have never learned to do particularly well. How do ordinary people do it?

Perhaps that set the tone for the swim. More than once, I got a little lost. My goggles kept fogging no matter how I adjusted them, let a little water in, tried to clear them with my finger. I swam higgledy-piggledy across the pool. On my last length I saw what I thought was, through my very local fog, a swimmer with a float, unmoving. As I drew closer I realized it was the floating barrier around the shadow of the leaning pecan tree whose name, I have recently learned from news reports, is Flo. Flo is at least a century old but has recently contracted Brittle Cinder Fungus. Already, the tree has been propped up with cement and a metal crutch. Flo’s fate is uncertain, but the arborists’ report is gloomy. I got a bit tangled in the ropes of the barrier, but I finished the swim, got to the car, and found the phone.

Flo on the right. Her concrete girdle is visible in the foreground.

Later, when it was time to take children to school, I could not find my keys. I looked for my swim bag: missing as well. But I never leave my swim bag in the car, I thought. The keys I do forget from time to time because the key is not a key, but a fob with a transponder. I should know better; I do not know better.

I had, of course, left both bag and keys in the car. All three things, car, bag, keys, sat in the driveway, sound if not safe.

A week from today I’m appearing at my beloved BookWoman in Austin on the occasion of my paperback’s publication date. It’s being billed as An Evening with Elizabeth McCracken, which for some reason puts me in mind of the one-man shows Hal Holbrook use to do dressed up as Mark Twain. Perhaps I’ll dust off my cabaret act. (I have no cabaret act, nor any appropriate talents for such.)

Quite sincerely: if you have any ideas of what would make a pleasant evening with me in a wonderful bookstore, please let me know in the comments. I don’t dance (don’t ask me), I don’t know card tricks, can’t sing, am absentminded, am sedentary and inflexible, will not impersonate Mark Twain, am not a very good cook. Please do not ask me to walk down a flight of stairs. As bad at it as I am in the dark, I would be worse in front of an audience.

I had only just gotten sort of comfortable with self-promotion on Twitter. I am telling myself that I must get comfortable with it in other places. NB this is not because I am modest or self-effacing. Inside I am as full of hubris and self-regard as nearly anyone. Clearly it’s not that I dislike talking about myself, or bragging, since this is a newsletter dedicated to both.

If you are at liberty and in Austin October 3rd, at 7PM come see me at the wonderful BookWoman. Buy books! Not necessarily mine: BookWoman is a dream bookstore, chockfull of wonderful books.

https://www.ebookwoman.com/event/evening-elizabeth-mccracken