I had a swimming lesson for the first time in 42 years today.

Lisa reasoned, rightly so, that as we’re living in an ocean province, on the beach a lot, we should top up our swimming and water safety skills, so we booked a week at the Mr. Bill Swim School in North River and today was lesson number one.

Whew: swimming is hard!

But I learned things, even in the short 30 minutes we had today, that will improve my swimming right away: how to alternate breathing sides for the front crawl, how to position my head for more efficient swimming, how to scissor kick. It was also my first time swimming with goggles (had they been invented in the 1980s?), which made things so much easier.

It was a “refresher course” for lessons I learned, more than 40 years ago, at the Downtown Hamilton YMCA from the estimable instructor Kevin Von Appen, but my lessons were so long un-refreshed that it seemed like a brand new day, with the aid of some vestigial muscle memory.

We’ll be back tomorrow morning.