I Could Have Loved This Sooner
There’s a particular sting in discovering
a pleasure you could have had years ago.
The air was about seventy degrees, which sounds perfectly civilized until you stand at the edge of an unheated pool. There hadn’t been much sun. I was trying to decide whether to go in, and I knew from the day before that I would be very interested in a hot shower when I got out.
I swim for about an hour four days a week now. It’s one of the things I look forward to most. And somewhere in the middle of becoming a woman who checks how much sun the pool has had, I had a thought that made me a little sad.
I could have loved this sooner.
There’s a particular sting in discovering a pleasure you could have had years ago. I know how to be sad about something I lost. It’s stranger to feel a little sad about something I have, especially when the thing itself is making me so happy. I think about how good it would have felt to get in the water at thirty-eight and have an hour when nobody could ask me where anything was.
There’s no way to know whether I would have loved it then. I might have spent the whole hour thinking about what I should be doing instead. I know that woman, and she could ruin a perfectly good afternoon without anybody’s help.
I also know how often I’ve said, “I’m just not that kind of woman,” with the confidence of somebody reading a fact off a government document. Sometimes all I meant was that I’d never tried it. Sometimes I’d tried it once, in the wrong company, and made a lifelong ruling on the evidence of a single lousy afternoon.
There are things I’d like to give a second afternoon.
I like the idea that at fifty-eight I could take a perfectly ordinary Tuesday and use some of it to find out whether I was wrong about myself. I could give something a few weeks and see if I start looking forward to it. I could get good enough to enjoy it in private. Nobody needs to hear about my progress unless I feel like telling them, and God help us all if I decide to take up the trumpet.
I do wish I could give the woman I was some of those hours in the pool. I’d like to see her climb out and leave a wet trail to the shower. I’d like to hear what she had to say about the whole thing on the way home.
I get to give myself the hour this week. And there are still quite a few things I’ve been very sure about that I’d like to try.
