Sting

An armada of Portuguese Man o' War blew up on the shore at Palm Beach, interfering with my compulsion to exercise and prompting a reverie.  These jellyfish cousins, which recall the majestic ships colonizing explorers sailed from Europe during the Age of Discovery, are a central preoccupation of my snowbird life in subtropical Florida.  

Swimming became part of my exercise routine more than four decades ago in Sydney.  I'll admit, the Australian eye candy was a strong motivator, but the habit stuck.  Upon return to the U.S. in 1984,  I began swimming a mile--72 laps--in the Olympic size pool at Columbia's Dodge Fitness Center: Speedos and Barracuda goggles became my lunchtime look three times a week except when the gym closed between semesters.  

Summering on Fire Island introduced me to open water swimming in 1988, an activity that fosters absolute respect for the ocean, sustained contemplation and sleep-inducing exhaustion.  The surf could be challenging but I learned to plunge past the breakers to relatively calm waters, always keeping parallel to the shore to protect against being swept away by riptides.  Strong, unpredictable currents can significantly impede progress, so I count my strokes, based on a calculation derived from the Columbia pool, to ensure a consistent workout.  1,850 strokes--split among breast, and left and right side--equals a mile.  At 35, it took 49 minutes; age has increased my current time in the water to nearly an hour.

After swimming the length of the Pines, I walked back on the beach in the opposite direction, hoping my goggles would identify me as Poseidon.   Beach-blanket bitchery soon put an end to that delusion.  I overheard one tanned and muscled hunk ask another "Why is that guy wearing a dog collar?" 

1989

Open water swimming season usually didn't begin until around Independence Day when the water temperature had warmed to the low 70s.  Soon, the arrival of small, ridged, translucent discs made the Atlantic feel like a big vat of bubble tea.  For a couple of weeks, their gentle touch made me flinch with apprehension.  But from August to mid-September, I felt as one with the natural world, occasionally being chased through aquamarine bliss by darting arrows of reflected light.  A local fisherman identified them as pilot fish.  "They probably think you're a whale."  You can call me Moby Dick.

 

During a visit to South Beach in April 1994, I attempted my first ocean swim in Florida's much warmer waters, emerging unrefreshed.  But by the time I bought a retirement home in Lake Worth Beach, I found the less-than-bracing temperature much more appealing.  New discouragements including, once, a shark, became apparent.  After completing one of my first swims past a long line of oceanfront condos, I noticed no one else was in the water on a crowded beach where my friend Christine sat, looking a little bit shaken.  "Didn't you hear the lifeguard whistling?" she demanded.  I hadn't.  She pointed to a red flag imprinted with the outline of a shark.

Lifeguards, on duty from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., use chalk boards to provide daily updates on beach conditions beneath red, purple, yellow and green flags.  I quickly realized that if I always waited for green flags, swimming would become an infrequent activity.  Yellow and purple flags flew most often, the latter indicating dangerous marine life, including Man o' War and common jellyfish.  Encountering the latter would be more yucky than painful.

At first, I assumed the lifeguards visually inspected the beach for the distinctive presence of Man o' War  and abided by their warnings.  But after seeing no small blue sails on multiple occasions, I asked a lifeguard how he and his colleagues made their determination.  "Mostly wind direction," he answered.  "Southeasterly winds blow them in off the ocean."

Still, fear of the unknown lingered.  Oddly enough, the pandemic helped me overcome it.  City officials closed the beach for much of April 2020.  No flags flew.  To avoid detection, I began swimming just before dawn.  I eventually got stung but mildly enough that I didn't get out of the water.  Once I did, the burning sensation on my forearm mostly had subsided.  On a one-to-ten scale, I would rate it about a six.

By the time the beach re-opened, the flags had faded into overprotective-mother (or fear-of-litigation) territory.  Of course that's when I experienced my first bad sting.  Half my face felt like it was on fire for more than an hour but I finished swimming because I reasoned it wouldn't burn any less out of water.  The venom raised welts on my upper body, too, shocking visible in the bathroom mirror.

Contact with the tentacles, not the sails (which propel the siphonophorae), that cause the sting.  Much thinner than twine, they can be several feet long, increasing the potential for incapacitating prey and painfully drifting across people. And not only swimmers:  just ask anyone who's ever stepped on one barefoot.  

