Synopsis
At age forty-four, Penelope Niven was at a turning point in her life. In need of a change for both body and spirit, she decided to learn how to swim. While discovering the restorative effect of the water, she also began to notice that the lessons she was learning in the pool drew remarkable parallels with the lessons of life. The way in which you first get into the water, for example, is similar to trying anything new-you can jump in feet first, or dive in headfirst, but first you have to have some idea of what you're actually getting into. From floating to treading water, forward strokes to the backstroke, Swimming Lessons combines the familiar lessons of swimming with personal anecdotes and apt observations to stirring effect. Sensible, touching, and personal, this appealing book will be invaluable to any reader facing a life change or simply looking for a little bit of inspiration.
A Harvest Original
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
PENELOPE NIVEN (1939-2014) devoted fourteen years to organizing Carl Sandburg's papers, forming the framework for her 1991 biography of the poet. A fellow of American Literature from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Niven founded and directed the Carl Sandburg Oral History Project for the National Park Service and the University of Illinois Library.
From the Back Cover
This is not just a book about learning to swim.
It is a book about learning to live.
It is a book about learning to live.
From the Inside Flap
At age forty-four, author Penelope Niven was at a crossroads: she felt that her life was slipping by with long-held dreams still unrealized. In desperate need of a change for both body and spirit, she decided to face her fears and learn how to swim. Little did she know what a profound effect those swimming lessons would have. For as Niven relished in the healing powers of water, she also discovered something very surprising: each skill she learned in the pool offered a striking parallel in how to live.
Floating, treading water, or swimming with all your might: these are simple yet eloquent metaphors for stages we all face in life. It can be more dangerous to dive into shallow water-to simply settle for easy and comfortable choices-than to plunge into the depths of the unknown. And sometimes, in life as in swimming, you cannot breathe when you want to, you simply have to take a breath when you can.
In Swimming Lessons, Penelope Niven shares these and other remarkable insights, illustrated with intimate stories, as well as charming and hilarious anecdotes. Beautifully written, filled with heartfelt lessons shared with a keen dose of humor and Southern charm, this is a book for anyone facing a life change or simply looking for a bit of inspiration.
Reviews
Biographer Niven uses her later-in-life swim training as a metaphor to structure this affectionate, if sometimes unfocused, rulebook for living. "As I found myself middle-aged and simultaneously being outfitted with braces and bifocals," she writes, "it came to me that I had nothing to lose" by learning to swim. Starting from simply getting into the water—one can jump in feet first, dive headlong or tentatively slide in, she notes—and moving on to floating, swim strokes and, finally, swimming alone and in the ocean, the author discovered that modern life and swimming hold parallel lessons. Nivens interweaves her newfound wisdom with words from her favorite writers and biographical subjects (Carl Sandburg, Thorton Wilder), her upbringing in tiny Waxhaw, North Carolina, and her subsequent years as a wife, mother, divorcée and writer who only signed her first book contract in her 40s. Since overcoming her anxieties about water led her to simultaneously dive into her dream of writing, she includes intriguing writing prompts following each chapter. Many of her anecdotes are enjoyable reading, such as her parents’ hospital bed feud over whether to be cremated or buried, or Aunt Geneva Walkup Rone’s belief in a world map that contains only four places: "Heaven. Hell. Waxhaw. And Off Somewhere." Niven is occasionally over-jubilant in celebrating her daughter’s insights or her father’s dignity and good humor; a few well-chosen quotes would do better than the constant adoration. Still, the book, like Niven’s preferred backstroke, "forces the vision upward" and will inspire readers. With b&w illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This inspirational collection of musings draws significant parallels between learning to swim and facing a variety of challenging life situations. Learning to swim at age 44, Niven was immediately struck by the "profound life lessons embodied in the principles of swimming." Initially getting into the water is akin to undertaking any new endeavor, from a new job to a new marriage; learning to float in the water is as necessary and fulfilling as learning to open yourself up to joy, trust, and hope. As she explores the inherent similarities between life and swimming, she offers some practical self-help tips for those struggling to navigate the often-turbulent waters of everyday life. This delightfully original primer is recommended for those attempting to tread water both in and out of the pool. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I. Getting in the Water
Getting in the water is easy: Just walk to the edge and jump in, or slide in, feet first. You can also fall in the water face first, or dive in smoothly, with ever-growing confidence and skill.
