A couple of weeks ago I spent $400 on a rectangular piece of styrofoam, or something mimicking styrofoam, as if I know what exactly is, and isn’t, styrofoam. But I didn’t just buy any styrofoam, I bought a piece designed to float on, and in, water, which means I bought it from a store that sells things to boaters, or people who like water, which means the $12 piece of Chinese foam was marked up a 33X because my intentions were leisure. I knew buying this piece of foam was a mistake, but my wife urged me to do it, so I went along with it and an hour later I had affixed this piece of foam to a rope that was in turn affixed to a rock that I found at the bottom of the lake. Once secured in place, I asked my wife if she wanted to go out and float on our new platform, an invitation which she declined. I knew she’d decline, and I thought again about how just an hour earlier we absolutely needed to buy this overpriced thing. Nevermind her, I waded out to float.
The foam said it was capable of supporting 1200 pounds of flesh, but with my weight alone it appeared to struggle to maintain any variety of dryness. It didn’t matter, I suppose, because I was still floating even if the floating felt more like neutral buoyancy. I rested my head on my interlocked hands and stared up at the sky. I tried my best to relax, which is an increasingly impossible state of being for me. It’s a problem, really, and when I one day announce I’ve retired from this business it will be solely because I wonder what it might be like to relax, and it is impossible to find out when my brain is full of deals and deadlines and Sunday morning requests for Sunday morning showings. Still, I gazed up and felt the water under my floating throne and tried my best to appreciate where I was in life and that I was, at this moment, able to float in cool water under a mostly cloudless sky.
A few seconds later I had to combat the thoughts that keep me anything but present. A deal in trouble. A client who hasn’t responded for a while. A mailing this week? Or did I do one last week? Is my Schedule C done yet? Probably not, but I should check. Each thought pressed in and I tried my best to return to where I was, and to what I was, or wasn’t, doing. But the thoughts persisted. A minute felt like 10. How long had I been out here? Was I dead? Did the rope I tied to that rock work its way loose and had I floated out to sea? If that had happened, could I survived? I thought I could, but then who would tell my plan administrator that my Schedule C was completed and further, who could tell my wife not to sell the house I had just built for less than I know it’s worth, which is far more than most people think, which means I’m a lot more like most homeowners than I thought. I fought the thoughts, and then one arrived that I wanted to think more about.
Floating on that raft made of imported chemicals, I thought about the last time I floated on a raft in a lake. It wasn’t just any raft, it was the raft. The raft of my childhood, which was located three piers to the south of my parents’ pier. The raft was wooden, with pontoon like floats under it and an abrasive low pile outdoor carpet on the top. The edges were sharp and the decorations were little more than pulled apart crayfish that the seagulls left us. We’d swim to that raft, or we’d race to it, and we’d play king of the raft and whip each other into the water, being careful, or not, to make sure no one fell on the painful edges, or worse, straight onto the scratchy sun-dried carpeting. It was king of the board for the elites, for those of us who could swim far enough and fast enough. There was no barrier to entry for king of the board. You needed only to be able to step up on to the board and get flung into the water by my older brother, or one of his friends, or later, by me. But the raft required effort for admission, and if you swam there you deserved the right to be king, if only for a moment.
There were other times that I’d swim to the raft just to float. To stare up at the sky and think about whatever was on my mind. There was no tax deadline looming. No clients to try to hang onto. Just me, the itchy outdoor carpet, some shreds of crayfish, and that wide open sky. Everything was easy. The raft didn’t require anything of me and me nothing of it. It only had to float and I only had to swim. The sun would bake and the cicadas would sing and the summer afternoon of my youth wasn’t something I had to fight for or work towards or struggle with. It just happened. And I’m so glad it did.