I wouldn’t call myself a slave to the work, because the work has brought me joy, but I have been galloping since May while working on a big project and on the fifth of September I suddenly felt my world slow down. I was eating dinner with a film crew on the edge of the lake in McCall and I let myself relax. I felt it in my bones, in my neck muscles and shoulders — something easy passed over me and my work-hardened spirit softened. At some point, after our table had been cleared, I looked out into the night where a floating trampoline sits in the lake and I asked the crew (who are my real life friends) and Robert (he was there, too) what it would cost them to swim out to the trampoline and do a backflip.
Someone said, “A thousand dollars!”
Some other numbers were tossed out and we mulled it over for a time and I spoke the words, “Fifty bucks.”
One of the guys reached into his wallet and pulled out a wad of cash, set it on the the table and we all sat there and looked at the money for a moment.
Then I stood up, climbed over the stone wall that separates the dining patio from the beach and I took off my corduroy pants and button down shirt and waded out into the lake in my underwear beneath the night sky. When I was hip deep, I submerged myself and began to swim, thrilled by the feeling that comes with being in water in darkness in the summertime. When I reached the trampoline, I climbed up the ladder and jumped around for a bit while my friends laughed with delight from shore.
The water was warm. The act felt young and true and free of the responsibilities and seriousness that comes with being thirty-five years old. I swam back to the restaurant, stood dripping on the patio, wrapped in a down jacket, smiling and shivering and Robert said, “Well guys, I guess we’re going swimming.” They, too, left the table, stripped down to their underwear and swam out, eventually doing backflips off the trampoline into the lake.
I never did pocket the fifty dollars that my friend set on the table. The money wasn’t my reason for swimming. Nor did I do it for attention. I did it to make a memory with the hopes that my friends would choose to make a memory, too. I did it to feel young and free and wild. I did it because I knew should not, because it’s not considered ladylike to publicly take off your clothing and swim around in your undies while people eating in a nice restaurant are watching. I did it with the hope that others would follow in my mildly outrageous footsteps and find themselves ageless for a moment. I did it so we could all swim out and feel the night surround us, paddling with childlike strokes towards distant lights.
