For the first time since leaving home, I take time to do my accustomed morning yoga routine on the soft living room carpet while Cameron practices her violin behind me.  This feels very good, both the stretching and the company. 

Then Cameron drives us to the huge YMCA downtown, where after filling out a rather extensive visitor information sheet, I am admitted as a guest to swim in the lap pool while Cameron “hangs” in an adjacent pool and chats with her trainer, Julie, for an hour, which grants her considerable if temporary relief from pain, I think by decreasing gravity’s compression of her spinal column.  I have a lap lane all to myself, and it is the first time in a very long while since I’ve been in an Olympic-sized pool.  I wonder if I am up to swimming 50-metre lengths back and forth for an hour, but manage it pretty handily (with a VERY slow breast stroke) for 45 minutes before joining Cameron in the therapy pool.  Neither pool is crowded, and I wonder what the average age of the few swimmers would be; except for the young life guards, the only people there are either elderly (like me, or apparently older) or kids first learning to swim.  Mitigated gravity is a great thing, and I recall how the boring repetitiveness of swimming laps in the Tulane pool after spending a day cramming for my doctoral oral exam was a much-needed de-stressor, allowing time for all I’d been studying to settle into my brain while simultaneously stretching out posture cramped by being hunched for hours over a carrel desk.  I enjoy watching two little boys at their instructor’s urging braving jumping into the deep end for the first time, and recall the St. Pete country club, Holiday Park, my parents joined to ensure that both their Floridian daughters would know how to swim.  Swimming turned out to be a graduation requirement at Furman University years later.  So glad I was given that head start.

From the pool and my first experience of a machine that extracted water from wet suits (great idea!), we stopped at a drugstore so I could replace the shampoo containers I had inadvertently left behind in the Asheville Best Western Glo, after which we got slices of cake at a bakery named Delicious (another great idea:  a place that sells slices of gorgeous layer cakes), picked up another dinner from Reto’s catering:  tomato chicken and broccoli, with my slice of choice, salted caramel (another first!) for dessert.  We talk, Cameron and I, of ultimate things for a while after dinner—serious conversation comes so easily with this good friend.

And then I retire to my comfy guest bed to watch a couple episodes of the streaming series that’s recently captured my interest, Bosch.  Viewing screens late into the evening is not good sleep hygiene, I know, but the plot twists and moral ambiguities that the appealing title character, a preternaturally gifted and empathetic detective, negotiates are too compelling to log out of early.  I am able to read myself to sleep soon after—all that swimming helps.  It’s been another low-key, restful day, a boon at the end of two weeks on the road, and I am grateful.