by Lynne Cox
The next morning I went for a walk and saw Shirley. She said that I looked so happy I glowed. She asked if I was in love with Steven. I said I thought I was, but I was afraid of opening my heart to him. Something might not work, and I was afraid that it would hurt my heart.
Shirley said that you have to seize happiness. Life goes by so fast, and if you don’t, it will pass you by. You have to risk your heart or you will never have lived. Her life was rich because she risked her heart. She had loved much and she was much loved.
When Steven and I saw each other again he presented me with a dozen bright yellow roses, with long dark shiny green leaves, arranged in a deep red vase. They were so beautiful. He said he loved flowers, that his father hiked with him in the area around Ithaca, New York, and his dad taught him the names of all the flowers. I asked him if his dad showed him lady slippers. They were delicate pink ballet-slipper-shaped flowers found deep in the forests of New England and upstate New York. His father told him that lady slippers were wild orchids. They were rare and beautiful and they should never be picked so they could be enjoyed by other people and so they could reproduce, so there would be more wild orchids.
I told him my dad walked with me through the woods and fields in New Hampshire and he told me the same thing about the lady slippers. Our fathers had shared the beauty and magic of the world with us, and we carried that in our hearts, to share with each other.
He said that in a few weeks the Concert Hall of the Ordway Center, one of the music halls he had worked on, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was opening. He asked if I would go with him. I said yes. I loved being with him.
We flew to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in late February, and we walked around the city when the air temperature hovered around 17 degrees Fahrenheit (–8.3 degrees centigrade). Frigid wind cut through our clothes, our eyes watered, our noses turned bright red and ran, and our lips were so numb we couldn’t speak, but we were happy holding hands, walking through beautiful old neighborhoods, and watching a pickup hockey game on Lake of the Isles until our toes were numb. We were constantly on the go, eager to experience new things in life together. We drove to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, warmed up, and wandered through the vast and beautiful art collection. It was exciting to realize that Steven liked the same artists I did, and those I wanted to bypass, he did too. We stopped to study the drawings by da Vinci, paintings by Rembrandt, Sargent, Bonnard, Monet, O’Keeffe, and Homer, and sculptures by Matisse and Moore. We discussed what we saw and why we liked the works and shared our perspectives. He helped me see things in the paintings I would not have seen myself.
The more I explored with Steven, the more I learned, and the more I learned about him, the more I realized I was in love with him. He was kind, considerate, open, and caring, and he was fun to be with. Because of Steven, I realized that there are different kinds of love that get you through life. There is the love of friends and family, a love that helps you endure, live, and thrive, and there is romantic love. The love I felt for him was a combination of all of them. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing. I couldn’t wait to see him or be with him. He enjoyed life and enjoyed sharing what he loved with me. I realized that I was living some of the best times of my life.
When we entered the Ordway, we were happy, but that happiness grew to elation when we entered the concert hall. The room was beautiful—the walls and ceiling were made of intricately designed wood paneling, and Steven explained that the hall itself is an instrument, and that when the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra played and the VocalEssence Chorus sang the joyful music of Prokofiev and Beethoven we would feel beautiful music wash over us. Steven said the sound of the hall was perfect, and I thought the day was too.
We began to share our dreams. Steven asked me where I wanted to visit. I said I wanted to spend an evening in Paris, and explained why. When my mother’s uncle went on his honeymoon and sailed around the world, he bought a bottle of Evening in Paris, from Paris, for my mother. Back in the 1950s it was difficult in Maine to get perfume from France. My mother was thrilled with the gift. She loved the fragrance and the cobalt-colored bottle. The perfume was gone, but I could smell a hint of the fragrance. I had asked her if she remembered when she wore it—if there were special dates or dances, and she looked sad for a moment and said she had saved the perfume for years in her dresser. One evening when she was going out with my father, she tried to spray the perfume on her wrist, but it had evaporated.
But she kept the bottle because it reminded her of her uncle and the excitement she felt when he gave her the perfume. She smiled and told me to enjoy the gifts I was given. Don’t store them away for some future time because they might evaporate.
I told Steven he was the gift I had been given, and I was enjoying every day with him.
A few weeks later a package was delivered. Steven ran out to get it. He was smiling when he presented it to me.
I opened the box and inside was a bottle of Evening in Paris. I took off the lid and sprayed it on my wrist. I smelled the delicate concentrated bouquet of flowers: bergamot, violet, lilac, jasmine, rose, clover, and linden. The scent was beautiful, warm, and delicate, like my mother. I turned my wrist so Steven could smell the scent, and when he smiled his eyes lit up.
He made me feel loved. And, anytime of day he sang to me, Russian and American folk songs, and Irish chanteys his father had sung to him. He sang songs from the Sound of Music, music I remembered from childhood, and he sang Bach’s Mass in B Minor, one of the most exalted sacred choral works I had ever heard.
Steven sang when he was happy, when he wanted to share a song, and when he wanted me to know that he loved me. I loved to hear him sing. I wanted to share what I loved with him, but he said he wasn’t very comfortable in the water. He had trouble breathing. That was the most important part of swimming, I told him. He learned how to breathe differently, like a swimmer, not a singer, and then he was able to float.
It was a beautiful thing to watch him start to swim, to share what I loved with him and see him come to love it too. It was fun to be with him and share small and great adventures. And he wanted me to experience more of what he loved. He took me to see the San Francisco Ballet perform Don Quixote. He had been CFO for the company for seven years and explained that we were watching some of the finest ballet dancers in the world. They were world-class athletes. I was captivated by the performance. The dancers were so agile, graceful, and powerful.
We flew to New York City to watch the Royal Ballet perform Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, a writers’ gathering place and safe harbor. The Royal Ballet’s performance was ethereal and inspired, and the dancers leaped so that they seemed to be suspended for moments in space held by the orchestra’s high notes.
Steven and I became closer. Our friendship and love for each other grew deeper. He began introducing me to his close friends. We went to see Jack London’s home in Sonoma, California, with Steven’s voice coach Linda and her husband, Ken. We were familiar with London’s books, but we were surprised by the number of displays and the depth of information about his life. We climbed to the second floor and heard a piano that Charmian, London’s wife, had played. Volunteers came to the home to play music for visitors. The woman playing the piano was just finishing her program, and Steven was marveling about the sound of the piano and the different way the Steinway was constructed. I asked the woman if it would be okay if Steven played for us. She smiled and offered her seat at the bench. Steven began playing Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann. We stood in a circle and listened in awe as other people hurried up the stairs to join us and listen. It was a magical moment, and we wanted to experience many more together. We knew it in our hearts.
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Lynne Cox, Swimming in the Sink