WHEN SHE WAS FOURTEEN and I was forty-four, my daughter, Jennifer, taught me to swim. Jennifer had just finished wearing braces on her teeth, and, thanks to a lower jaw problem, I had just begun. Dire medical necessity, not vanity, mandated that I wear those braces just as I was struggling to cope with menopause, my daughter's puberty, and my husband's midlife crisis. Overwhelmed by these circumstances, I needed diversion, distraction-escape.
I had grown up a swimming illiterate, terrified of the water. Now I was also terrified of wearing braces on my teeth at such a preposterous age, and of seeing my life slip by with some long held dreams unrealized. There was nothing I could do about the braces except endure and survive. But, it occurred to me, I could take charge of the dreams.
Many of my dreams had come true, especially my wife and mother dreams, but others haunted me. I had always wanted to write, to travel, to make a lasting, positive difference in the world around me. Some of my more whimsical dreams were pinned to childhood heroes-Isaac Stern, for instance. I love music, and, although I play the piano and the organ, I had dreamed of playing the violin like Isaac Stern. Then there was the Ginger Rogers dream. I have danced the cha-cha, the waltz, the Texas two-step, and the jitterbug, but I had always dreamed of swirling across a stage like Ginger Rogers, ballroom dancing, ballet dancing, tap dancing, even clog dancing my way to the stars. And I used to dream of swimming like Esther Williams, "The world's most famous and glamorous swimming star," as she was described on the cover of her 1957 book, Get in the Swim. I was a senior in high school in 1957, not daring to aspire to fame or glamour. I just wanted to know how to swim so I wouldn't have to sit forlornly on the edge of the pool.
People usually learn to swim, tap dance, or play the violin when they are young. But as I found myself middle-aged and simultaneously being outfitted with braces and bifocals, it came to me that I had nothing to lose. I might as well be twelve again. This could be my chance, perhaps my last chance, to go after some of those childhood dreams-to learn, however belatedly, to fiddle, tap dance, and swim. As much as I revered Isaac Stern and Ginger Rogers, I gravitated toward Esther Williams. I decided to take those long-deferred swimming lessons.
I grew up in Waxhaw, North Carolina, a very small town where there was no swimming pool. Swimming lessons, if there were any, consisted of being thrown by a well-meaning parent into a murky pond or into the deepest pools of Twelve Mile Creek.
"Swim," came the order from the safety of shore. "Now, swim!"
The words echoed in the ears of frightened children as they fought against the mysterious power of the water, simultaneously learning to fear the water and to distrust the adults in their lives. A child can no more swim on command than she can speak or read or play the violin or stop being afraid of the dark. Nevertheless, countless desperate children have survived that abrupt abandonment to water over their heads. Some swallow fear along with muddy pond water, and muster a clumsy dog paddle in the struggle toward the shore. Some flounder and have to be rescued. Some never get into the water again. Others learn to swim by the book. Still others take to swimming in spite of everything, creating unorthodox breast strokes, swimming ever after with their untutored heads held defiantly upright in the air.
Fortunately, my parents did not throw me into the languid depths of Twelve Mile Creek or the swampy clutches of Massey's Pond, but neither was I taught to swim in a proper swimming pool, officiated over by trained instructors.
Our family had lived briefly in Charlotte, a city twenty-six miles away, where there were swimming pools aplenty. But there was also the polio epidemic, and for one endless summer we were confined to our dead-end block of Sedgefield Drive with only ourselves and a handful of other children for company. We could see, tantalizingly close, a throng of other children. Their block was longer and there were more children to play with, but we had woods, and they didn't. And all the city swimming pools were closed that summer against the scourge of polio.
