There's A Change in the Weather

Early morning Barton Springs Swim Report, 10/10/2024

Mid 60s and starry this October morning. In the daylight, it’s still summer: mid 90s, strong sun. In the delicious predawn dark, you can feel—I can feel—fall.

There’s a little comic heron I’ve encountered more than once on the pool deck on the south side. Perhaps he’s always been there, and rightly views me as an interloper. This morning as I turned to get in the water I saw his potbellied outline, standing on my favored stairs in. I hesitated. Out of fear? Courtesy? Like many cowards, I cannot always tell the difference between the two. Then a woman came swimming up and the heron flew off. “Whoop!” said the woman, quietly.

I did make a lightning trip to Massachusetts for my 40th high school reunion. I had a good time; I need never attend another. We are in our late 50s, which must be the demographic with the widest variety in age presentation. A handful of people looked a good fifteen years younger than their age, a lot looked pretty much dead on (both good and bad versions of it), and another handful looked fifteen years older. An old pal told me he found it the most depressing of the reunions (he’d been to several) because some people had changed enough that he didn’t recognize them. But I am blessed with such terrible facial recognition skills—not full faceblindness, but truly comic and alarming inability—and so I always knew I’d have to read name-tags. I was unable to call anybody by their grown-up names (sorry, Robbie and Donny and Ricky).

I also discovered that if you have published a few books since high school, you will spend much of a reunion listening to people apologize for not having read any of them. “It’s all right,” I kept saying. “Statistically speaking, nobody has.” Somehow absolving people for not having read of my books felt grandiose to me, as though I, too, found it an apologizing offense. No matter what language I used, I felt like an asshole. Truthfully, I probably should just have said, deadpan, Yeah? Fuck you.

(Edited to add: people were being lovely when they said it; I’m just an awkward object.)

Now I’m home and back to the pool. I’ve swapped my surf poncho for the enormous boiled wool dress I favor when it’s chilly: that’s how I can tell that fall is coming, my New Englander’s need for coziness. I spend way too much time thinking about my swimming kit: my swimsuit is wearing out, and Land’s End doesn’t make it any longer; I have a new pair of water shoes (I always swim in water shoes) that have to be put on with a shoe horn but are otherwise fine; now that it’s cold, I’m again looking for the right pair of after-swim footwear, something I have never found. Last year, on my usual north side of the pool, I often changed (modestly) inside of my big dress, dropping my damp suit to the concrete in the dark.

Today when I got out there was a big crowd of young people in skimpy bathing suits, gathering their nerve for jumping in or pulling out their phones to document their bravery (even though they hadn’t exercised their bravery yet).

But I had exercised mine, sort of, in the face of cold water and tiny herons, and so, though the young people might scoff to hear it, as I walked past them in my voluminous frock I felt happy and smug. They were too young to have heard a reunion’s call. I graduated twice as many years ago as most of them have been alive. I meant them no harm, I even admired them for their gumption, and the heron, I hope, felt the same about me.