One of those strangely vivid yet hard to place memories I have from my childhood is watching an older man— I don’t know who— floating in the water while I was swimming next to him and trying to mimic his movements. I remember watching him expand his chest and exhale while keeping his body afloat like it was the most precise and exacting of arts. No matter how accurately I recreated his technique, I found that it made no difference in the way I floated. But there he remained, bobbing in the water, only his face and stomach breaking the surface.