Later, we moved back to Waxhaw where I finished elementary school, junior high school, and high school without learning to swim. During my senior year in college, with two other classmates, I spent humiliating hours in the shallow end of the pool at the Greensboro, North Carolina, YWCA, trying to pass the swimming requirement upon which my graduation was conditional. Never mind that I was about to graduate magna cum laude. All that work would count for nothing if I couldn't swim the required distance in the pool. I managed somehow to survive the academic equivalent of being hurled into Twelve Mile Creek.
Paradoxically, I grew up to be a creature who loved water even though I feared it mightily. From childhood I have had a passion for the ocean. Our family spent every summer vacation at the South Carolina shore. During our first summer at Cherry Grove Beach, I jumped waves, holding fast to my father's hand. The salt water transformed my straight brown hair into tangled curls, and my hair has been curly ever since.
More important, from childhood until now, time at the ocean has been essential to the ongoing nourishment of my soul. For even a short time each year, I need to sleep to the rhythm of the sea and climb back into its salty womb in order to recalibrate my interior life. I crave the sensuous, primal energy of the ocean, its vast glory of light and power. I love its deep, briny music and its artifacts: crusty shells; bleached wood; ribbons of seaweed; the warm, limpid pools the tide leaves in the breast of the shore. But I used to regard the ocean with an innate dread, and I did not wade far into its depths. I still go vertically, not horizontally, into the salt water, my feet burrowing into the warm sand at the edge. I love the water lapping at my ankles or breaking at my knees, but terror still overtakes me if I venture by mistake into currents more than waist deep. I am still trying to learn to swim in the ocean.
It was ironic, then, that my husband should have been a sailor, the grandson of a landlocked mountain blacksmith, inheriting from some distant ancestor a manic love for the sea. He had a passion for salty sails, for elegant wooden sailboats heeling almost horizontally into the wind and water of the Chesapeake Bay. I trusted him. If I needed to be rescued from the water I believed I could count on him to see to it. We sailed for many years without mishap.
When Jennifer was old enough, we provided for her aquatic well-being. At the age of three, she started real swimming lessons in a real swimming pool. Before she could read, she was a good swimmer. It was much later, when she was a teenager, that my daughter reciprocated and taught me to swim. When a swimming instructor at the college nearby announced a class for adults who absolutely could not swim and were terrified of the water, I knew my opportunity had come. There were four of us trembling in the shallow end of the Olympic-sized pool for that first lesson. Our instructor was the epitome of patience. He did his best, but soon there were only two of us.
I brought all my latent and conscious fears with me into the shallow end of that pool. You would have thought that I had, indeed, some far distant summer day in Waxhaw, been flung headlong into Twelve Mile Creek or cast to sharks in Massey's Pond. I dreaded each swimming lesson and had to be made to go. Jennifer took my discipline in hand, secretly, I suspect, vindicating every piano lesson, every reluctant day at school, every household chore and doctor's visit I had exacted of her in the fourteen years of her life.
"Maybe it would help if you practice," Jennifer suggested one day. "I'll go with you."
Gratefully, I accompanied my daughter to the pool, urging her to let me stay in the shallow end, where my feet could, on a moment's whim, connect with the reassurance of the concrete floor. Patiently Jennifer coaxed me to demonstrate what I had been trying to learn in the humiliating ordeal of my swimming class. "Floating on my back," I told her in despair. "That's only the first step, and I can't even do that."
"It's almost impossible to sink, Mom," she reassured me.
"That's what you all say," I grumbled. "Ninety-seven percent of people can float. I happen to be one of the 3 percent who can't."
"Of course you can, if you really try and if you really want to," she said with some relish. This was a line I had used with her as she faced new challenges. "Try."
I tried. Arms turning to lead and legs kicking wildly, I foundered and sank to the bottom. Eyes, ears, and nose full of water, I prepared myself to drown. I remember thinking that my death would be much harder on my husband and my child than on me. I wouldn't be around to know about it but they would have to cope with it, call the rest of the family, plan the funeral, and then manage to live without me. It would serve them right. But Jennifer came to the rescue, of course, and insisted that I try again. "Back on the horse, Mom. I'll help you, and I'll be right here," she said soothingly.
