The Water Was Very Cold Today
And we were in it for a pretty long time
I swim with this one person all the time. She is ten years older than me, fourteen if you’re counting, and I think people mostly are. She grew up in San Francisco and Marin, notice I did not say the Bay Area, because I find that term almost worthless. Anyway, she’s a Northern Californian for sure, but her parents were from the east coast, so she understands me, which is a nice way of saying she thinks it’s funny the way I am a jerk. She is a writer, mostly of poetry, and is very famous in our town. Even at the lake, where it is my strong feeling people should be occupied with either getting ready to swim, swimming, or toweling off, people are always gunning to talk to her.
Many of them are nice enough to me, but some regard me as a kind of pest. “Who are you to have captured this woman’s attention?” is a vibe I can get. Sometimes I stare people down. “We’re trying to swim here, stop asking questions about poetry, a genre I can barely tolerate,” is the vibe I try to give off in these situations, and I think I do it well.
My friend writes pretty good poems, but they’re still poems. I like prose much better, and once we have gotten ourselves into the horribly cold water, and stopped swearing about how cold it is, I try to gently steer her toward producing more of it.
