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.

Just before the turn of the century, I was about to start college, and had just signed on to continue my summer job on a part-time basis as a contractor, answering tech support emails for an hour or two each day while I went to school.

To be able to work from home I bought my first PC, a Dell Dimension, and I signed up for the finest residential broadband that Pacific Bell had to offer. I was the first person in our neighborhood with broadband; I know this because they had to make repeated service calls to upgrade a mile worth of copper phone wires until they’d support a DSL connection, but after a month of that, the lights on the modem finally stayed green, and I officially entered the Internet Age, with such bounteous bandwidth that I was able to stream foreign films from CinemaNow in glorious 480p.