During the next half hour she eased me into the pool and supported me as I lay on my back. She pulled and pushed me gently through the water until I got the feel of it. Now and then I would jerk my arms or break into a clumsy kick and begin to sink to the bottom again.
"No, Mom," she'd reprove. "Relax. Just give yourself up to the power of the water."
My daughter, always mature for her years, had made one of the most profound observations I have ever heard about swimming or about living: "I don't understand it myself," she said, "but there is this mysterious power in the water. If you fight against it, you sink every time. If you give yourself up to it, it supports you. You have to learn to trust the power of the water."
Instinctively, she understood an ancient metaphor for faith, as well as the metaphysics and the symbolism of water. As long ago as 3000 B.C., the Sumerians discovered that water can heal. In India, as early as 2000 B.C., earth, air, fire, and water were deemed the basic elements of the material universe and the concept spread throughout the world. To religious people since the beginning of time, water has been sacred, in some views the very source of life itself. Three quarters of the earth's vast surface is dominated by oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, creeks, and springs. And always, everywhere, the growing embryo is cradled in the watery womb.
In that intimidating swimming pool, my daughter taught me how to swim and, in the process, how better to live my life. You do have to learn to trust the power of the water, the power that beats in the mysterious heart of life; as philosophers as various as Trismegistus, Giordano Bruno, and Blaise Pascal have said-the power whose center is everywhere. That is the fundamental lesson in swimming, in writing, in loving, in living-probably even in dying.
But before you can fully trust the power of the water, or your own powers in the water, you have to jump in or fall in or dive in. You have to get wet. There has to be a first time.
JUST AS I HAD dabbled my feet in swimming pools and oceans, I dabbled in writing the first three decades of my life. Writing was my oldest dream, spun out of a love of words before I could even read them or shape them with a pencil-the words I heard my elders speak and sing, the words they read to me. I remember how words looked before I could decipher their geometry-black shapes laid out in their tidy mystery on the pages of storybooks, the Methodist hymnal, or the long columns of the daily newspaper. I was a child in those years before public school kindergartens or television, much less Sesame Street, that avenue to precocious recognition of the cryptograms of language.
When I was five, I stood between my parents in the Methodist church one Sunday morning, holding my own hymnal and pretending I could read the words of a song I knew by heart. Like the grownups around me, I glanced down at the words and up again. Suddenly, somewhere along about the third verse, I knew with absolute certainty that someday soon, I would be able to read. Then, I told myself, I would become a writer.
After church that day, thrilled with my discovery, I decided I couldn't wait until I started to school. I needed to learn to write now. There was no time to waste. I found paper and a pencil and a favorite storybook, and sat down at the kitchen table to teach myself to write the letters of the alphabet. Once I mastered them, I thought, I would be well on my way to being a writer. When my parents saw what I was up to, they listened patiently to my explanation, and began to give me writing lessons. I was enchanted.
We started with my full name: Penelope Ellen Niven. I am named for my mother's mother, Penelope, and my father's mother, Ellen. It delighted me to learn that my name had eighteen letters, and six of them were E's. E was the letter I could write first, and best, and P came next. (Recently I found the old dictionary the family used during my childhood; boldly inscribed inside its cover is the letter P-awkward and misshapen, but a P, no doubt about it.) My parents taught me block letters, and then I wanted to learn to write cursive script. I was dazzled by my newknowledge. Now I knew these letters-their names and sounds. With my own hands I could write them on paper, unlocking an ancient, mysterious code. Suddenly I could assemble the letters into words on the page, and decipher the words other people had written in the books I loved.
Copyright © 2004 by Penelope Niven
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Getting in the water is easy: Just walk to the edge and jump in, or slide in, feet first. You can also fall in the water face first, or dive in smoothly, with ever-growing confidence and skill.
WHEN SHE WAS FOURTEEN and I was forty-four, my daughter, Jennifer, taught me to swim. Jennifer had just finished wearing braces on her teeth, and, thanks to a lower jaw problem, I had just begun. Dire medical necessity, not vanity, mandated that I wear those braces just as I was struggling to cope with menopause, my daughter's puberty, and my husband's midlife crisis. Overwhelmed by these circumstances, I needed diversion, distraction-escape.
