Roots and Reflections

Seventy-eight years old, and I still can't resist the temptation. That swimming pool in the backyard—my grandson James calls it 'the old watering hole'—calls to me every morning like it did when I was twelve. The water feels different now. Softer somehow, or maybe my skin's just grown thin enough to appreciate the gentleness of it.

I remember teaching James to swim in this very pool, thirty years ago. He'd cling to my neck like a frightened monkey, certain the deep end would swallow him whole. 'You have to trust the water,' I told him, the same words my father spoke to me at Lake Michigan in 1952. We float, I suppose, on the same wisdom our ancestors floated upon.

Baseball was different then. No cable television, no instant replays, no million-dollar salaries. We'd gather around the radio, my father and I, while my mother shucked corn in the kitchen. The White Sox, the Cubs—it didn't matter which team you loved, as long as you loved something with your whole heart. Now James has his satellite packages and his high-definition screens, but he still drives over every Sunday to watch the game with me on my old console TV. Some traditions deserve to be preserved like family photographs.

Speaking of photographs, I have one tucked in my wallet—black and white, grainy as all get-out. There's my father, standing in his victory garden during the war, holding up a bunch of spinach like it was a trophy. 'Good for the blood,' he'd say, though I think he just loved surprising people with something green in a world that had gone mostly gray. I grow spinach now, in the garden patch beside the garage. James's daughter Lily helps me harvest it. She makes faces every time she tries it, but she keeps coming back to help anyway. That's the thing about family—we keep showing up, even when the taste is bitter.

The water in the pool ripples in the breeze. Lily will be here soon with her own children—my great-grandchildren, would you believe it?—for swimming lessons. I'll teach them to float, to trust the water, to know that some things hold you up when you're ready to let go. The cable will bring us the baseball game afterward. And maybe, just maybe, we'll harvest some spinach for dinner, though I expect most of it will end up in the compost heap behind the garage.

Somehow, that seems perfect. Life isn't about what we keep, after all. It's about what passes through us—what we swim through, what we grow, what we love—and how gently we learn to float upon it all.