As a child I know that I would alternate spending Thanksgivings between my mom’s family and my dad’s family. I have no early memories of the ones I spent with my mom’s family, and in comparing notes with my mom, I think this is because there wasn’t a specific Thanksgiving tradition on that side of the family, even in terms of which people we spent the holiday with, or which dishes we had, that would have imprinted on my young brain through years of repetition. Instead my early Thanksgiving memories are all from my dad’s family.

A couple of weeks ago I started taking beginning swim lessons. (What, did you think this title was a metaphor?) I’m in my mid-forties and have survived just fine so far on the theory of just not going in water that’s deeper than my head, but my daughter started swim lessons the week before, and the place she’s going takes adults too, so okay, fine, it’s a thing we can do together. Maybe you’re reading this and you’re an adult non-swimmer wondering what it’s like to learn these new tricks as an old dog, or maybe you’re a lifelong swimmer with morbid fascination about how someone manages to avoid learning to swim for that long in the first place.

I was reshelving my collection of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines the other day and an address label fell off one of them, with a street name that I had forgotten and had been trying to remember ever since the last time I drove through San Anselmo and realized that although I knew I’d lived there for a bit I could no longer point out the street I’d hiked up and down so many times. I must have still had my subscription going when we moved there. I looked the street name up and traced the path on the map between there and a few other landmarks and it all started to come back.