They really are marvels of nature but I spend far too much time obsessing about them.

To swim or not to swim:  that is the question.

Lucy by the Sea (4*)

A different kind of pandemic novel than Day, but the one to read if realism inflected with kindness and wisdom is your thing.  

Elizabeth Strout nails the early uncertainty in the weeks and months after March 2020 and persuasively navigates Lucy's gradual, difficult transition from city to country mouse without giving short shrift to either environment, emotionally or politically.  She writes movingly of the importance of human touch within and without family while stoically acknowledging “We are alone in these things we suffer."  

In spite of the loss and illness Lucy experiences, mostly second-hand, her relentless self-examination and her ex-husband's protectiveness believably revive their long dormant need for one another.  As a result, their family becomes unexpectedly whole again, a hope that Lucy seemingly put to rest in Oh William!, Strout's previous novel, and her relationship with her daughters deepens and finally pushes aside the demons of her own upbringing.  

Life keeps throwing us curve balls and nobody captures them more empathically than Strout.

 

Day (5+*)

 

What makes a novel a masterpiece?  For me, it's story, character, writing, resonance and epiphany, the rarest of birds.  Michael Cunningham, who was inspired by Virginia Woolf to write The Hours, once again adds literary allusion to his latest work, and manages to tie it all together with a . . . wait for it: healing use of social media.  

In other words, Day is the real thing.

First the inspired structure and very slight but absolutely compelling story: 

Cunningham takes snapshots of April 5th in three successive years, including 2020 smack dab in the middle.  Although he never mentions covid, you know pretty much know where he's going with a quick glance at the table of contents alone.  

Tightly wound Isabel is married to Dan, a wanna-be rock star in recovery who continues to bleach his hair.  She's the breadwinner, and he's the house husband who writes songs when he's not taking care of their two children, who are as closely observed as the adults. Robbie, Isabel's underachieving gay brother, lives upstairs with the Brooklyn family, although he's about to vacate so ten-year-old Nathan and Violet, half his age, finally can have separate bedrooms. Dan's brother Gareth, a sculptor, has donated the sperm to father baby Odin with his friend Chess, an academic feminist with regrets.

Character (oddly enough, heterosexual character) is Cunningham's wheelhouse.

Isabel herself is insufficiently dramatic—taciturn, more than a little coldhearted, someone who shops at the farm market in hope of becoming more convincingly the kind of person who shops at the farm market, the kind of person who’s at home among all the women and men who’ve brought their own bags (she herself never remembers), who are jovial and self-satisfied, unconcerned about themselves as members of the newly rural rich, hybrids of farmer and financier, who speak as knowledgeably about the first of the fiddlehead ferns as they do about net worth and capital gains.

Now for the writing, which buoyed me along even in the slow, quotidian first section.

There’s a song inside the song. It isn’t beautiful, it isn’t only beautiful, though it contains beauty like a plum contains its stone. It’s the song that leaves nothing out. It’s a lament and an aria. It’s that old ditty about Frosted Flakes and it’s an anthem to the perfume your mother wore when you were a child. It’s a hymn sung by girls with candles in paper cups, it’s the cry of the rabbit when your father slit its throat, it’s the sound of your wife whispering in a dream that’s not about you.

I can't recall many fully realized "guncles" in fiction, but Nathan's and especially Violet's love for Robbie resonated with my own experience, if mostly on holdiays.

Robbie will be back soon, and when he’s back, the world will not only make more sense, it’ll be more thoroughly infused with jokes and hope, with the sparkling bounty, the bigheartedness, Robbie took with him when he went away.

And now for the epiphany that brought me to tears:  Isabel observes how her brother's friendship with Dan at an early age--somewhat scarily, she marries Dan for that reason before the internet provides Robbie and her with a technical alternative to their semi-incestuous vibe--gave him the confidence to become himself.  Something similarly non-sexual happened to me during college when rooming with an Olympic athlete whose aura of cool validated my own emerging personality.  It's something I never had considered prior to reading Day but it really struck a nerve nearly 50 years after the fact.

I just wish I hadn't read The Mill and the Floss.  It's a terrific spoiler.  Move over Virginia.  Michael has moved on to George, acquitting himself equally well.