A Post That Would Make Jacques Cousteau AND Jacques Pepin Cringe

When I was somewhere around four years old, I learned how to swim. I’m not sure if it came before learning to read, or after, but it had a very similar effect on me. Suddenly, everything in my narrow view looked different, like I had fallen into Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole. There was a whole new world underwater, one that held the possibility of discovery and imagination. And the perfect gravitylessness back flip.

If a deep body of water was available to me, I was in it. We’d go to “nice” parties, the kind where the kids were supposed to play genially in someone’s bedroom while the adults drank cocktails with names like a Dark and Stormy, or a Harvey Wallbanger, and I would somehow always end up in the pool. One time, my mother took me with her to a “business meeting” (she helped my dad sometimes at his business) at a resort hotel, and while she was talking to the important lady, I wound up playing deep sea diver. I had a problem.

The summer before I turned five, I learned of something magical: the Swim Team. Anyone on it got to enter the pool hours before the regular people and swim up and down for a really long time. Then, once a week, you got to race other kids and they would give you brightly colored ribbons. And snacks. Let’s not forget the snacks. Truly, heaven existed on Earth.

When I asked my mom if I could be on the swim team, she said no. She had three other kids and didn’t have the time (or the energy) to schlep me the seven miles to the pool every day (I don’t think that’s exactly what she said – I can’t remember her ever using the word schlep – but that was the gist of it.). Not to be denied, the next time we were at the pool, dressed in my favorite turquoise blue bikini, I made my way around the cool deck, stopping at each gaggle of mothers gathered in bright yellow beach chairs and drinking sangria, asking if they would pick me up for swim practice. Amazingly (I don’t know if it is thanks to the sangria, or just that I caught them off guard) five of them said “yes”. I had a carpool.

When wind of my brilliant scheme reached my mother, she blew a gasket. I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong – I wanted what I wanted – but that didn’t keep me from getting in trouble. No Marathon candy bar for me that day. I had “mortified” my mother, whatever that meant. But, always one to admire pluck, she eventually relented and joined my new carpool. I was officially a swimmer.

For the next ten years, my life revolved around the smell of chlorine, goggle-rimmed eyes, and the logging of times in a little blue Mead notebook. Swimming was serious business for me, and set me on a path of obsessive training that still structures my life in middle age. I like to move. A lot. I like to move in lap formation – in the pool, on the track, around the block. I’m sure there’s a diagnosis for this condition, but I’m too old to care now. I’ve settled in for good.

But despite the turn my love of the water took towards a lifetime of serious, obsessive athletics rather than deep sea exploration or marine biology, one whiff of a hamburger on a charcoal grill and I am immediately transported back to the days of un-judged sunburns, three hour dive-offs, and the magic of an enormous rectangle of water.

Best Grilled Burger (According to A Five Year Old)

1/4 pound ground chuck – 85 percent lean (This is not the time to go low fat. Remember, childhood memories are at stake.)

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. pepper

5 hamburger dill pickle chips – nothing fancy here

NO lettuce, NO tomato, NO onions

1 Tbs. French’s golden mustard

1 Tbs. Heinz ketchup

1 white, spongy hamburger bun

Lay’s potato chips

1 waxed paper cup of Real Coke

Form meat into a patty. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Grill hamburger patty over an open flame. Grill the hell out of it. Then grill it some more. Put it on the bun. Pour on the mustard and ketchup and dot with the pickles. Add chips to your paper plate and put a straw in your Coke.

Eat while sitting in a wet bathing suit underneath a hundred year old cottonwood tree.

Tagged as: Best Grilled Burger, ground beef, swimming