I never learned to swim. Unlike most country boys who learned when their fathers tossed them into a pond and they had to keep themselves from going under, I remained grounded. My father couldn’t do the tossing because, as many of you know, he had no hands to lift me, having lost his in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. My mother apparently couldn’t bring herself to throw her only child into a pond and then watch him sink, as I might have done. I don’t believe my mother knew how to swim, and I imagine my father didn’t either. No uncle stepped up to teach me. As a result, I stayed on land whenever my friends took to the water.

When I was five, I attended a birthday party held at a public pool. I didn’t have any bathing trunks. Another little boy was in the same boat. One of the mothers said we could go into the wading pool and splash around in our tidy whities. I was enjoying myself. Then the other kid peed in the pool and that was the end of that. That’s pretty much my history when it comes to swimming.

Anytime I’ve been with a group who decided to go swimming, I’ve felt so much on the periphery I might as well disappear. It’s that feeling of exclusion I want to talk about today. I imagine we all have similar moments from our pasts—or maybe even our present times—that still haunt us. Can you recall a moment when you felt like you were outside whatever circle of light shone around others? Can you remember how you felt?

I always felt—and can feel to this day—the embarrassment of not being like my friends, to whom swimming came so easily. I also felt a desire, a yearning to be able to jump into a pool and swim with power and grace to its end. These contradictory feelings were at war inside me. I had an urge to stay on dry land with my mother, to cling to her and hide my face in the folds of the skirt of her dress, thereby practicing the misguided belief common to all children at some time or another; if I can’t see someone, then they can’t see me either. I also wanted fervently to be able to say, “Hey, everybody. Look at me.” I wanted to amaze my friends with my athletic swimming. Those few minutes in the wading pool with my friend were among the happiest of my young life. So what I was in my underwear? I was as close as I’d ever come to feeling at home in water. I was like my friends. I felt normal.

For those of you writing memoir, what’s your moment of feeling on the outside? Maybe you even have a moment like mine, one that for at least a while welcomed into the circle of light, only to have the invitation revoked. Write about that moment. Think about your contradictory urges. Let the narrative of what happened reveal aspects of the person—you!—that you may have not considered at the time. Use the reflective voice to think about what your moment has to show you about yourself. For instance, I often blamed my father’s accident for standing in the way of a more regular childhood for me. Worse yet, I sometimes blamed my father. Looking back on it all now, though, I see this: None of us can help what our lives give us—shucking boxes jam and snapping rollers mangle hands and little boys never learn to swim. But that’s not the end of the story. There really isn’t an end. We go on into the rest of our years, carrying the circumstances of our lives. Some people never realize that. Most people don’t want to look too closely at what harmed them. Most people don’t want to examine their lives, but if we do, we can take away the power of our pasts over our presents and our futures. We can write our way toward a healing of sorts. We can begin with something that may seem small—the memory of a little boy standing ankle deep in a public wading pool while wearing his white underpants—but it actually contains so much about the people we became.

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