April
I spent most of the first two weeks of April of this year in a state I described to a friend as “No Feelings Only Disco.” It had all been a bit much, traveling to New York, and seeing a bunch of people, and getting the second dose of the vaccine, and spring arriving, and and and. So I was listening to a lot of ABBA and dancing around my apartment and on the street while walking my dog and in the car. No Feelings. Only Disco. I know how to do the Hustle now.
This mania has followed me most of the pandemic, my energy easily summonable with just a few bars of music. At some point in the spring, a friend let me know that the public pool near my apartment in Chicago had reopened. I pumped my fist and booked a slot for the next day. I didn’t sleep much that night. I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in a few weeks — a long time for us — and we stayed up / out late, talking mostly about how if any of the things happening in our lives — even and especially the good things — had been shown to us on a menu, we probably wouldn’t have chosen them. I got home late, and sort of wired, and I was still thinking about a strange phone call I’d gotten earlier that day, and then I ended up staying out walking my dog — sleep was elusive.
I went to the pool and teared up walking through halls I’d walked possibly hundreds of times. After some warm-up laps, I dove underwater and swam from one end of the pool to the other until I couldn’t anymore. When I stopped, finally, forty minutes later, there was only one thing in my head: “we’re the heirs to the glimmering world,” from The National’s “The Geese of Beverly Road.”
September
I live near Beverley Road now, in Brooklyn. Someone told me once that this is the street the song is about. I take the subway north from the Beverley Road station frequently. I hear Matt Berninger’s voice in my head every time: hey, love, we’ll get away with it.
I swim here, too. The Y is a ten-minute bike ride from my house, twenty minutes on the train, and the lap swim hours are all day every day, no reservations needed. Unlike at my old pool, the locker rooms are nice. There are shower stalls, non-slip pads on the floor; there’s a sauna. Like at my old pool, there are nosy old ladies who talk to me while I’m naked, complain about the facilities, make a fuss over nothing. I love these ladies; they are like children: whatever is in front of them is the most important, most pressing matter.
My swimsuit is too big. I need a new one. It doesn’t matter. I get in the water, and I swim. It’s the same, here, in Chicago, wherever. An arm after an arm after an arm until the wall approaches, then flip, land, push. In the pool as in life, wherever I go, there I am. It is not effortless. It is a pleasure of an effort.
This is one of a few pieces on The National. You can read the other ones here, here, and here.