Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by December 1, 2015, for consideration for the June 2016 issue.

My home town didn’t have a swimming pool, but the larger town across the river did. And each summer, for six weeks in the mornings, they offered swimming lessons.

The swimming pool was a mile and a half from my house. The summer after I completed first grade, I set out at 9 a.m. each weekday morning with three kids from the house across the street to walk to the pool for our 10 a.m. lessons. Charley, the oldest, was responsible for getting the rest of us–me, his sister Margaret, my age, and his brother Bobby, a year younger than Margaret–to lessons on time. We carried our bathing suits rolled up in a single bath towel stuffed into an empty plastic bread bag with a sandwich for lunch, Charley leading the way and the three of us younger kids following behind.

Margaret, Bobby, and I were in the Red Cross Beginners level class. Charley, three years older, was in either the Intermediate or Swimmers level. He didn’t spend any time with us once we arrived at the pool. The others in his class didn’t have younger children to watch out for. He wanted to spend time with his peers. He waited for us outside the changing room at the end of the lessons, staying as far away from us as he could get away with before we headed homeward.

I was afraid to put my face in the water. Until I could, I would never pass the Red Cross Beginners level swimming lessons. I could do everything else, including jumping into the pool from the edge, completely immersing myself in water for the length of time it took to bounce back up to the surface. But I panicked whenever I put my face into the water.

I practiced at home, filling the bathroom sink with water and then forcing myself to put my face into it. But instead of becoming comfortable, I held my breath for as long as I could until I pulled away from the sink, gasping for air.

I repeated the Beginners course each year for four more years, each year with younger and smaller children around me than the year before. By the time I completed fifth grade, I was embarrassed to be so much older than the others in my class. Especially since I already knew how to dog paddle and tread water; they didn’t require putting my face into water. I could even float on my back, completely relaxed with hands resting on my belly. But I couldn’t float on my stomach with my face in the water.

I don’t recall if I found a way to get over my fear long enough to keep my face in the water in order to pass or if the instructor just decided I needed to move on, even without overcoming my fear. I passed that year, finally advancing to the Intermediate class the following year.

By the time I reached the Intermediate level, my hometown had built a pool just half a mile from my house. I spent mornings, afternoons, and evenings at that pool every summer, even challenging myself one summer to swim laps at the five-foot stretch of the pool until I had swum a mile.  But I still didn’t put my face in the water.

 

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

I submitted this piece for consideration for the March 2015 issue, though it wasn’t selected.

My first love was far from traditional. My love wasn’t a person–a boy or a girl with the power to cause my heart to leap for joy–or a pet with the power to love me back. My first love was a place, a place I discovered at the bottom of a wooden trunk in the basement of my parents’ first house, a place so unlike what surrounded me every day in my Midwestern hometown, where everyone was either Scandinavian or Catholic.

The vision of my special place rose from the trunk attached to a purple silk kimono my father brought back from Japan at the end of World War II. Dad hadn’t been a soldier; he joined the Merchant Marines, encouraged by his uncle Bill’s stories of the adventures he would have. At the time, service with the Merchant Marines wasn’t considered military experience, but it brought Dad into the war nonetheless as the ships on which he sailed brought supplies and provisions to the military ships in the Pacific theater. His service extended beyond the end of the war, giving him the opportunity to step on the shores of one of our country’s then greatest enemies–Japan. And he brought back trinkets including the purple kimono that captured my preschooler’s attention so completely. I wanted to know everything about this place that I only knew was far away and very different.

It was 25 years later that I finally met my first love. After having lived and worked for two years in another very foreign place–Iran–I traveled home by heading east so I could stop for a few days in Japan. Four days were all I had, and by the end of them my jaws ached from continuously smiling from ear to ear. My love was everything I had hoped for.

But it took another 15 years to realize what a gift my parents had given me by allowing me to fall in love with this place. Then I was living on the east coast where I worked for the U.S. Department of State. My parents came for a visit and while we walked on the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol building, a Japanese tourist stopped my father to ask for directions. When Dad rejoined us after having pointed the way, he remarked that he wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told him 40 years earlier that he would some day have a conversation with someone from Japan in the capital of our country. And it hit me then that while I was falling in love with Japan, my parents and their friends hadn’t yet gotten over the losses they held my first love responsible for.

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by September 1, 2015, for consideration for the March 2016 issue.

I managed to get through ten years as an independent adult without owning a single piece of furniture. I had always thought the first piece of furniture I would have to buy would be a bed. For many years I was pleased to have avoided that purchase. In my mind, not owning furniture was synonymous with being independent, being able to make my own way through the world, taking advantage of what serendipity offered. But the furniture purchase that affected me most was when I bought my first sofa.

My first apartment–while I was still a college student in my Minnesota hometown–was furnished. My hometown was a college town. The influx of students who attended one of the three colleges in the area demanded temporary quarters only nine months of the year. Most apartments were therefore furnished.

After graduation, I moved from Minnesota to Berkeley, California, where my first apartment again was furnished. Five months later, I moved in with an older woman who had recently lost her husband. She was confined to a wheelchair and didn’t like the idea of living alone. I slept in her fully furnished spare bedroom. That arrangement didn’t work out for long. By the time I knew I had to move again, I had arranged to borrow furniture from the church I worked at when I found my first unfurnished apartment.

Three years later, I moved across the San Francisco Bay to attend graduate school at San Francisco State University. My first apartment in the city was a studio that had been servants’ quarters a few decades earlier. Furnished again. In the next three years, I had three different roommates and lived in four different apartments. Each time, a roommate had all the furniture we needed, including a spare bed for me.

During all this time, I was able to pack up everything I owned into my 1969 VW bug. It felt liberating to be that free–to be able to pick up and move if something attractive enough to entice me came along, or if something disastrous encouraged me to move on.

My next two moves were overseas, first to Iran and then to Romania, where my sponsoring organization provided a place to live and the furniture needed to fill it. Even when I returned to the United States, to Illinois, I was able to find a furnished apartment just down the street from my first full-time teaching position back home.

But in 1979, ten years after I graduated from college, I bought a sofa–a brand new, three-piece sectional, big enough for two people to sleep on if one of the two curled up all through the night.

It was a symbol of my having truly entered adulthood. I no longer needed to shop at thrift stores or accept hand-me-downs from friends. It should have been a reason to celebrate.

But it also represented the end of my peripatetic lifestyle. As the first piece of furniture I owned that I couldn’t disassemble and somehow cram into a vehicle, it felt more like a millstone around my neck than a certificate of passage into adulthood.