Early Morning Barton Springs swim report.

Later arrival than usual, 6AM. A raccoon in the parking lot regards me, decides I’m a cop, bolts. More than the usual number of swimmers towing those international orange inflatable floats to signal that a swimmer should not be run over: fine, I will not run you over. I swim for an hour and a quarter, through sunrise into daylight, and for the first time see a cormorant swimming far below the water’s surface. Above, they’re patrician and elegant and long-necked, noses in the air; beneath, graceful but comic. You can really see the neck-to-padding-little-legs ratio.

I swam thinking about my friend and colleague Michael Adams, whose memorial service my ball-&-chain and I went to yesterday. He was legendary for his kindness and gentleness and his deep devotion to—his unconditional love for—his students, but he was also quite funny, with a teasing sense of humor. He was a swimmer too, though at the University of Texas swimming pool. He told me once that he got into an actual argument with Dean Young in the locker room—it wasn’t difficult to find yourself in an argument with Dean; I cannot imagine Michael arguing in public—when they were both naked, about some bit of university policy they disagreed about. “Like ancient Greek philosophers,” he said later, turning it into a good and even noble story.

I was at the pool later than usual because it’s Presidents’ Day. My mother was born on Washington’s birthday and hated Presidents’ Day, the compression of Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s. She loved having a memorable birthday because she loved birthdays. She would have liked that 6AM raccoon, and its suspicion of me.