Question Authoritoadians

Midday Barton Springs Swum Report

The bad news is: I’m still afraid of fish. The good news: I forget about this until I’m in the pool and see a fish.

I have been swimming regularly, with interruptions here and there. At first it was my epidermis that kept me away: I had a small oddity taken off my skin—the doctor’s report called it “a neoplasm of unknown behavior”; it was benign—which meant that I was only allowed to frequent chlorinated pools, which I did. On Memorial Day at the Y, I turned to see that my lane had been invaded by the water exercise class that had been next door, two silver-haired women in visors holding large foam dumbbells. I addressed the lifeguard standing at the pool’s edge plaintively: “I guess I lost my lane.” He said, “We’re closing the pool on account of lightning.” At which point I felt another unfortunate emotion: glee. Take that, you visored silver foxes who don’t respect boundaries!

That was the start of the bad weather. It has stormed a lot in Austin, most notably a couple of Wednesdays back. My younger kid and I went to a double feature downtown—Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman—but my older kid and my ball-&-chain were uptown in a hell of a hail storm. Most of our damage was plant-based—our garden was pummeled—but our fence is pretty scarred. When we movie-goers came back, we saw that streets in our neighborhood were entirely carpeted in green leaves. Cars and houses, too: plastered in green.

One day I left my swimming shoes outside to dry in the sun, but forgot to bring them in. In the morning I stepped into one and found it soaking wet. The other one was wet and full of leaves. I picked one shoe up and sniffed it and can only conclude that some passing animal had micturated all over my swimming shoes. I applaud the ingenuity and sass (though I disposed of the shoes). Perhaps it was the coyote I have sometimes seen in our yard.

When I got to the pool that morning, I heard a swimming woman ask a companion, “Is that the third wheel, or one of the parents?”

She was talking about the Egyptian geese, which have some sort of interesting Design for Living arrangement going on. Maybe it’s a commune, or maybe it’s polyamory. There are a number of middle-sized goslings and at least three adults and I don’t think we should be heteronormative or shaming about it: I think the geese are being excellently modern.

Today I was supposed to go swimming with me and mine at Hamilton Pool, so I slept in, all the way till 7:30. But there’s no swimming at Hamilton Pool today—there’s been so much rain that the water is full of harmful bacteria. That seems like a metaphor for something, but these days everything does. Instead we all went to Barton Springs in the middle of the day. It seemed remarkably uncrowded to me. Then again, when I am by myself in the mornings I loathe humanity, but altogether terrible news of the world has made me much more tender towards groups of humans, and there they were, swimming, sunbathing, gathered together. I mean, I didn’t want to talk to them—I’m still a crank—but their presence comforted me. Sunday I went with my younger kid to the protest, where all around us we saw people who were outraged but had maintained their senses of humor.

The particular river I am swimming through these days are my old papers, and we pack up to leave. It’s clear that I believed as a younger writer that an archive would make overtures for my every scrap or jot, but that hasn’t happened yet. Some stuff I have no idea why I kept—there was an entire tub of the reviews for my first three books—and other things newly precious to me: a letter from Calvin Trillin which says he thinks we must be “shirt-tail mishpocha”; a copy of Joshua Clover’s Iowa thesis, which has as his address the terrible duplex on North Dodge Street which he took over from me; letters from people I’d forgotten I had long correspondences with, once upon a time.

I’ve also found things like this madness:

This appears to be an outline for a novel based on an utterly failed short story that I wrote in graduate school. I tell the story of that story often: it had a very unreliable narrator, so unreliable that when I brought it into Frank Conroy’s workshop in the spring of 1989, not a single person understood what the story was about. What was worse, somehow, was that several people really liked it—except that they liked some different story, the story they thought I had written. This planned novel—I find no evidence of it—must have been an attempt to redeem the material. Perhaps you can tell that I was several years away from actually writing a novel. I don’t know what I meant by the scrawled note at the end. What I meant about any of it. My children are very amused by this artifact and have chanted SEX SEX UNDERWEAR at me, which is all I really deserve.

I swam yesterday and will swim tomorrow and every non-hailing day till we leave, and every day in the fall when I’m back teaching. It feels valedictory already, though I have many swims left.