Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford

because there was a flourish from the band, and that meant the show-offs on the dance floor did a lot of dipping, the women swaying back as their partners held them.
    Eleanor drained her champagne glass and patted me on the knee. “Well, there’s my cue. I’m back in the saddle again.”
    And that was when Art Jarrett grabbed the mic and began singing “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” Only, of course, he kept looking over at Eleanor sitting next to me while he sang, and when they got to the second chorus, she stood up and threw that little shawl off again and started moving toward him, only like she was swimming.
    “Don’t tell me it was a backstroke, Mother.”
    No, she swam over freestyle. And I had to wonder what the blazers would think about that, if pretending to swim in a bathing suit on dry land made her a professional. But I guess not. Anyway, when she got to Art, they put an arm around each others’ backs and sang the last chorus together. That was the part of a ballad he let her sing—only, of course, she sang “Did you ever see a dream walking?” and he sang “Did you ever see a dream swimming?” It wasn’t a bad show, really. It really wasn’t.

    Mom shook her head, smiling at the memory. Then she glanced over at the television set, but the gymnasts were still the attraction. They were on the balance beam now. “Aren’t they ever gonna get rid of those damn little imps and get the swimmers out here, Teddy? I’m an old lady, I wanna see Natalie Coughlin swim the hundred before I fall asleep.”
    I looked at my watch. “It can’t be much longer now,” I said, “but come on, don’t leave me hangin’. How did you do when you raced a couple days later?”
    “Actually, not bad. I told you, we were still swimming yards then in the United States, a hundred yards and two hundred yards, and I got my best times in both. But still, I was fourth. And not all the best girls were at the Indoors. If I was gonna make the Olympics at the trials in New York, I had to get third. I had to get a little faster.”
    “How did Eleanor do?”
    “Oh, my gracious, she not only set a new world record in the hundred, she did it by more than a second.”
    “Wow.”
    “Oh yeah, it made me think: Hmmm, if I can just figure some way to get laid in New York the night before the trials, I could make the Olympics.”
    “Come on, Mother.”
    “Oh, don’t be such an old woman, Teddy. Of course I wasn’t serious. I was still such a sweet little virgin then, I didn’t even know what a dry hump was. But . . .” She paused. “But, no, honestly, I certainly didn’t forget what Eleanor said. To make love to the man of your dreams, and then sleep in his arms and get up and beat all the other girls the next day and stand there on a podium with a gold medal round your neck and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ playing . . . well, Teddy, life couldn’t get any better than that. My gracious, queen of the backstroke . . .”

When I was a child, it seemed so strange listening to my parents talk about their lives before I was born. I mean, however irrational, in a way it just didn’t seem possible that they were around before I arrived on the scene. In my parents’ cases, too, it was even more difficult, because I grew up in Montana, and they’d both come from Back East, and for those of us from Out West, Back East might as well have been The Mysterious East. That made it that much more confounding to hear of times past that had transpired in such alien territory.
    Actually, it wasn’t just the war that my father didn’t care to talk about. He was reluctant to bring up his childhood, too. I gathered enough to appreciate that it had been a terribly sad one for him. His family had been hard on one another, lacking much love, and they were poor, too, and as things had grown so terribly hard in the Depression, Dad simply saw no reason to bother any longer with the blood he’d been dealt. The best I could glean from him, one