I had grown up a swimming illiterate, terrified of the water. Now I was also terrified of wearing braces on my teeth at such a preposterous age, and of seeing my life slip by with some long held dreams unrealized. There was nothing I could do about the braces except endure and survive. But, it occurred to me, I could take charge of the dreams.
Many of my dreams had come true, especially my wife and mother dreams, but others haunted me. I had always wanted to write, to travel, to make a lasting, positive difference in the world around me. Some of my more whimsical dreams were pinned to childhood heroes-Isaac Stern, for instance. I love music, and, although I play the piano and the organ, I had dreamed of playing the violin like Isaac Stern. Then there was the Ginger Rogers dream. I have danced the cha-cha, the waltz, the Texas two-step, and the jitterbug, but I had always dreamed of swirling across a stage like Ginger Rogers, ballroom dancing, ballet dancing, tap dancing, even clog dancing my way to the stars. And I used to dream of swimming like Esther Williams, "The world's most famous and glamorous swimming star," as she was described on the cover of her 1957 book, Get in the Swim. I was a senior in high school in 1957, not daring to aspire to fame or glamour. I just wanted to know how to swim so I wouldn't have to sit forlornly on the edge of the pool.
People usually learn to swim, tap dance, or play the violin when they are young. But as I found myself middle-aged and simultaneously being outfitted with braces and bifocals, it came to me that I had nothing to lose. I might as well be twelve again. This could be my chance, perhaps my last chance, to go after some of those childhood dreams-to learn, however belatedly, to fiddle, tap dance, and swim. As much as I revered Isaac Stern and Ginger Rogers, I gravitated toward Esther Williams. I decided to take those long-deferred swimming lessons.
I grew up in Waxhaw, North Carolina, a very small town where there was no swimming pool. Swimming lessons, if there were any, consisted of being thrown by a well-meaning parent into a murky pond or into the deepest pools of Twelve Mile Creek.
"Swim," came the order from the safety of shore. "Now, swim!"
The words echoed in the ears of frightened children as they fought against the mysterious power of the water, simultaneously learning to fear the water and to distrust the adults in their lives. A child can no more swim on command than she can speak or read or play the violin or stop being afraid of the dark. Nevertheless, countless desperate children have survived that abrupt abandonment to water over their heads. Some swallow fear along with muddy pond water, and muster a clumsy dog paddle in the struggle toward the shore. Some flounder and have to be rescued. Some never get into the water again. Others learn to swim by the book. Still others take to swimming in spite of everything, creating unorthodox breast strokes, swimming ever after with their untutored heads held defiantly upright in the air.
Fortunately, my parents did not throw me into the languid depths of Twelve Mile Creek or the swampy clutches of Massey's Pond, but neither was I taught to swim in a proper swimming pool, officiated over by trained instructors.
Our family had lived briefly in Charlotte, a city twenty-six miles away, where there were swimming pools aplenty. But there was also the polio epidemic, and for one endless summer we were confined to our dead-end block of Sedgefield Drive with only ourselves and a handful of other children for company. We could see, tantalizingly close, a throng of other children. Their block was longer and there were more children to play with, but we had woods, and they didn't. And all the city swimming pools were closed that summer against the scourge of polio.
Later, we moved back to Waxhaw where I finished elementary school, junior high school, and high school without learning to swim. During my senior year in college, with two other classmates, I spent humiliating hours in the shallow end of the pool at the Greensboro, North Carolina, YWCA, trying to pass the swimming requirement upon which my graduation was conditional. Never mind that I was about to graduate magna cum laude. All that work would count for nothing if I couldn't swim the required distance in the pool. I managed somehow to survive the academic equivalent of being hurled into Twelve Mile Creek.
Paradoxically, I grew up to be a creature who loved water even though I feared it mightily. From childhood I have had a passion for the ocean. Our family spent every summer vacation at the South Carolina shore. During our first summer at Cherry Grove Beach, I jumped waves, holding fast to my father's hand. The salt water transformed my straight brown hair into tangled curls, and my hair has been curly ever since.
