I watched The Swimmer tonight, the 1968 Burt Lancaster movie. It’s based on a John Cheever short story about a rich suburban guy who’s had a breakdown and decides to swim across a bunch of pools until he gets home. Except he’s not rich anymore and it’s not his home anymore. Each pool brings him more humiliation, more reminders of his failures. It’s very late-Sixties bleak. He’s the guy who took the advice to go into plastics, or whatever was the equivalent when he graduated college.
It was a terrible movie for me to watch at this point in my life. I’m already an empty-nester. I don’t like to swim, but I am walking a lot so I don’t sit and evaluate my life decisions for the entire day.
I miss the kid a lot. I don’t want her to come home. I’m thrilled that she’s building a great life in NYC. I like having a new freedom in my life. Still, I miss her. There are all these goofy songs we’d sing together that I can’t sing anymore. It makes me sad to sing them solo.
She turned out so well, but there are still so many things I regret and wish I’d done differently. I had a vision for her childhood that didn’t pan out like I planned it. I hate that she was ever sad or scared or hurt, and I also love how those hard things shaped her.
I’m tired of being sad. I want to be on the other side of this. But also, how wonderful it is that I had a child at all. She’s the somebody who could make me glad just to be sad thinking of her.
I’ll try to think of it that way.