187. The Swimmers

Every so often when I was a kid, the neighbor across the street would pull me aside and ask, “Did you know that your father swam in the Olympics for Italy?” It was always a source of great hilarity to my father and me, the idea that in our close-knit family in our tiny house, such a major piece of information would be unknown to me.

But it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. My father grew up in Gaeta, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and indeed was a competitive swimmer, a backstroker. As a teenager, he and the Gaeta team would swim the 1.5 kilometers back and forth from one end of the beautiful Serapo beach to the other. My father always spoke fondly of his leopard print bathing suit, “alla Tarzan.”

Apparently, the team was good enough to make the national championship meet in Bologna in the late 1930s, not quite the Olympics, but an accomplishment still. Here is what I know:

1. As Bologna is known for its cold meats, my father expected he could get it cheap at the source. So he went to a macelleria and ordered a dime’s worth of prosciutto. Much to his disappointment, that got him only one paper-thin slice.
2. For participating in the event, my father got a signed certificate from Mussolini. Sadly, that has been lost over time.
3. The Gaeta team lost to a team of city slickers, who had the luxury of practicing in a pool, and knew how to do flip turns. While training in the open sea probably made the Gaeta boys stronger swimmers, they lost valuable seconds at the end of every lap.

Thus ended my father’s formal swimming career, well short of the Olympics. But he always loved the water. I remember him teaching me to swim at the beach in Provincetown when I was four, more with water safety and comfort in mind than grooming me for future competition. But it turns out there is one sense in which I inherited the competitive swimmer gene.

At my town’s swim club, there is a list of those, in order, who swim 1000 laps, starting when the pool opens Memorial Day weekend. The trick of doing well is a bullheaded willingness to swim in all sorts of terrible weather conditions and very cold water. So there I am, every day, forcing myself in; some years, my lips turn blue and I can’t stop shivering for hours afterwards. About 200 make the list over the course of the summer, but I always aim for the top twenty at least. It’s not the same as having a certificate from Mussolini, or even a thin slice of prosciutto, and I’m in no danger of being falsely known for being in the Olympics. But it is personally very gratifying just the same.