The City & the Country no.57 – January 14 2015

2015! When I was a teenager I would have doubted that I would make it to 2015, let alone be swimming a mile every morning before breafast. The Y in Kingston is my home from home. My photos make it seem less ancient and ramshackle than it in fact is, with many defects in walls and floors and elsewhere. New showers (not shown) are a big advance, but much remains to be repaired in the Men’s locker room. The good parts about the Y are the pool itself, always the right temperature, and the steam room (likewise – the total fog in the photo is true to the steam room on first entry, which affords no idea who or how many are present), and the companionship.

My good friend the painter and doughty swimmer Dan knows everyone in the pool and introduces any newbies to them; young life guard Quinn knows everyone too and greets us by name (not every life guard does, especially not the shy girls or the middle-aged man whose strut and unfriendliness have led me to dub him Hitler); Dan was once kind enough to ask me if I ever swam competitively – a huge compliment, this, from someone who swims many miles daily and is as fine a swimming sylist as I know; this week we shared a lane and he told me I was a ‘powerhouse.’ I’m still glowing. Of course the pool also includes ‘whales,’ my term for the huge self-taught 300-plus pounders who splash everyone and fill up a whole lane and more, ‘floaters,’ who rarely swim at all, but bob in place, or stand like sad sentries in the water, and other beasts of the communal pool.

I’m in the habit of doing my Buddhist prayers in the fog of the steam room. ‘What’s that noise?’ someone enquired, genuinely puzzled, last week. I grinned in secret, kept reciting, and no one answered.

‘What’s that on your back?’ is a regular question put to me, and I try and deflect further conversation by answering, truthfully, ‘German philosophy.’ That usually does it, except for a few persistent souls, whose noblest example is the eye surgeon Ron Hanowice, who not only probed until I confessed that it was the opening of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, he actually bought the book and read it from cover, which few except specialists do. More effect than I could ever have believed my back would achieve. Alas, Ron found this truly hopeful and heartening masterpiece depressing. Ron is retiring to Texas this year. (My idea of depressing. Houston, what’s more!)