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Showing posts from July, 2011

JAWS

As I was swimming laps at my town pool, with goggles on, I looked underwater and saw other swimmers' legs and arms mid-stroke, dangling, moving, submerged.  This underwater image of extremities in motion evokes a mild dread, an eerie foreboding, a sense that something terrible is going to happen. I blame it all on the movie JAWS.  Every last fear, anxiety or minor apprehension about the water: ocean, lakes, you name it.  And as irrational as it is, the movie has even instilled a passing concern about swimming in chlorinated pools! I grew up swimming in my backyard canal, the bay, the ocean.  Endless salt water surrounded my home, my life.  The hours of a summer day were tracked by the ebb and flow of the tide. When I was 10, my dad, the fisherman, captain and boater, took me to see JAWS at a huge air-conditioned theatre in Massapequa, N.Y.  It was a hot summer night and I brought along a ziploc bag of semi-stale pretzels from home. For the entire mo...