More important, from childhood until now, time at the ocean has been essential to the ongoing nourishment of my soul. For even a short time each year, I need to sleep to the rhythm of the sea and climb back into its salty womb in order to recalibrate my interior life. I crave the sensuous, primal energy of the ocean, its vast glory of light and power. I love its deep, briny music and its artifacts: crusty shells; bleached wood; ribbons of seaweed; the warm, limpid pools the tide leaves in the breast of the shore. But I used to regard the ocean with an innate dread, and I did not wade far into its depths. I still go vertically, not horizontally, into the salt water, my feet burrowing into the warm sand at the edge. I love the water lapping at my ankles or breaking at my knees, but terror still overtakes me if I venture by mistake into currents more than waist deep. I am still trying to learn to swim in the ocean.
It was ironic, then, that my husband should have been a sailor, the grandson of a landlocked mountain blacksmith, inheriting from some distant ancestor a manic love for the sea. He had a passion for salty sails, for elegant wooden sailboats heeling almost horizontally into the wind and water of the Chesapeake Bay. I trusted him. If I needed to be rescued from the water I believed I could count on him to see to it. We sailed for many years without mishap.
When Jennifer was old enough, we provided for her aquatic well-being. At the age of three, she started real swimming lessons in a real swimming pool. Before she could read, she was a good swimmer. It was much later, when she was a teenager, that my daughter reciprocated and taught me to swim. When a swimming instructor at the college nearby announced a class for adults who absolutely could not swim and were terrified of the water, I knew my opportunity had come. There were four of us trembling in the shallow end of the Olympic-sized pool for that first lesson. Our instructor was the epitome of patience. He did his best, but soon there were only two of us.
I brought all my latent and conscious fears with me into the shallow end of that pool. You would have thought that I had, indeed, some far distant summer day in Waxhaw, been flung headlong into Twelve Mile Creek or cast to sharks in Massey's Pond. I dreaded each swimming lesson and had to be made to go. Jennifer took my discipline in hand, secretly, I suspect, vindicating every piano lesson, every reluctant day at school, every household chore and doctor's visit I had exacted of her in the fourteen years of her life.
"Maybe it would help if you practice," Jennifer suggested one day. "I'll go with you."
Gratefully, I accompanied my daughter to the pool, urging her to let me stay in the shallow end, where my feet could, on a moment's whim, connect with the reassurance of the concrete floor. Patiently Jennifer coaxed me to demonstrate what I had been trying to learn in the humiliating ordeal of my swimming class. "Floating on my back," I told her in despair. "That's only the first step, and I can't even do that."
"It's almost impossible to sink, Mom," she reassured me.
"That's what you all say," I grumbled. "Ninety-seven percent of people can float. I happen to be one of the 3 percent who can't."
"Of course you can, if you really try and if you really want to," she said with some relish. This was a line I had used with her as she faced new challenges. "Try."
I tried. Arms turning to lead and legs kicking wildly, I foundered and sank to the bottom. Eyes, ears, and nose full of water, I prepared myself to drown. I remember thinking that my death would be much harder on my husband and my child than on me. I wouldn't be around to know about it but they would have to cope with it, call the rest of the family, plan the funeral, and then manage to live without me. It would serve them right. But Jennifer came to the rescue, of course, and insisted that I try again. "Back on the horse, Mom. I'll help you, and I'll be right here," she said soothingly.
During the next half hour she eased me into the pool and supported me as I lay on my back. She pulled and pushed me gently through the water until I got the feel of it. Now and then I would jerk my arms or break into a clumsy kick and begin to sink to the bottom again.
"No, Mom," she'd reprove. "Relax. Just give yourself up to the power of the water."
My daughter, always mature for her years, had made one of the most profound observations I have ever heard about swimming or about living: "I don't understand it myself," she said, "but there is this mysterious power in the water. If you fight against it, you sink every time. If you give yourself up to it, it supports you. You have to learn to trust the power of the water."
