A Jolt of Memory, Out of the Blue
When you randomly think of someone from a distant chapter of your life.
Out of the blue today, I thought of someone I hadn’t thought of in at least two decades. Here’s how I got there.
I was helping my Mom with one of her Amazon delivery runs, when I thought about finding a gym with a pool. Getting into a pool would make it millions of times easier for to exercise, maybe get back to building some muscle mass, which is something my nephrologist (I have a nephrologist now!) mentioned in passing.
Long story short, there aren’t nearly enough gyms with pools out here in the middle of the freaking desert.
Anyway, that took me back to my very first swimming lessons. One of the fourth-grade teachers at my childhood elementary school taught swimming lessons over the summers, and I ended up learning from her. The entire situation was a bit awkward though, because that teacher’s daughter was in my class (we had the same class and the same teacher from grades 1–3, which is forever when you’re that age, but anyway. All I could think about was how weird it was going to be to be shirtless around some of my classmates.)
I left that school and that city when I was in the fifth grade, and I never came back. I don’t even consider that city the place where…
