Today is my mom’s 62nd birthday. That means that 31 years ago, she was pregnant with me. It’s quite possible that 31 years ago, she was swimming in a pool in Danville, the family cat, Cow Kitty, by a window at home. Cow Kitty is the subject of one of my series of security questions, what was the name of your first pet? I usually forget if I’ve answered the question as one word –  ‘cowkitty’ –  or whether I’ve properly capitalized it, as the creature’s name should be. I think of the aptly black and white spotted cat, who lies next to me in baby photos, and I think of the house in Danville, too, which I picture from the story in which my dad taps on a bedroom window late at night, returning from a wedding. The story goes that he drove up the 101 after his best man’s speech because I was a newborn, and my mom and Cow Kitty were alone with me at home. He wasn’t supposed to come back until Sunday morning but instead he arrived late, to tap at the window. It’s surprising he had to tap at all, my parents have never been fond of locking doors, in fact often our doors don’t have locks and if they do, we don’t have the keys. This has resulted in us locking ourselves out in the case of the latter, to which they say, Goes to show, no more locks. 

I swam tonight in a five lane pool in Berkeley, Danville is twenty miles away on the Grove Shafter Freeway, I shared a lane with a stranger who swam slowly but for longer than I did. I needed to be horizontal, and warm. We didn’t stay in Danville long after I was born, by the time I was swimming laps, we made a circuit of the pools on the west side of the bay. The first time I swam laps with my mom, on a November holiday in middle school, we met her friend Deirdre mid-morning at Rinconada. Maybe not where most 12 year olds want to spend a school holiday, but I relished in sharing the ritualistic hour in the warm steam. We swam long laps off of Viscaino Lane, too, preferring the pool in the quiet darkness of the winter’s evening hours. Upon reflection, I realize this may have been motivated by the fact that we had the showers all to ourselves afterwards, we ignored the suggestion to keep our hot water usage limited, after the locker room was vacated. 

In the water, my mind tries to assign meaning to a series of incidents. I have received parking tickets in three counties in a month. One ticket, because I parked in front of a fire hydrant in Beaverton, Oregon, after dark, another for an expired registration, the third, because I parked on the side of the block that requires a permit from 8am – 7pm, looking only at the street sign on the other side. I speculate for days after each ticket, what am I being warned of? What am I forgetting? Am I moving too fast? I think the answer is simple, that I am not reading the signs. My car battery died because the overhead lights got stuck on, I hadn’t renewed my roadside assistance nor my registration and the next week it was rounded up with the others in negligence and taken to the impound lot below the 80. I spent a Friday in the underbelly of San Francisco, trying to retrieve it. I stood in the DMV for hours and learned from the TV monitor that the Bureau of Land Management hosts a bat beauty competition. A bat from Southern Oregon has just been announced the winner.

I flip turn, I think of the wet morning that I slipped in the streetcar tracks on my commuter, the imprint of 17th and Sanchez that bloomed on my right hip in the following days. Instead of accepting bad luck, I am convinced that I have made the wrong choice, to commute to work on this dripping day. I am convinced that there is an alternative to the palmful I left in the 17th street asphalt, that my atoms could have been elsewhere. I read that macroscopic objects are subject to the same principles as electrons, which I suppose I was taught a decade ago, I don’t remember the math but it doesn’t matter, the law’s effects are imperceptible on macroscopic masses.¹ But if I were to apply the principles to myself, it goes something like this. That my most probable location was spilled onto the asphalt, I can’t define my velocity but I was going the speed at which a 23 mm tire slips on wet tracks. There is some probability, though, that my atoms were elsewhere, they could be at the Equator on Miller Ave, or the apartment in Salzburg that we didn’t want to leave. Some of them could be eating a Boulted croissant in Raleigh, and some could be in an apartment in Ann Arbor, that I never made it to. I don’t know if the stack of tickets and bills and the gravel that sticks in my palm for weeks are a sign that I shouldn’t be here, or that I shouldn’t be going anywhere. I know that most probably, they are a sign of neither, they are chance as much as they are side effects of moving and of movement.

I’m in the pool because I needed the underwater quiet. I have felt an unexpected nostalgia for the grey apartment in Ludwigshafen, which I spent most of June wanting to leave. Without the quietness of that apartment, a quietness which was sometimes lonely, my most probable location would be the apartment in Ann Arbor, I’m sure of it. Without that quietness, I couldn’t have felt the pull back to California, or, if I’d felt it, I would have been too distracted to act on it. I would have spent August swimming in the Great Lakes, September, witness to a Midwest fall, I might have become a regular at Zingerman’s Bakehouse where my friend worked as a bread baker a few years back. She sent me a loaf of rye once through the USPS, when I lived on Fulton Street in Berkeley. I did not yet know that the Fulton Ave stretching across San Francisco would be my home, now. 

In San Francisco months which might have been temporary, I feel the flux of time, and how choosing to stay seems to start time anew. I have this idea that I am starting a decade of living in San Francisco, because I sat with two friends on a bench in Gestalt House in Fairfax, and they told me about their own decades long habitation of this city. If I can want something so undefined as a block of time, I want this decade, too. The electron’s principles may be insignificant on my macroscopic body, but the laws of physics are not the laws of narrative. I choose a position, and the paths that connect these nighttime laps to the decades future become indiscernible, in all but length.

1. Labatut, Benjamin. When We Cease to Understand the World. New York, New York. The New York Review of Books, 2020. ↩︎