Instinctively, she understood an ancient metaphor for faith, as well as the metaphysics and the symbolism of water. As long ago as 3000 B.C., the Sumerians discovered that water can heal. In India, as early as 2000 B.C., earth, air, fire, and water were deemed the basic elements of the material universe and the concept spread throughout the world. To religious people since the beginning of time, water has been sacred, in some views the very source of life itself. Three quarters of the earth's vast surface is dominated by oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, creeks, and springs. And always, everywhere, the growing embryo is cradled in the watery womb.
In that intimidating swimming pool, my daughter taught me how to swim and, in the process, how better to live my life. You do have to learn to trust the power of the water, the power that beats in the mysterious heart of life; as philosophers as various as Trismegistus, Giordano Bruno, and Blaise Pascal have said-the power whose center is everywhere. That is the fundamental lesson in swimming, in writing, in loving, in living-probably even in dying.
But before you can fully trust the power of the water, or your own powers in the water, you have to jump in or fall in or dive in. You have to get wet. There has to be a first time.
JUST AS I HAD dabbled my feet in swimming pools and oceans, I dabbled in writing the first three decades of my life. Writing was my oldest dream, spun out of a love of words before I could even read them or shape them with a pencil-the words I heard my elders speak and sing, the words they read to me. I remember how words looked before I could decipher their geometry-black shapes laid out in their tidy mystery on the pages of storybooks, the Methodist hymnal, or the long columns of the daily newspaper. I was a child in those years before public school kindergartens or television, much less Sesame Street, that avenue to precocious recognition of the cryptograms of language.
When I was five, I stood between my parents in the Methodist church one Sunday morning, holding my own hymnal and pretending I could read the words of a song I knew by heart. Like the grownups around me, I glanced down at the words and up again. Suddenly, somewhere along about the third verse, I knew with absolute certainty that someday soon, I would be able to read. Then, I told myself, I would become a writer.
After church that day, thrilled with my discovery, I decided I couldn't wait until I started to school. I needed to learn to write now. There was no time to waste. I found paper and a pencil and a favorite storybook, and sat down at the kitchen table to teach myself to write the letters of the alphabet. Once I mastered them, I thought, I would be well on my way to being a writer. When my parents saw what I was up to, they listened patiently to my explanation, and began to give me writing lessons. I was enchanted.
We started with my full name: Penelope Ellen Niven. I am named for my mother's mother, Penelope, and my father's mother, Ellen. It delighted me to learn that my name had eighteen letters, and six of them were E's. E was the letter I could write first, and best, and P came next. (Recently I found the old dictionary the family used during my childhood; boldly inscribed inside its cover is the letter P-awkward and misshapen, but a P, no doubt about it.) My parents taught me block letters, and then I wanted to learn to write cursive script. I was dazzled by my newknowledge. Now I knew these letters-their names and sounds. With my own hands I could write them on paper, unlocking an ancient, mysterious code. Suddenly I could assemble the letters into words on the page, and decipher the words other people had written in the books I loved.
Copyright © 2004 by Penelope Niven
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Search results for Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from...
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Acceptable. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00078368449
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons : Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Published by
HarperCollins Publishers, 2004
ISBN 10: 0156027070
ISBN 13: 9780156027076
Used
Softcover
Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). 1st Edition 2004. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 10470212-6
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00075903416
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: Half Price Books Inc., Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
paperback. Condition: Very Good. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_449359201
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: HPB-Emerald, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
paperback. Condition: Very Good. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_455183871
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0156027070I4N00
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0156027070I4N00
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0156027070I4N10
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water
Seller: Library House Internet Sales, Grand Rapids, OH, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
Softcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Explores the metaphor of swimming lessons as instructions for life, from how to enter the water to swimming in the ocean. Please note the image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item. Book. Seller Inventory # 123492796
Stock Image
Swimming Lessons
Published by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004
ISBN 10: 0156027070
ISBN 13: 9780156027076
Used
Paperback
Seller: Library House Internet Sales, Grand Rapids, OH, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Nocito, Jim (illustrator). Explores the metaphor of swimming lessons as instructions for life, from how to enter the water to swimming in the ocean. Former library book. Solid binding. Moderate edgewear on the boards. Moderate shelf wear. Please note the image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item. Ex-Library. Seller Inventory # 123640721