Flotation discovered

Tassos

If really we are fated, Socrates, to dwell in the impenetrable nonsense of pictures and texts, there is always a certain leave to be begged for memory, itself, to indulge our taste for dialogue. A reader brought one of our earliest interlocutors to mind the other day, with the gift of a picture (no less) of swimmers of a certain time and indefinite place. One was carried back to finding one's own buoyancy, a subject deferred here while trying to plant feet on the ground, but probably never to be accounted for, by terms and punctuations such as these. 


So let us talk of arms of burnished warmth and solace that would lift a lad in water, giving harbour and permission to be brave at one's own pace. Looking back, one counts the repeal of knowing nothing as beginning in those days, with a patient sibling and a lifeguard called Tony at a pool they still call the Coral Casino. But this was light years ago, and nothing remains the same except our parturition in the flux of perfect play. That will always need a patient watch, and courage drawn from gentleness and strength.